The Pitfalls of Marriage

I've worked at a lot of restaurants.

When I was 17 I worked at a restaurant called "Skinny Haven." The restaurant no longer exists. It was basically a Weight Watchers restaurant. All of the menu items had exchange counts listed (this is when Weight Watchers used exchanges instead of points). On many mornings before the restaurant opened there were Weight Watchers meetings. After the meeting everyone would step on the scale then take a seat in one of the booths and order breakfast. Since the restaurant doesn't exist anymore, there isn't a website to link to, but I found this restaurant review. In it the reviewer calls the place a "health-conscious restaurant." Everything came to the restaurant (mostly) pre-cooked and pre-packaged. The cooks would unpackage all the meals and assemble according to the pictures they had pasted to the walls inside the kitchen and pop it in the microwave for a pre-specified amount of time. It was all flavored with artificial seasonings, sweetened with artificial sweeteners and filled with artificial flavors. Sure, everything was low calorie, but that was the only thing it had going for it. Low Calorie foods was the goal, not food rich in protein and nutrients our bodies need. The ice cream they had, I have to say, was kinda good, but it was in no way good for you. It was dehydrated non-fat milk, fake sweetener, flavor and water that was frozen and whipped together to a sort of soft-serve consistency. Nothing, save for the actual vegetables on the salad bar was good for you. After Skinny Haven I got a job at a restaurant near the Queen Mary called The Reef. I didn't work there very long. I showed up for work one day and the place had burned down. When it was rebuilt I wasn't rehired. Turns out The Reef had seen more than a few fires in its day, only to be rebuilt and re-opened with new management and a new staff. I also worked at El Torito and a hamburger joint called Hof's Hut. Hof's had pretty tasty hamburgers. One time while working there I licked a piece of lettuce on a salad and gave it to a customer I didn't like. Then when I moved to San Francisco I got a job at a pizza place that has since closed. I've written about that place before. Worst job on my psyche ever.

All of the restaurants were different from each other. All had their own charm (or lack thereof). They all had one thing in common, though. At every restaurant, part of my sidework was to marry the ketchups. It was so gross. We had to balance a 1/2 full ketchup bottle on top of a 1/2 empty ketchup bottle and turn them into one full ketchup bottle. It didn't matter if they were different brands. It didn't matter if they were different ages. At the end of every shift, all of our ketchup bottles needed to be full so that the next day every customer could have a full ketchup bottle on their tables. Sometimes we'd use a little hot water from the coffee machine to loosen up the last bits of ketchup in the bottle. Sometimes instead of playing the bottle balancing game we would use a ketchup funnel. Sometimes the ketchup would be so old that it would ferment and explode a bit when opened. I hated marrying ketchup. And it wasn't just ketchup. We had to marry a whole host of condiments; mustard, mayonnaise, A-1 Sauce, hot sauce. And sometimes, when there was no more ketchup (or other condiment) to marry, we would open a #10 can (or giant tub) of the necessary condiment and pour brand new condiment in the old condiment container. We never washed any of them, save for the lids which we soaked in hot water to get all the dried crud off while we were marrying the condiments.

So this morning I went to the cafeteria in my office complex to get some eggs. You can get two scrambled eggs and bacon for $3. It's a pretty good deal. After I paid I went to the condiment counter to sprinkle some yummy Tapatio  hot sauce on my eggs. I had long suspected that this place marries their condiments and today I got my confirmation. In marrying the hot sauces, they neglected to put that little plastic insert back in the bottle, you know, that little piece of plastic that makes the hot sauce come out in measured drops. I ended up dumping 1/2 a bottle of Tapatio on my eggs.

Man, that sucked. I knew I should have gone for the Cholula.

Reeboks and Burgers - A Dream

Have you ever broken up with a friend?
I have once. I did it badly. It was messy.



I read an article in some woman's magazine about breaking up with friends many years ago. I had never heard of the concept. Sure I'd heard of people drifting apart, or people having fights and never speaking to each other again, but I had never heard of people having the "we have to talk . . . " conversation with regular friends.

I knew this woman. For a while we were kind of good friends. We worked together. We saw each other every day at work. We had lunch together just about every day. We hung out outside work as well. There was something about her, though, that left me feeling negative and drained.
Not really knowing if I wanted to cut off all ties with this woman I decided to take a little break from her.  She was a real negative influence on my life. It took her absence for me to realize that. I decided a break up was in order. I broke off all contact possible. I still had to work with her, though.

After about 6 months, our friendly "good mornings" turned into snide eye contact. We tried to ignore each other completely unless there was a chance that she or I could throw the other under some kind of oncoming bus. We were playing a super passive-aggressive Spy vs. Spy game that I was determined not to lose. I definately did not handle the situation correctly. While I don't think she would have responded well to the "we have to talk" talk, I still could have done things differently.

Then one day she left the company. For a few months I would see her on Muni as she had found work in the same neighborhood as our place of employment. Sometimes we'd say hello and sometimes we'd pretend we didn't see each other.  I haven't seen or spoken to her in years. We have no common friends so I don't know what she's doing these days.

I had a dream about her last night. Strange because I haven't been thinking about her. It was a work dream.

We were working at Hof's Hut, (which is a restaurant / hamburger joint / trying to be fancier than it is, but the burgers are pretty good kind of place. I worked at one of their locations when I was 19).
In my dream I couldn't get the time of my shift right. I always had conflicts with the time they wanted me to work. My x-friend kept taking all the good shifts, wearing super white reebok tennis shoes which for some reason really rubbed me the wrong way. She kept getting in my way and I couldn't serve my tables. I threw up my hands, said "fine" and left the restaurant, but not before pouring a glass of apple juice down the vent slats in her locker.

I wonder why I dreamed about her. I wonder why in my dream I let her best me. Do I have some unresolved issue with her? Do I have some unresolved issue with any of my current co-workers? I am feeling a bit stressed about a particular situation at my current job, but it has nothing to do with any conflict with anyone. I do feel bad with how we stopped being friends, but I'm not sorry we don't hang out anymore.

hmmmmm

The Geneva Pizza Dream, Again.

I've written about this before, but it happened again. I had "The Geneva Pizza Dream."

When I've had a bad day at work, or when work gets stressful I have "The Geneva Pizza Dream." Geneva Pizza was a bit of a stressful place to work. I worked there for a few years and then I quit. I quit by walking out in the middle of my shift in hysterics. A customer gave me a ride home.

Ah, fun times.

In short, in The Geneva Pizza Dream the restaurant is super busy and no matter what I do I can't quite catch up. People can't get their pizzas, the phone won't stop ringing, the keg needs to be tapped, or if it is tapped all I get is foam, people are screaming at me ..... you get the picture.

Over time the dream has changed a bit. In one version I go back to run the place or I go back to pick up some extra cash, but in both of those cases after it gets too busy I say 'screw it, it's just a cruddy pizza place" and I walk out.

Last night I had a new version of the dream.
I was working at Geneva Pizza. My boss wasn't the boss I had when I worked there but my boss that I have now. We were in the pizza place right before opening. I told him to turn on the oven because customers were going to be in soon and we have to cook some pies. He told me he wasn't going to because he didn't think we were going to have any customers that day. I thought it was strange but didn't question him. I started to walk over to the closet and I tripped over a red bicycle. I asked him if the bike was his. He said yes. I was surprised he had ridden his bike to work. I walked over to the supply closet. It was twice as big as I remember and decorated like a living room in a crappy apartment all decked out for Christmas. I closed the closet door and started looking at some coupons for free make-up. The coupons were made out of vellum. They were a pearlish color with black text. When I read the fine print it said in order to be eligible for the free make-up I had to be 16 or over and Japanese. While I was trying to figure out a way to convince the coupon people that I was Japanese, three teenage girls came up to me and I gave them half of my coupons.