On my way to pick up the kids at their daycare I ran into a thick wall of smoke caused by a wall of flames that was burning on the side of the road. It was a grass fire, probably caused by some stupid-ass smoker tossing a butt out of the window. After I picked the kids up, I once again had to drive through the smoke and made it home safely. When M came home I said: “I had to drive through a wall of flames to pick the kids up.” To which she replied without shock: “That sounds bad.” And then bypassed me to say hello to the kids.
It’s been a week of driving through fire as the kids continue with Teething 2005! Combined with Parent Authority Test 101. We had a couple of good nights but usually at around 10, z wakes up and then it’s all over. If m wakes up, you can usually bribe her back to sleep, but not z. She wants painkillers, rocking, an inside stroller walk, car seat rocking, DVD of Baby Einstein or just plain cash.
Speaking of cash, m broke my fucking glasses (actually it was my fault for letting her hold them): “Thanks kid, that’s $200 out of your college fund, That will be at least one keg party you won’t be having.” If only I won the lottery. M Hates when I talk about winning the lottery because I never buy a ticket. I tell her that my odds of winning are probably the same without one. I remember the day a guy in my office won 23 million dollars. I was downstairs and we all heard. “Oh my god!” and stuff like” I won the lottery! Oh my god!” We rushed to his desk and he was reading his ticket and freaking out. We asked him to check again. He read the numbers off and compared them to the numbers on the lottery web site. Sure enough, they matched the piece of paper he was holding. Most people were silent. I gave him a goodbye man-hug (sideways, genitals not facing each other) and said it was nice knowing you. He then looked at his ticket and threw it to the ground. I resisted the urge to dive for it. Was he insane? “This isn’t my ticket.” He said picking it up and throwing it down. “Okay?” I thought. This is where I really do grab the ticket from the lunatic. If anyone else sees me grab the ticket and run out the door, I pay him or her off with a million bucks. I hand it back to him and it felt like a scene from Lord of the Rings: Bilbo, tired of the burden of carrying the all-powerful ring, throws it to the ground. One of the secondary characters picks it up and has to return it. In the process, their skin turns green and eyes bug out. A voice tells them how powerful they could become it they’ll just make a break for it. “My precious!” I slur and drool trough sharp teeth before returning it to the guy. “Are you insane?” I ask. “This isn’t my ticket.” He repeats. Is this some weird psychological guilt for winning enough money to have a view of Gods backyard? I wonder. “This is a printout of the winning ticket.” He says. Apparently the guy had got a lotto machine printout of the winning numbers to compare them to his ticket and had been reading the wrong one. We all had a good laugh (except him).
I discovered a few things on that day. 1), I really can feel good about other peoples good fortune and 2) The chances of you winning the lottery are like 500 million to one. The chances of you knowing the lottery winner are probably 1 in 80 million. The chance of you murdering someone and getting away with it are like 1 in a million (unless you’re O.J. and have a lot of money so it’s probably 1 in 10). Therefore, no matter what, you have a better chance of finding the person who won the lottery, beating their ass, taking their ticket and getting away with it then playing the regular way.
M also really hates it when I call us poor. Yes we own a house in the most expensive real estate market in the country. Yes, if I was making what I make in the Bay area and I lived in Mississippi or Bangladesh, I could live in one of those big white plantation houses, sit on a porch, big enough for a 8 mules and drink mint juleps. Or call myself sultan, live next to the Taj Mahal and bathe in saffron water. But I don’t! Everything is relative: Gas and houses are bloody expensive here! So I am relatively low middle class or upper lower (I get confused which). When I think of poor, I don’t compare it to what you have, but what you have left. Sure you can pay for your rent and car, but what do you have after that? How much are you putting into retirement? Do you really believe social security will pay for more than a Twinkie dinner in the cockroach-infested vending machine at the cheap retirement home? So after paying for everything, I have jack shit take home. I’m living on fumes and it’s not the twin’s fault, Its my job life. Why the hell did I choose art? It pays shit if you’re lucky and even then, the shit is thrown at you by some greedy art director. I’m in the highest paying art job I’ve got and yet I feel like I’m still working at an art supply store. All that’s missing are milk crates, cinder block shelves and a 12 pack of Ramen noodles.
When I was in art school, I worked in an office for a work-study program. Everything I made was going into buying art supplies, which are fucking, expensive. They should have called it a work-food program. One week I had no money for food and had already ate all of my Ramen noodles and packs of instant, peaches and cream oatmeal (which is the worst thing you’ll ever put in your mouth next to a dentist drill or a convict’s penis). I was literally a starving artist. I remember sneaking into a pizza restaurant and stealing their condiments–Crackers and Ketchup soup. Mmm! Bon Appetite! In the break room at work, they had only two things, coffee and instant creamer. So. I sucked that stuff down on an empty stomach. By the time I got back to my apartment, I was shaking and freaking out. I felt like I could vibrate trough walls. I lay down on the floor to die or at least calm down. When I looked over to the right, I noticed that under my roommates bed, was an onion. Why was there an onion there? Was he stealing food or is this some kind of voodoo thing. I took the onion, ran downstairs and tried to make onion rings.
Recipe:
Slice onions and dip in water.
Flour.
Fry in hot grease until everything breaks apart and turns into hot, brown grease soup.
Eat and thank God for this bounty because after all, people in Bangladesh would kill for Brown Onion Grease soup.
I never could figure out where that onion came from. My friend A from art school claims that I was hallucinating. It wasn’t really an onion but a rolled up white sock. Mmm! Sock soup. Maybe it really was a voodoo thing. My roommate was from the deep-deep South and he did literally just disappear after I took the onion away, never to be seem again. Maybe it was because my other roommate was a maniacal freak who threaten his life for stealing his food. More likely, that.
I do feel very rich with the girls. It is like winning a personal lottery of sorts.
But like winning the lottery, you may not have to eat Sock soup, but you may have to adjust your old unsolved problems up a level. If I won the lottery, coming home could be: “My private jet flew through a wall of flames at the London airport.” Without shock, M says: “That sounds bad” and bypasses me to get to the kids. Then m takes my $50,000 glasses I got from Sir Elton John and throws them to the ground.
That’s it
E.M.
Friday, August 05, 2005
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
The Spanking Machine
Sooo tired. These past weeks have been hell as z has been teething a lot. She usually wakes up at 2 in the morning and it takes at least an hour to get her back down until the Tylenol kicks in. She has such a low pain tolerance unlike m, whose like a little tank sometimes. On the plus of development, language continues to creep in. z can say the first half of words; (cheese is che) and m can say "ball" and "bubble" pretty clearly. Time to stop saying "fucking hell!" when near them.
Both kids have been acting a little "challenging" lately. They like to purposely walk over to somewhere I don't want them to be or do something that I don't like. But first, they look at you and check: "Is this going to piss you off?" If I look at them, that's when the bottle of poison goes in the mouth or they jump trough the stained glass window (did I mention I Live in a church that use to be a poison factory?) I thought that they wouldn't be acting like this until they were two. What happen to the terrible twos! I guess this is sorta a preview of the infamous teen years when they really lay on the spread. We have a whole room full of toys but they just want to climb up to the window, eat stuff off the carpet, climb over the guardrail or pet the rabid hyena, which is in their room for some reason. I know that if I ignore them, they'll eventually start doing stuff to get my attention; fast cars with boys/drugs/alcohol, yadda yadda... But perhaps I can circumvent their behavior by using reverse psychology. Make being good, naughty and they'll flock to it like sea gulls at a garbage dump. Maybe when they become surly teens, I'll leave porno magazines and drugs lying around and hide a bunch of textbooks in the attic and under my mattress: "Hey z! Look what I found! A Calculus book!" "Ooh! Check it a SAT prep kit."
When I was visiting my family across country, my big sister, C asked me if there was anything I was going to do differently with my girls than the way we were raised. I wasn’t sure if she was leading into a religious question or not. Like getting them confirmed into Catholicism. Unlike me, she still believes in the Catholic Church’s version of Christianity along with multiple Internet hoaxes. I have yet to convince her that Tommy Hilfiger is not a racist who wants to remove the words “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance or Jesus will not get Bill Gates to give you money when ever you forward an e-mail. I told her the one thing I would NOT do would be to ever beat my kids. She looked at me as if my 10 years of living in Liberal Northern California had finally caught up with me. Like, Not only would I not beat my kids, but also I would let them have sex with their boyfriends in their rooms or smoke pot with us and call us by our first names. No, my objection to clobbering comes not so much from the couple of belt floggings by my dad but from the nuns at my grammar school. May those nuns all rot in hell. Yes, hell. I mean what kind of adult beats a child with a cane? This was the result of some kid opening the door to the classroom right when the girls were undressing for gym. For some reason, the boys would get dressed in the bathroom and the girls would get dressed in the classroom. Sister Magarette (or Margarita) had gotten foot surgery and hobbled with a cane for at least 3 months (not continuously hobbling or else she would have made it to Canada). Now, as cruel as the caning was, you think she’d beat just that peeping kid but Nooooo, she lined up all the boys in the hallway and one by one, hit our back thighs: WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! Dude? What the fuck? I didn’t even see anything and I get beat? Their flawed logic was; “The good must suffer with the bad” Meaning then, the good kids would keep the bad ones in line or in other words; sanctioned ass kicking.
Another time I was beat for talking in church. Oh I’m sure Jesus would agree with that one: “Blessed are the meek for they shall…Wait a minute! Who’s talking? You! Boy! Next to that goat! Come here you little bastard! How dare you talk during my eulogy! Let me show you how hard the right hand of God is! Another time we got beat by a woman who whacked you if you failed a test. Oh yeah, that’ll work. What the hell were these people’s problems? What kind of fucked up upbringing creates a nun that beats children? At what point did they choose Nun over Dominatrix or LA cop? The only thing I learned from getting beaten is; don’t ever do that again…In front of them! One nun wasn’t so much as a beater but a sarcastic douche bag. Once, I decided I wasn’t going to get bad grades anymore and I told her so and do you know how she responded? “We’ll see about that.” Wha-wha what? If she were Denzel Washington or Morgan Freeman in some feel-good movie about grammar school she would have said: “That’s what I wanna hear solider!
When I use to watch the Ricky Lake/Jenny Jones/Jerry Springer lineup and the "Out of control/whatever/I do what I want" 13 year old girl comes out and causes her mom to shrink with every “bitch” she calls her, of course, like everyone in the audience, I want to cut the rope holding an anvil over her head. But now that THAT could be my kid. I can’t see beating them just because they talked in Pope Ratzinger’s church!
For Christ sake!
The beatings were such an ingrained form of discipline in Catholic school that there was a rumor of a spanking machine. That’s right, some kind of wheeled device with multiple, spiked ping-pong paddles on it that saves the hand of the punisher and administers swift justice to the arse of the offender. One time, I got in trouble for talking (as usual) and I got sent to the principal’s office. I can’t tell you how shitless I was, dead man walking down the hallway, imagining them oiling up ol' 'Betty’ or whatever nickname they had for the machine. When I arrived, they made me sort out a bunch of paperwork. That was it! No spanking machine! I was so relived but also a little disappointed, of course not at the prospect of being beaten bloody by a robot but the fact that something horrible that you believed in and wouldn’t put past the cruelty of the nuns, was only a rumor. This created a little break in their infallible teaching for me which would follow me trough the next 5 or 6 years of their instructions: Perhaps you won’t get pregnant even if you keep your underwear on, perhaps pre marital sex isn’t wrong if you never plan to get married and why is anal sex wrong if Gay people do it and yet I see so much of it in straight porn movies?
Years later, the final straw was them protecting the child molesting priest and ignoring the victim! Perhaps this is that ingrained sadistic center that can’t smack kids around anymore but they sure haven’t got the hang of that “love thy neighbor” thing, yet.
I have yet to find a church that doesn’t beat up on someone. The Dali Lama hates gays as much as the Catholics, Baptist and countless others. Other religions won’t even let women have clitoris or drive cars (perhaps there's a connection there), that it’s okay to blow people up or believe that women can get over Post Partum Depression with prayer. Ugh!
One day I’ll find a less fucked-up religion and maybe then you’ll drag my ass out of bed on a Sunday after a night of baby teething. Until then, Zzzzzzzzz.
That’s it
EM
Both kids have been acting a little "challenging" lately. They like to purposely walk over to somewhere I don't want them to be or do something that I don't like. But first, they look at you and check: "Is this going to piss you off?" If I look at them, that's when the bottle of poison goes in the mouth or they jump trough the stained glass window (did I mention I Live in a church that use to be a poison factory?) I thought that they wouldn't be acting like this until they were two. What happen to the terrible twos! I guess this is sorta a preview of the infamous teen years when they really lay on the spread. We have a whole room full of toys but they just want to climb up to the window, eat stuff off the carpet, climb over the guardrail or pet the rabid hyena, which is in their room for some reason. I know that if I ignore them, they'll eventually start doing stuff to get my attention; fast cars with boys/drugs/alcohol, yadda yadda... But perhaps I can circumvent their behavior by using reverse psychology. Make being good, naughty and they'll flock to it like sea gulls at a garbage dump. Maybe when they become surly teens, I'll leave porno magazines and drugs lying around and hide a bunch of textbooks in the attic and under my mattress: "Hey z! Look what I found! A Calculus book!" "Ooh! Check it a SAT prep kit."
When I was visiting my family across country, my big sister, C asked me if there was anything I was going to do differently with my girls than the way we were raised. I wasn’t sure if she was leading into a religious question or not. Like getting them confirmed into Catholicism. Unlike me, she still believes in the Catholic Church’s version of Christianity along with multiple Internet hoaxes. I have yet to convince her that Tommy Hilfiger is not a racist who wants to remove the words “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance or Jesus will not get Bill Gates to give you money when ever you forward an e-mail. I told her the one thing I would NOT do would be to ever beat my kids. She looked at me as if my 10 years of living in Liberal Northern California had finally caught up with me. Like, Not only would I not beat my kids, but also I would let them have sex with their boyfriends in their rooms or smoke pot with us and call us by our first names. No, my objection to clobbering comes not so much from the couple of belt floggings by my dad but from the nuns at my grammar school. May those nuns all rot in hell. Yes, hell. I mean what kind of adult beats a child with a cane? This was the result of some kid opening the door to the classroom right when the girls were undressing for gym. For some reason, the boys would get dressed in the bathroom and the girls would get dressed in the classroom. Sister Magarette (or Margarita) had gotten foot surgery and hobbled with a cane for at least 3 months (not continuously hobbling or else she would have made it to Canada). Now, as cruel as the caning was, you think she’d beat just that peeping kid but Nooooo, she lined up all the boys in the hallway and one by one, hit our back thighs: WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! Dude? What the fuck? I didn’t even see anything and I get beat? Their flawed logic was; “The good must suffer with the bad” Meaning then, the good kids would keep the bad ones in line or in other words; sanctioned ass kicking.
Another time I was beat for talking in church. Oh I’m sure Jesus would agree with that one: “Blessed are the meek for they shall…Wait a minute! Who’s talking? You! Boy! Next to that goat! Come here you little bastard! How dare you talk during my eulogy! Let me show you how hard the right hand of God is! Another time we got beat by a woman who whacked you if you failed a test. Oh yeah, that’ll work. What the hell were these people’s problems? What kind of fucked up upbringing creates a nun that beats children? At what point did they choose Nun over Dominatrix or LA cop? The only thing I learned from getting beaten is; don’t ever do that again…In front of them! One nun wasn’t so much as a beater but a sarcastic douche bag. Once, I decided I wasn’t going to get bad grades anymore and I told her so and do you know how she responded? “We’ll see about that.” Wha-wha what? If she were Denzel Washington or Morgan Freeman in some feel-good movie about grammar school she would have said: “That’s what I wanna hear solider!
When I use to watch the Ricky Lake/Jenny Jones/Jerry Springer lineup and the "Out of control/whatever/I do what I want" 13 year old girl comes out and causes her mom to shrink with every “bitch” she calls her, of course, like everyone in the audience, I want to cut the rope holding an anvil over her head. But now that THAT could be my kid. I can’t see beating them just because they talked in Pope Ratzinger’s church!
For Christ sake!
The beatings were such an ingrained form of discipline in Catholic school that there was a rumor of a spanking machine. That’s right, some kind of wheeled device with multiple, spiked ping-pong paddles on it that saves the hand of the punisher and administers swift justice to the arse of the offender. One time, I got in trouble for talking (as usual) and I got sent to the principal’s office. I can’t tell you how shitless I was, dead man walking down the hallway, imagining them oiling up ol' 'Betty’ or whatever nickname they had for the machine. When I arrived, they made me sort out a bunch of paperwork. That was it! No spanking machine! I was so relived but also a little disappointed, of course not at the prospect of being beaten bloody by a robot but the fact that something horrible that you believed in and wouldn’t put past the cruelty of the nuns, was only a rumor. This created a little break in their infallible teaching for me which would follow me trough the next 5 or 6 years of their instructions: Perhaps you won’t get pregnant even if you keep your underwear on, perhaps pre marital sex isn’t wrong if you never plan to get married and why is anal sex wrong if Gay people do it and yet I see so much of it in straight porn movies?
Years later, the final straw was them protecting the child molesting priest and ignoring the victim! Perhaps this is that ingrained sadistic center that can’t smack kids around anymore but they sure haven’t got the hang of that “love thy neighbor” thing, yet.
I have yet to find a church that doesn’t beat up on someone. The Dali Lama hates gays as much as the Catholics, Baptist and countless others. Other religions won’t even let women have clitoris or drive cars (perhaps there's a connection there), that it’s okay to blow people up or believe that women can get over Post Partum Depression with prayer. Ugh!
One day I’ll find a less fucked-up religion and maybe then you’ll drag my ass out of bed on a Sunday after a night of baby teething. Until then, Zzzzzzzzz.
That’s it
EM
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Sweaty Hobos, Covered in Butter
We recently went to Atlanta to visit my side of the family and give them a chance to finally meet the girls (15 months later). It was a lot of fun. Got to see my friends too. The girls got compliments on the airplane like: "They were so good.” or “They shut the hell up, real good." On the way back, we got to use the special Homeland Security baby lane which was like 5 people deep, instead of the 500 poor saps who had to wait an hour to get anal probed. Ha! We got express anal probing!
After all of the stimulation of travel, hotel rooms, going off their organic diet for a week and 9000 degree heat plus humidity that was like having a large, sweaty hobo grab your face, it was nice to get back to my Bay Area island in the sea of red state stupidity. It’s taken a while, but I think the girls have finally calmed down and realized there are no more army of people admiring you, just your boring ol’ parents and those dishonorable cats.
z seems to have picked up a souvenir from her cousin j, who’s pretty much the same age as them. She keeps trying to do j’s very high-pitched squeal. Thank god she can’t quite get it because j’s squeal was so bad, my fillings rattled. If z gets it right, we may have to take her back to the hospital: “Excuse me? Do you have a quieter model?” I kid of course (nudge nudge).
"Will someone please Stick a railroad spike trough my head?” This is what I'm thinking as I return to work after being out for a week. There use to be a time I really liked my job..Okay, that's bullshit. There was a time I didn't hate it as much. Back in the day (Yo, yo) it felt more like a team thing. There were staff parties, free movie tickets, perks, even t-shirts with our company name on it. Now, they give you t-shirts instead of raises and movie tickets instead of respect. It seems that all of the people I liked working with either quit or never made it past that 6 months probation period. I miss going to lunch with people or being able to speak off the record about what a fucking back-stabber this guy who sits across from me is. More and more of these backstabbing assholes are being shoved into my office. It's like they're surrounding me, like the cream filling in a jackass cake. The only people that are left are the ones who you know if you tell them anything, the upper management will come to you later and say: "Did we get a customer complaint about X?" My old crew, we would SELF CONTAIN the problem before it would get that far up. We wouldn't cover it up; we would just solve the problem as fast as possible. And what's wrong with that? If I were a boss, all I would say would be if the work is getting done and the customers are happy then leave me the fuck alone.
I was an assistant manager at an art suppy store once and even tough you try to be as "cool" as you can, the "Leave me the fuck alone" technique never really works. No matter how hip you try to be, it was all about the age. I wasn't even 40 and yet the 20-30 year olds treated me as if I was the old coot. It didn't matter that I was a independent comic book artist who use to make his own movies or tried (emphases on tried) to make really terrible music and form an industrial band which never put out an album or played anywhere. (I did get the t-shirts printed tough). The work would always slip as people would slack off and then what? Now you had to come out of the office, wearing your Members Only jacket, sporting a comb-over and your arms akimbo saying:" So, is it break time?" Or: "Do you need something to do?" Yuck! Poo-poo to that.
One of my first jobs was at a fast food chicken joint in the South, during the summer. It was 90 degrees outside and we were stuck in the kitchen where the 9000 degree heat would cook us like Peeps Easter candy in the microwave. Whenever I got a chance, I would sneak into the walk-in fridge and sit on the milk crates. "Ahhhhh!" Occasionally the Members only jacket/comb-over/akimbo arms manager would check in on me: "What are you doing in here?" "Oh, just organizing the eggs." I would respond.
This fast food joint served these really large biscuits and it was our job to brush them, just once with butter before wrapping them up. I always thought that was a rip because I personally would like to taste the butter more. So one time I really lathered it on as if they were sponges. In comes the morning Sunday rush, out go the biscuits, and in comes this pissed off old Black dude. His brown pants, butter stained like he had wet himself
Everyday, they wouldn't let you go until you cleaned the stove and drained the grease from the deep fat fryer. Cleaning the grill involved a long audacious process of scrubbing a still hot, metal slab with a Brillo pad and then after draining the lard pit into these huge buckets, you had to carry this sloshing liquid to this garbage bin containment thing, way the hell in the back. After one brutal shift, at around 2AM, I really wanted to go home and watch the Night Flight video show (is that still on?). Instead of walking the rainy long wet journey to the grease bin, I just dumped the grease next to the side of the building. I'm sure the rats outside were happy about that one: "Hey! Ben! It's like drinking a steak!" The next day, the manager comes in, his pants and Members Only jacket covered in grease and tire marks complaining: "I was riding my motorcycle on the side and hit a slippery patch and whipped out."
I guess I can understand how grossly incompetent and lazy young people can be. And how you really can’t not manage them but still, I wasn’t those freezer-checking managers, I was like working for Patsy and Adina in Ab Fab. You know. Come in whenever, bottle of champagne and caviar in the desk, calling everyone dahling. But did that get me cool Assistant Manager points? Hell no. Will it get me cool points with my girls? All I can say is; if your kids think you’re cool, you’re not doing your job.
That’s it,
EM
After all of the stimulation of travel, hotel rooms, going off their organic diet for a week and 9000 degree heat plus humidity that was like having a large, sweaty hobo grab your face, it was nice to get back to my Bay Area island in the sea of red state stupidity. It’s taken a while, but I think the girls have finally calmed down and realized there are no more army of people admiring you, just your boring ol’ parents and those dishonorable cats.
z seems to have picked up a souvenir from her cousin j, who’s pretty much the same age as them. She keeps trying to do j’s very high-pitched squeal. Thank god she can’t quite get it because j’s squeal was so bad, my fillings rattled. If z gets it right, we may have to take her back to the hospital: “Excuse me? Do you have a quieter model?” I kid of course (nudge nudge).
"Will someone please Stick a railroad spike trough my head?” This is what I'm thinking as I return to work after being out for a week. There use to be a time I really liked my job..Okay, that's bullshit. There was a time I didn't hate it as much. Back in the day (Yo, yo) it felt more like a team thing. There were staff parties, free movie tickets, perks, even t-shirts with our company name on it. Now, they give you t-shirts instead of raises and movie tickets instead of respect. It seems that all of the people I liked working with either quit or never made it past that 6 months probation period. I miss going to lunch with people or being able to speak off the record about what a fucking back-stabber this guy who sits across from me is. More and more of these backstabbing assholes are being shoved into my office. It's like they're surrounding me, like the cream filling in a jackass cake. The only people that are left are the ones who you know if you tell them anything, the upper management will come to you later and say: "Did we get a customer complaint about X?" My old crew, we would SELF CONTAIN the problem before it would get that far up. We wouldn't cover it up; we would just solve the problem as fast as possible. And what's wrong with that? If I were a boss, all I would say would be if the work is getting done and the customers are happy then leave me the fuck alone.
I was an assistant manager at an art suppy store once and even tough you try to be as "cool" as you can, the "Leave me the fuck alone" technique never really works. No matter how hip you try to be, it was all about the age. I wasn't even 40 and yet the 20-30 year olds treated me as if I was the old coot. It didn't matter that I was a independent comic book artist who use to make his own movies or tried (emphases on tried) to make really terrible music and form an industrial band which never put out an album or played anywhere. (I did get the t-shirts printed tough). The work would always slip as people would slack off and then what? Now you had to come out of the office, wearing your Members Only jacket, sporting a comb-over and your arms akimbo saying:" So, is it break time?" Or: "Do you need something to do?" Yuck! Poo-poo to that.
One of my first jobs was at a fast food chicken joint in the South, during the summer. It was 90 degrees outside and we were stuck in the kitchen where the 9000 degree heat would cook us like Peeps Easter candy in the microwave. Whenever I got a chance, I would sneak into the walk-in fridge and sit on the milk crates. "Ahhhhh!" Occasionally the Members only jacket/comb-over/akimbo arms manager would check in on me: "What are you doing in here?" "Oh, just organizing the eggs." I would respond.
This fast food joint served these really large biscuits and it was our job to brush them, just once with butter before wrapping them up. I always thought that was a rip because I personally would like to taste the butter more. So one time I really lathered it on as if they were sponges. In comes the morning Sunday rush, out go the biscuits, and in comes this pissed off old Black dude. His brown pants, butter stained like he had wet himself
Everyday, they wouldn't let you go until you cleaned the stove and drained the grease from the deep fat fryer. Cleaning the grill involved a long audacious process of scrubbing a still hot, metal slab with a Brillo pad and then after draining the lard pit into these huge buckets, you had to carry this sloshing liquid to this garbage bin containment thing, way the hell in the back. After one brutal shift, at around 2AM, I really wanted to go home and watch the Night Flight video show (is that still on?). Instead of walking the rainy long wet journey to the grease bin, I just dumped the grease next to the side of the building. I'm sure the rats outside were happy about that one: "Hey! Ben! It's like drinking a steak!" The next day, the manager comes in, his pants and Members Only jacket covered in grease and tire marks complaining: "I was riding my motorcycle on the side and hit a slippery patch and whipped out."
I guess I can understand how grossly incompetent and lazy young people can be. And how you really can’t not manage them but still, I wasn’t those freezer-checking managers, I was like working for Patsy and Adina in Ab Fab. You know. Come in whenever, bottle of champagne and caviar in the desk, calling everyone dahling. But did that get me cool Assistant Manager points? Hell no. Will it get me cool points with my girls? All I can say is; if your kids think you’re cool, you’re not doing your job.
That’s it,
EM
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