Michael Scheuer, 41, is off to federal prison for three years and must pay $68,000 in restitution after he was convicted of tampering with menus at Walt Disney World to add profanity and remove allergen information. Sheuer's job involved managing the menu systems, but his obscene and potentially harmful modifications were certainly not on the card.
As part of Scheuer's duties, he was responsible for creating and publishing menus for Disney's entire restaurant portfolio, which required using Disney's secure servers. After a "contentious" departure from the company that Scheuer described as unfair, he began using his personal computer and cell phone to access the menu system and make changes described in court documents as "benign" at times and potentially "deadly" at others. … Investigators described Scheuer's more "benign" actions as changing prices or adding profanity to menus. In one case, he changed a menu item name from "cheesy grits" to "cheesy (expletive)." In another, he changed menu information about wine regions to "reflect locations of recent mass shootings,"
Federal prosecutors said that Scheuer's actions became potentially fatal when he altered allergen information on restaurant menus to indicate that "food items were safe for customers with certain allergies, when they were not." He removed warnings for peanuts, tree nuts and shellfish, often substituting them simply for "milk," according to court documents.
Scheuer's lawyer cited mental health issues. If his menu edits clearly went far beyond satire and into lethal malice, I find myself transfixed by the idea that you could go to Disney World and order reds from Uvalde and Buffalo.
Previously:
• Disney's amazing new drone show
• Tron Lightcycle/Run is the newest, coolest, and most oddly punctuated ride at Disney World
• Watch this cosplaying critic's epic takedown of Disney's catastrophic Star Wars Hotel
• Memoir of raising an autistic boy who found himself with Disney World's help
