Thursday, August 09, 2012

Les Temps Perdu: Menick and the mountain of meatballs

I feel obligated to complete the great tales of employment that I’ve started.

At some point during my freshman year of college I decided that I needed a source of additional income, and got myself a job working nights at a cafeteria style restaurant on the main commercial drag of the campus. This was one of my most successful career stories. I started out as the dish washer and, by the time I retired, I was the head chef, with seniority over the entire rest of the staff. Curiously enough, I only worked there a week.

I don’t know by virtue of what idiocy I felt I could hold down what amounted to a regular job while going to school. I guess it was the need for money; even though I had been a hard worker in high school, everything that I had earned had gone toward my education. I was not raised poor by any means, but my parents were not aware of it. Like a lot of people whose formative years were during the Depression, my parents continued to think that Hoover was in the White House and that the bottom could fall out of everything any minute. And they applied the lessons of their youth to me: whenever we disagreed about something, their response was that they didn’t have that during the Depression, and that was the end of the argument. No wonder I enjoy debate. If your opponent makes an argument that the social contract entails rights protection, you can’t respond, “Rights protection? We didn’t have rights protection during the Depression! We didn’t even have Rights! For that matter, we didn’t even have the letter R. You kids are spoiled rotten these days.” Anyhow, the money I had earned as a high school student was earmarked for education, and out of my immediate reach. My expenses as a college student were greater than my resources. A job seemed like the right idea.

The first night I arrived for work, I was show the dishwashing machine. This was an object the size of a bus, but it operated fairly simply. You put a lot of dirty dishes into it on one end, and took out a lot of clean dishes from the other end. Various amounts of water, steam and soap were also entailed, making the immediate environs a little less pleasant than would otherwise be the case. And, of course, you had to get the dirty dishes from their previous resting spots, on the tables in the dining room, and put them in their new resting spots, in piles ready to go back to the kitchen. Provided there were people around eating, the dishwashing job was pretty steady. A great way to start in the culinary business, I’d say. That and my other responsibilities, which included sweeping up. And mopping. And wiping tables.

That was my first night.

My second night I moved on to meatballs. I am not quite sure of the number of meatballs eaten by the average college student in my day, but the evidence of my experience was that the number was pretty high. My task of making meatballs saw me with an ice cream scoop in hand, facing a pile of meatball muck roughly four sizes greater than my own height and weight. I had to take the meatball mountain, scoop by scoop, and remove it to roasting trays, then put the trays in the oven for a while until the red chopped meat was magically transformed into the humble polpettina, as my Italian grandmother might say. (I never knew my Italian grandmother, but I can’t imagine her not saying it, so there you are.) It is impossible to appreciate the numbness of mind that comes with eight or so hours of nonstop meatball production. Making a couple of dozen meatballs for Christmas Eve? Heaven. Making a couple of thousand meatballs for the hungry stomachs of the Syracuse University student body? Not quite so heavenly.

On my third night, while continuing odd tasks, especially clearing up, I began to work the counter and learn the grill. Not a lot of food was cooked to order aside from burgers and eggs, which didn’t require a lot of training. What does require perhaps training but I would suggest that it’s more innate talent, is timing things and keeping track of things. A short order cook is not a master of cuisine but a master of scheduling, knowing what’s due when, and delivering it on time. Orders never come occasionally. There is never one person wanting something to eat. Either the line is empty, or it’s the nightmare of Malthus. The only number of people ever ordering food was too many. And somehow you had to keep track of it all.

In the days that I worked in the cafeteria, the turnover of employees was both ridiculous and nonstop, and I do not exaggerate when I report that on day seven I had seniority, and I was no longer just filling in or helping out on the line, but I was the chief cook. No more dishwashing for me. No more mountains of meatball muck. No, for me it was hour after hour of burgers and fries and scrambled eggs and you name it, and I went home that night after I got paid and collapsed and never returned.

I just didn’t need the money that badly. There was no way to do this job even a couple of nights a week and still go to school. This wasn’t work. This was WORK. No wonder kids didn’t hold on to the jobs, which in my recollection were a commitment of all or nothing. The cafeteria wanted regular employees, but they could never dependably come from the ranks of fulltime students. It was one or the other. The other won out.

I wish I could say that this experience was traumatic, but it wasn’t until I was thinking about jobs and wracking my brain that I even remembered it. Repressed? I don’t think so. It was only one week, long ago, one mountain of meatballs, one never ending line of fries, fries, burger, fries—it's not the sort of thing that sticks with you. So that may be the moral of the story. No matter what you’re doing this week, if you don’t ever do it again, eventually you’ll forget about it. Sometimes that’s a good thing to know.

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