Gluttony

Second in series about my crappy former jobs

The summer when I was 16/17, I worked, with a good friend of mine at an all you can eat buffet. I worked two positions there, carving meat and as a salad bar attendant. It was yet another crappy low paying job, but it did have some hilarious moments, I got to be a witness of gluttony on an unprecedented scale.

One night I was working at the meat carving station. I had ten pound slab of roast beef and giant slab of turkey breast, and heavyset middle age man came up and when I asked what he wanted he pointed to the slab of turkey meat, which was probably about five pounds, and said “All of that.”

I thought he was joking, lots of people liked to make inane jokes like that. So I gave him a polite charity laugh and asked him what he really wanted.

At this point his face got really red and he began to berate me “I was not joking. You have some nerve to laugh at me like that. If you don’t give me the turkey that I asked for I am going involve your manager. Just give me the god damn turkey.”

Not wanting any trouble and just not caring about the company’s bottom line, I gave his five pounds of turkey meat and he contently waddle off. To this day I wonder if he actually ate all of that turkey or if he was just trying to see how far the all you can eat policy actually went.

Another memorable customer was the guy who came nearly everyday right before the breakfast buffet ended, the breakfast buffet was a couple of dollars cheaper. He would then sit at his table until about 4:00 pm, eating three meals. To pass the time he would tell the same story, about how the government of Malaysia stole three million dollars from him, to anyone that he could corner.

This particular restaurant was particularly filthy, there are two incidents that I remember clearly that illustrate this point. The first happened when on slow day my boss asked to clean underneath the salad bar. It quickly became apparent that this task had not been done in great while. I pulled out an object that I had trouble identify at first. It was dried and brown, it and vaguely the size and shape of dried chili pepper. Then I turned it over and saw the blue Chiquita sticker on it. I wonder how long a banana must sit out to become completely desiccated.

Then there was the jello incident. One afternoon I was getting a large tray of Jello out to place it on the salad bar. For some reason I dropped it, spilling it all over the filthy floor. It just so happened that the manager was standing right there. He told to hold on and not to clean it up until he got back. He then returned with a large squeegee mounted on broom handle that was used to clean the restroom floors and proceeded to squeegee the jello back into the pan. Once that was accomplished he calmly placed it onto the salad. Over the next couple of hours I had a hard time keeping a straight face as people consumed the floor jello.

Next Job: Something a little less soul crushing

Something New

One of the things that I like best about my job is that I am constantly getting to do new and interesting things. The latest thing that I have been tasked with is conducting a needs and feasibility study of establishing a fire protection district in the area of the county in whicg I live.

Unbelievably fire protection in the unincorporated portions of the county is provided by a private for profit for company. In order to receive fire protection residents must pay a yearly subscription fee. The for profit fire department will put out a fire for non-subscribers as well, however non-subscribers are then forced to pay the full bill for fighting the fire. Apparently it starts at about two grand just for a fire truck just to show up, and goes up in price from there.

A number of area residents find this situation to be intolerable and have begun to agitate for change. As result I am now conducting a study on the establishment of a public fire protection district. I find this to be fascinating and fun because I get to dive headfirst into a topic that I have not previously had much exposure to. I would be miserable if had job the was solely composed of the same shit, day after day after day.

My First Job

First of a Series

The week marks the second anniversary of first professional level job. In honor of that I have decided to look back on all of the crap jobs that proceeded it. Low paying crap, I got my social security statement in the mail yesterday, which lists out what I have made in every year I worked. I made more in 2006 than I did in 1994 to 2005 combined.

When I tuned 14 back in 1994 my mother deiced that it would be a valuable life lesson if I got a small part time job. In Colorado the only entity that can hire people hire people under the age of 16 is the State. So I got a job at Colorado State University working in the dorm kitchens washing dishes, in the summer the dorms were rented out by youth conferences.

I would ride my bike over to campus and for two or three hours a day I would unload dishes from the end of conveyor-belt style dishwasher. For my efforts that summer I made the princely sum of $700, which at the time actually seemed like a lot. In the summer of 1995 I once again worked the same job, this time with my brother.

One of things that sticks most in my mind about this job was the site of food being prepared in bulk. Later on when I was in school eating in cafeteria the memory of food being prepared in bulk would be unsettling. Eggs did not come from eggshells but rather from half gallon cartons labeled "Frozen Egg Product With Citric Acid." Food just is not pretty when prepared in bulk.

The other thing that sticks out in my mind is obsession that they had with trash can cleanliness. So great was the concern with this issue that there was a special machine whose sole function was clean and sterilize trash cans. They were quite insistent that every trash can was sanitized everyday. In regards to hand washing, management, adopted a much more laissez faire attitude.

Next Job: The Golden Corral-A Study in Gluttony

Lucky in Love

Every once and while I like to google my name just to see what kind of stuff pops up. Today I came across this gem about my wife and I. It from the campus newspaper from our last year at Bradley. It was from a Valentines Day article on campus couples. Real names redacted

Published: February 14, 2003

Lucky in love
Campus couples discuss the ups and downs of college relationships

This is the real thing!

So can campus couples really end up together forever? They can in the case of senior K. P. and Bradley graduate A. F. The two are engaged to be married June 21, and the spark started at a fraternity party.

“I was looking for a friend and I asked A where I could find him, when I looked up I was like, ‘Hey, wait, I know this guy, he’s cute!’” P said.

The stayed up talking until 7 a.m., and both knew there was something special right away.

The relationship grew from there.

Yet the couple was immediately put under tremendous pressure. Soon after they began dating, F departed for a semester in Malta.

“Phone bills were expensive, and the emotional stress huge, but we both learned that it made us stronger,” P said.

Being from California and Colorado — two unusual places for Bradley students — P believes their relationship was destined from the get-go.

“It was an odd choice of schools for both of us,” P said.

The couple will wed on a riverboat in New Orleans, then plan to move to Louisiana where F will attend graduate school.

“Love is where you least expect it,” P said. “Neither of us expected we’d meet one another at the most cliched place — a fraternity party!”

Happy Birthday, Nate

Happy birthday little brother. You would have been 26 today. Hard for me to say anything other than I miss you terribly.

Car Chase

I stumbled across an online discussion on the list of things that people would like to do before they died. It made think of something that use to always on my list of things to do before I died, one that I got to do and found it to be not at all what I hoped it would be.

Growing up I had always loved the car chase scenes in movies. They always looked like so much fun. I though abstractly that it could be a lot fun to be in car chase some day, but since I was not planning being a cop or running from the cops, I never really though that I would get participate in one. This in not how things turned out

Back when I was a graduate assistant in New Orleans, two years ago, I was tasked with taking pictures of all the abandoned properties in the now infamous Lower 9th Ward (which before Katrina wiped it out was probably one of the most destitute neighborhoods in the nation). It should been a big red flag when my advisor told me that it would be a very bad idea to get out the van to take the pictures and that we should do it just after sunrise when the junkies were most likely to be asleep. But, I was bright eyed eager new grad student and took on the project with vigor.

For the first couple of months the project went fine, it was an eye opening experience on the depths of poverty in urban America. Then one morning we noticed that we were being tailed by a late model Lexus SUV, with completely tinted windows. We didn't think much of until noticed the driver making angry gestures and honking at us. This seemed like a good time to go back to campus, so we decided to end the day early.

As we began to leave the neighborhood the Lexus speed up began following us inches from our back bumper. All the while he contoured to honk and flip us off. Then we hit a red light, which allowed him to box us in. At which point the driver, a dishelved man with bloodshot eyes, who looked like he should be pushing a shopping cart under an overpass somewhere, and not be behind the wheel of Lexus, jumped out and ran up to driverside door. He than began to scream at us, his words so slurred that he was barley understandable.

At first, he just screaming over and over “why you taking a picture of my house, why you taking a picture of my house.” Before we could it word edgewise to offer an explanation he began to threatening to kill us, stating that he would hunt us down and that we could not get away from him. At this point I was as terrified as I have ever been, I hald expected him to pull a gun at any minute

Fortunately at this point the car in front of moved so, so my partner hit the gas to get us out of there. The crazy dude jumped back in his Lexus and began to chase us. We got onto the interstate and he continued to follow. Unfortunately a 1990 Astro Van is the best vehicle to have in car chase, especially when the other party is driving a late model Lexus. As we speed down the interstate he would pull along side us and then suddenly and violently swerve at us in an effort to force us off the interstate. This continued for several miles.

While this going on we are on the phone with 911 trying to get some police help, but none came. Finaly as we came to the edge of New Orleans and he gave up the chase. Needless to say this incident ended the project uncompleted. Which ultimately didn’t matter when a year latter Katrina wiped these neighborhoods literally off the map.

Still I got to cross something of my to do list, ultimately car chases are better off left to Hollywood.

Sick

I am sick today, I have a over a months worth of sick leave accumulated. Yet here I am at work. I want to go home, yet I will not. Guilt over using sick hours when I am actually sick keeps me shackled to my desk.

It is not is if I am a workaholic that has a hard time taking time off. I make good use of my vacation time and any comp that I accumulated. But for some reason admitting that I am physically too sick work is nearly impossible. It feels like a terrible admission of weakness, I know it is irrational, but I can not escape from it. If can mange to sit upright in a desk chair, I feel obligated to go to work.

I am sure that part of this insane attitude was passed down to me from my parents. I am descended from farmers and shop keepers in rural Iowa and Minnesota, not exactly the kind of culture that looks kindly on the sick day. My parents did not forbid my brother and I from taking sick days, if we were sick and asked they always let us take the day off. Rather I think I am prisoner of the example they set, I can not remember them taking a sick day other than the times when they were too sick to actually get out of bed. It is not as if they were workaholics either, my dad towards the end of his career stoped going to work on Fridays because he didn't feel like it, and he hundreds of hours of vaction time.

Likely I bigger part of my reluctance to take sick time when I feel sick is a strange outgrowth of my marathon running hobby. After ten marathons I have come to believe that success in running a marathon can boiled down to one simple thing, taking the next step, when taking the next step seems like the hardest most painful thing to do in the world. While this is a great attitude for running a marathon, it is not always so wonderful when it spills over into other parts of my life. It seems to have combined with my inherited antipathy of taking sick days to form some sort of weird mutant hybrid attiude that keeps from taking sick time.

On the plus side at least when it comes time for me to take paternity leave in the next couple of years I will have a metric butt load of sick time to draw from. I will feel no guilt for using sick time for that purpose.