This is the 11th blog entry I've posted in May, which is a pace I probably won't be able to keep up.
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The Strep Throat Fairy visited K at school Friday, and he came home with a fever. (Kevin, not the Strep Throat Fairy.) He has some antibiotics now, and is feeling a lot better.
There has been a lot of illness and flu going around this spring. J tells me that there were days at her middle school recently where over 100 students were out sick. Yikes.
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The Greek Orthodox Church near our house (down Scio Church) is having their annual Ya'ssoo Festival this weekend. I can hear the music from here, but I don't understand the words.
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M had a soccer game today, and it was quite exciting. He had two shots on goal, and one appeared to go into the goal, but the referee didn't call it a goal so it didn't count. The kids on M's team who were nearby swore it was a goal and said we were most certainly robbed. Since they are impartial observers, I will believe them.
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Last night was M's last soccer practice of the season, and the custom is to have a game between the kids and the parents. It was a lot of fun, although I pulled a muscle in my side during the game.
Soccer is for the young.
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Dinner Time = Fun Time
Today at dinner we had a few laughs.
We were discussing the fact that Hershey (one of our cats) is deaf. K asked what would happen if a cat was blind.
K: Would he have a dog?
Mom: A dog?
M: Yeah, you know, a dog to help him see.
Mom: Oh, a dog!
M: He could have a chihuahua.
Mom: A chihauhua?
M: You know - a chihuahua. It's like a dog.
It's true. There are similarities between chihuahuas and dogs. And the image of a chihuahua being a seeing-eye dog for cat is funny. Hershey would probably outweigh it by 5 pounds. Comedy gold!
Later, after both kids did an impromptu multiplication problem at the table:
K: Is there any dessert?
Mom (impressed with the math): Sorry, there's only dessert for dumb kids.
M (with big dopey face): Me dumb.
Maybe you had to be there...
We were discussing the fact that Hershey (one of our cats) is deaf. K asked what would happen if a cat was blind.
K: Would he have a dog?
Mom: A dog?
M: Yeah, you know, a dog to help him see.
Mom: Oh, a dog!
M: He could have a chihuahua.
Mom: A chihauhua?
M: You know - a chihuahua. It's like a dog.
It's true. There are similarities between chihuahuas and dogs. And the image of a chihuahua being a seeing-eye dog for cat is funny. Hershey would probably outweigh it by 5 pounds. Comedy gold!
Later, after both kids did an impromptu multiplication problem at the table:
K: Is there any dessert?
Mom (impressed with the math): Sorry, there's only dessert for dumb kids.
M (with big dopey face): Me dumb.
Maybe you had to be there...
Weekend Update
We went to Chicago this weekend and saw the Harry Potter exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. It was well done. They had costumes from all the characters, props, magic wands, quidditch equipment, and so on. If you're a fan of the movies, you'll recognize most of the items and get to see them up close. If you're not familiar with the movies, they have some video screens showing scenes from the movies that are relevant to the items nearby. My favorite parts were the animated portraits and seeing the magic wands up close.
A few years ago, we saw a similar exhibit with props and costumes from the Star Wars movies, which we all liked.
Our kids are Harry Potter fans and are reading the books, but we're having a problem with the movies. The first few are rated PG, but the next ones are rated PG-13. They get pretty scary, and since the PG movies are already plenty creepy, we're reluctant to let them see the next ones. Some of the characters like the Death Eaters are scary, even for adults.
J is working in a middle school media center (formerly known as a "library") and she says this is common for book series aimed at youth readers - they start off written for middle/high school, and they get more serious and more violent/scary/adult as they go. Harry Potter books start with a little violence and death, and incorporate more and more as they go along. This is because a book series has to grow with its readers - as those middle and high school students read the next book in the series, they aren't interested in reading more books aimed at younger readers - they want grown-up themes and situations. The Twilight books are another recent example -the first book is OK for middle school readers, but subsequent books have more serious things happening, such as naked people hugging and such, things that are not considered appropriate for middle schoolers. This is a dilemma for new readers whose parents may not want them reading the newest books in the series, but it's aimed at faithful readers who have been with the books at the start.
It's too bad they can't make two different versions of the books - one milder version for new readers, and the more grown-up version for older readers.
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I signed up on MentorNet as a potential mentor for a college student. I was just matched with a student, so it will be interesting to see what happens. Most of the communication goes through email, so it does not take a lot of time.
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I'm looking forward to a relaxing Memorial Day, I hope everyone is taking it easy and getting outside to enjoy the weather!
A few years ago, we saw a similar exhibit with props and costumes from the Star Wars movies, which we all liked.
Our kids are Harry Potter fans and are reading the books, but we're having a problem with the movies. The first few are rated PG, but the next ones are rated PG-13. They get pretty scary, and since the PG movies are already plenty creepy, we're reluctant to let them see the next ones. Some of the characters like the Death Eaters are scary, even for adults.
J is working in a middle school media center (formerly known as a "library") and she says this is common for book series aimed at youth readers - they start off written for middle/high school, and they get more serious and more violent/scary/adult as they go. Harry Potter books start with a little violence and death, and incorporate more and more as they go along. This is because a book series has to grow with its readers - as those middle and high school students read the next book in the series, they aren't interested in reading more books aimed at younger readers - they want grown-up themes and situations. The Twilight books are another recent example -the first book is OK for middle school readers, but subsequent books have more serious things happening, such as naked people hugging and such, things that are not considered appropriate for middle schoolers. This is a dilemma for new readers whose parents may not want them reading the newest books in the series, but it's aimed at faithful readers who have been with the books at the start.
It's too bad they can't make two different versions of the books - one milder version for new readers, and the more grown-up version for older readers.
-----
I signed up on MentorNet as a potential mentor for a college student. I was just matched with a student, so it will be interesting to see what happens. Most of the communication goes through email, so it does not take a lot of time.
-----
I'm looking forward to a relaxing Memorial Day, I hope everyone is taking it easy and getting outside to enjoy the weather!
Science Olympiad Results!
We are proud to announce that M's Science Olympiad team won second place in its event on Saturday at the Washtenaw Elementary Science Olympiad. His event was called "Estimania." He was one of three students on his event's team. This picture is M outside Skyline High School, Ann Arbor's new high school, where the Olympiad was held.
The website for the organization is here.
He got to go up on the stage at the awards ceremony and get his medal. M's school also had the honor of winning the overall first prizes for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades. Hats off to all the Lawton Olympians!
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The day after the Science Olympiad, M performed The Caisson Song at his piano recital. It went off without a hitch. All of the students at the recital did a great job. M has come a long way and is really enjoying music. We sometimes have to tell him to stop singing so loudly with his piano pieces, and we try to limit his whistling. But he has the music gene, and there's only so much we can do.
Cable Boxes and Persistence of Vision, Part Deux
I wrote a while back about cable boxes and the ways Comcast could present commercials even when fast forwarding through a show. The persistence of vision idea certainly doesn't make it easy for them, and assumes they're displaying the ad on their own cable box. I thought of a few more ways they could cheaply advertise.
When you're fast forwarding, the sound stops - you can watch the picture go by, but you can't hear anything. Since the audio isn't being used at this time, Comcast could play a short audio message. It would stop when you stopped fast forwarding. It could figure out what you're watching and customize the message for you. For example, if you’re watching “Lost”, an overwrought, entirely confusing drama that takes place on an island, there might be a quick audio message “See Gilligan’s Island reruns on TNT, weekdays at 4 pm”. If you’re watching Desperate Housewives, you’d get “Bovine Flu hits Michigan – story at 11 on Action News”.
Another idea that would allow them to show little ads all the time would be to put a small logo or ad at the right or left of the bar that displays when you're playing, pausing, fast forwarding, or doing something else. Since that bar already takes up space at the bottom of the screen, they could fill it in a little more with (say) the Best Buy logo or a picture of Bart Simpson next to the Fox logo.
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I bought some pretzels at work the other day because I needed a snack. The pretzels are the only relatively healthy thing in the vending machine. Since I was hungry, I was hoping to get a good-sized bag. But in my wildest dreams I never imagined that the pretzel company made a size just for me! Hungry Size! How lucky can a guy get?
When you're fast forwarding, the sound stops - you can watch the picture go by, but you can't hear anything. Since the audio isn't being used at this time, Comcast could play a short audio message. It would stop when you stopped fast forwarding. It could figure out what you're watching and customize the message for you. For example, if you’re watching “Lost”, an overwrought, entirely confusing drama that takes place on an island, there might be a quick audio message “See Gilligan’s Island reruns on TNT, weekdays at 4 pm”. If you’re watching Desperate Housewives, you’d get “Bovine Flu hits Michigan – story at 11 on Action News”.
Another idea that would allow them to show little ads all the time would be to put a small logo or ad at the right or left of the bar that displays when you're playing, pausing, fast forwarding, or doing something else. Since that bar already takes up space at the bottom of the screen, they could fill it in a little more with (say) the Best Buy logo or a picture of Bart Simpson next to the Fox logo.
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I bought some pretzels at work the other day because I needed a snack. The pretzels are the only relatively healthy thing in the vending machine. Since I was hungry, I was hoping to get a good-sized bag. But in my wildest dreams I never imagined that the pretzel company made a size just for me! Hungry Size! How lucky can a guy get?
I wonder what the other sizes are?
"Not Very Hungry" Size
"Kind of Hungry" Size
"Dinner's In An Hour" Size
"I Had The Hungry Size But I'm Still Hungry" Size
"If You Eat These You'll Wish You'd Bought The Cheetos" Size
When I Was A Young Warthog, Second Verse, A Whole Lot Worse
For some reason that escapes me, I applied for a job at Wendy’s when I was 17.
I first applied at the Wendy’s on West Avenue (in Jackson), but they didn’t call me back. I heard from some friends that the Wendy’s on Airport Road was hiring, so I went out there and interviewed. They gave me a job right away.
There’s a reason they had problems finding people to work there – there was hardly an apartment or home within a mile of the place. It was brand new, really large, and it even had a basement. But it was pretty far from my house, so I couldn’t easily or quickly get there.
On my first day, they showed me how to make fries. How to rotate them, how to salt them, how to put them into the cardboard sleeves. Every time they needed some fries, the manager would turn to me and tell me what size to give her, then I’d hand them to her. Eventually, I took a few steps over to the front counter and put them on the tray myself.
I had a lot of trouble getting the fries to fit into the sleeve at first. One time I grabbed a few that were flopping over with my fingers and stuffed them into the sleeve. The manager was looking right at me, and shook her head “no”. Standing directly behind her, across the counter, was a woman I knew from church, watching me get reprimanded.
I had a hard time sorting out the orders that were called over the speakers. The front register person would call out the order as it was told to her, and the drive-through speaker barked out the orders at the same time. I couldn’t remember which one needed what, so the people on those lines had to continually tell me what to bring them. After several hours of this, I got better.
Three or four weeks after I started, I got a call from the West Avenue Wendy’s, which was less than a mile straight south of my house. I told the manager at Airport Road that I’d like to transfer to the West Ave Wendy’s. I thought she would be fine with it, since it was the same company. Right? But instead it made her grumpy. Something about all the time they take to train someone just to watch them leave. I told her I was sorry, but that travel to and from work was already a problem, and I was likely to leave anyway. This did not make her feel better, either. There was no pleasing this woman.
Working at the new restaurant was a nice change – I had struggled to learn things at the “old” Wendy’s, but at this new Wendy’s I was able to fit in and do just about anything. On my first day, I was assigned the Product Coordinator position, which ran the gamut from “dropping chicken” (into the fryer, not on the floor) to putting potatoes into the potato oven to washing dishes. I did a good job, and I enjoyed not having the speakers bossing me around from two different directions.
I learned the other positions – salad bar, register, grill, line coordinator, and so on. They taught me how to make change, and were sure that I would do it wrong, since every other trainee on the register did it wrong. Most trainees tried to subtract the total from the amount given, and would get the wrong answer, or stand there for 30 seconds figuring it out. The manager told me to count UP from the total to the given amount, which made sense to me right away.
While I was learning the register, the manager called me in to the office at the end of my shift to count the money. The first time I did this, I noticed he was flipping the bills so they were all facing the same way. I went through my stack and organized mine the same way. When he asked me how much money I had, I didn’t know, because I didn’t realize I was supposed to count it. I was just flipping.
This Wendy’s was a lot smaller than the one I had been at before – it didn’t have a break room or a basement. There was a big walk-in freezer outside the building, and two smaller ones inside. The outside freezer was mostly for buns. The inside freezer was for fries and chicken, and the walk-in fridge had everything else – beef, cheese, vegetables, etc. When it was hot outside, it was even hotter inside, and we could duck into the fridge for a minute to cool off.
We had rules for where things had to go in the fridge – the ground beef (which was indeed fresh, never frozen) was always to be stored on the bottom shelf along with the raw chicken. You can’t store anything below raw chicken.
Work was sometimes fun, sometimes drudgery. It depended on who was working that day. Some people were good workers and did their jobs and helped each other out. As you would expect, we had people who would refuse to do parts of their jobs (such as wash dishes) and we’d end up doing them ourselves because we needed the dishes and didn’t want to argue. (I was afraid of a few of my coworkers, so I figured out what they would not help me with, and I didn’t bother asking them.) For the most part, though, I liked my coworkers, and we were able to have fun and tell jokes and trade gossip while still getting our work done. Once I got used to a position, it was easy to do, even if we were really busy. Making sandwiches became automatic (mayonnaise, ketchup, pickle, onion, tomato, lettuce, in that order, or white/red/green/white/red/green. Mustard is added directly to the patty, or the cheese if it’s a cheeseburger.) Running the grill became automatic, and running the register was easy after doing it for 15 or 20 hours. (Interesting fact: When preparing a cheeseburger, the grill operator melts the cheese directly on the grill, then lifts it with the edge of a spatula and drapes it over the patty.) It didn’t matter whether we had 100 customers or twelve, there wasn’t much a customer could to do stump us. As an adult, I learned this was the beauty of a well-run franchise, with all the roles defined and the stations set up to make things as easy as possible.
I learned to walk flat-footed, like walking on ice, because it was not unusual for the floor to be a little greasy or wet. One of my coworkers slipped and fell backwards once, and her head bounced on the floor. She was OK, but there was only so much they could do to keep the floor dry. That same coworker fell victim to a money changing scam a year later, and I realized I was fortunate to have never had a money problem for all the hours I spent at the register.
My work schedule varied from week to week. My typical school-day shift would start at 4, and ended at either 7:30 or 11:30. Sometimes it was 7:30-11:30. Wendy’s closed at 10:30 on school nights, and closing took an hour. It was not unusual for me to close two or three nights a week. When I turned 18, the manager who did the schedules noticed it, and scheduled me to close three nights in a row the following week – Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I told him that I couldn’t do that – I still had to go to school and it was helpful if I was awake for my classes. He agreed not to close me two nights in a row from then on. Many of the other high school students who worked there were not allowed to close on school nights, so he scheduled me as much as possible to close. My parents obviously didn’t love me, or they would have set the same rule for me.
I didn’t have a favorite job, but to my surprise, the drive-through register job was fairly easy. If it got really busy, someone would come over and help make drinks, and even take orders while I stuck my head out the window and took money. If it wasn’t busy, I’d make the drinks myself. The people who put things into the bags were usually good enough that I didn’t have to carefully check their work, which made the drive-through register one of the easiest jobs. Working in the back room was pretty good too – as long as you followed the schedule for when to put more potatoes in the oven, and listened for someone telling you they were running out of chicken, you could decide what needed to be done. I could help the girls working on the salad bar, or mop a floor, or do dishes. (It was always girls doing the salad bar.) On weekends, and during the summer, I was sometimes scheduled at 7 am to open the store. We’d make taco salads, mix up chili, move new pans full of patties up to the front, refresh the cheese bin, fill up the condiments, and so on. It was pretty easy work, and it was fun because there were no customers. Then we’d open at 10:30, and I’d run the grill until lunch was over.
My least favorite thing to do was to take the grease buckets out and dump them into the bins at the back of the parking lot. These days, that kind of grease will run your car, but back then all it did was smell terrible and get on your clothes. Being a teenager, most of the hard, physical work didn’t bother me at all, other than being boring (see my recent post about working at Melling.)
I learned the important insider tricks while I was there. When we had a break, we were given a 50% discount on food, so I’d make the most of that. I learned that wrapping the large chocolate chip cookies in foil and putting them in the potato oven for a few minutes made them nice and gooey. I learned that a little of the frosty mix we poured into the machines was a nice snack. Dipping gooey chocolate chip cookies into a frozen Frosty was, as comedian Rich Hall would say, “a big fat donkey ride to heaven.” Depending on the manager on duty, we were allowed to order a burger at break time, then go back and it make it ourselves, so I’d pile mine up with pickles and onions. We used to have wheat buns (excuse me – multi-grain buns) and I loved those. I was disappointed when they got rid of them.
(As an aside, I filled out a health survey form for MSU when I was about to start my freshman year. They asked how many times I ate fast food each week, and I selected the option “6 or more”. When I got my health assessment back from them, one of their suggestions was “Eat fast food less often.”)
I made some good friends when I was there – I still remember some of their names and occasionally ran into them for years after. We had some fun, and I think the managers were willing to put up with a little of it as long as everything got done. A coworker and I once asked the manager if we could roll up our (short) sleeves because they were getting in the way of our muscles. The manager made us flex our biceps so he could see the problem. We both made our best muscles and he let the other guy roll up his sleeves and told me to keep mine straight. I tried to explain that just because the other guy had arm fat doesn’t mean he had bigger muscles than I did, but I didn’t get anywhere. We also had a manager who would let us start closing on “bar time”, a reference to the common bar practice of setting clocks 10 minutes fast to allow for the extra time needed to shoo drunks out at closing. We’d ask if we could close “bar time” and start discreetly dismantling the salad bar early and scrubbing the grill.
For a while, there was a guy who worked there who claimed he could create a cleaning agent for any kind of mess. You’d tell him you had to mop up Thousand Island that had spilled, and he’d say “I know what will work for that!” and he’d throw some soap packets and other things into a mop bucket and present it to you. One day he decided that ammonia and bleach would work to clean up some stain or another, and we had to clear out of there for a while because of the fumes. His enthusiasm exceeded his abilities.
All things considered, it was a pretty good job. I met a lot of people and had some fun. I got some experience dealing with different people, working together as a team, and being able to focus on multiple things at once.
I first applied at the Wendy’s on West Avenue (in Jackson), but they didn’t call me back. I heard from some friends that the Wendy’s on Airport Road was hiring, so I went out there and interviewed. They gave me a job right away.
There’s a reason they had problems finding people to work there – there was hardly an apartment or home within a mile of the place. It was brand new, really large, and it even had a basement. But it was pretty far from my house, so I couldn’t easily or quickly get there.
On my first day, they showed me how to make fries. How to rotate them, how to salt them, how to put them into the cardboard sleeves. Every time they needed some fries, the manager would turn to me and tell me what size to give her, then I’d hand them to her. Eventually, I took a few steps over to the front counter and put them on the tray myself.
I had a lot of trouble getting the fries to fit into the sleeve at first. One time I grabbed a few that were flopping over with my fingers and stuffed them into the sleeve. The manager was looking right at me, and shook her head “no”. Standing directly behind her, across the counter, was a woman I knew from church, watching me get reprimanded.
I had a hard time sorting out the orders that were called over the speakers. The front register person would call out the order as it was told to her, and the drive-through speaker barked out the orders at the same time. I couldn’t remember which one needed what, so the people on those lines had to continually tell me what to bring them. After several hours of this, I got better.
Three or four weeks after I started, I got a call from the West Avenue Wendy’s, which was less than a mile straight south of my house. I told the manager at Airport Road that I’d like to transfer to the West Ave Wendy’s. I thought she would be fine with it, since it was the same company. Right? But instead it made her grumpy. Something about all the time they take to train someone just to watch them leave. I told her I was sorry, but that travel to and from work was already a problem, and I was likely to leave anyway. This did not make her feel better, either. There was no pleasing this woman.
Working at the new restaurant was a nice change – I had struggled to learn things at the “old” Wendy’s, but at this new Wendy’s I was able to fit in and do just about anything. On my first day, I was assigned the Product Coordinator position, which ran the gamut from “dropping chicken” (into the fryer, not on the floor) to putting potatoes into the potato oven to washing dishes. I did a good job, and I enjoyed not having the speakers bossing me around from two different directions.
I learned the other positions – salad bar, register, grill, line coordinator, and so on. They taught me how to make change, and were sure that I would do it wrong, since every other trainee on the register did it wrong. Most trainees tried to subtract the total from the amount given, and would get the wrong answer, or stand there for 30 seconds figuring it out. The manager told me to count UP from the total to the given amount, which made sense to me right away.
While I was learning the register, the manager called me in to the office at the end of my shift to count the money. The first time I did this, I noticed he was flipping the bills so they were all facing the same way. I went through my stack and organized mine the same way. When he asked me how much money I had, I didn’t know, because I didn’t realize I was supposed to count it. I was just flipping.
This Wendy’s was a lot smaller than the one I had been at before – it didn’t have a break room or a basement. There was a big walk-in freezer outside the building, and two smaller ones inside. The outside freezer was mostly for buns. The inside freezer was for fries and chicken, and the walk-in fridge had everything else – beef, cheese, vegetables, etc. When it was hot outside, it was even hotter inside, and we could duck into the fridge for a minute to cool off.
We had rules for where things had to go in the fridge – the ground beef (which was indeed fresh, never frozen) was always to be stored on the bottom shelf along with the raw chicken. You can’t store anything below raw chicken.
Work was sometimes fun, sometimes drudgery. It depended on who was working that day. Some people were good workers and did their jobs and helped each other out. As you would expect, we had people who would refuse to do parts of their jobs (such as wash dishes) and we’d end up doing them ourselves because we needed the dishes and didn’t want to argue. (I was afraid of a few of my coworkers, so I figured out what they would not help me with, and I didn’t bother asking them.) For the most part, though, I liked my coworkers, and we were able to have fun and tell jokes and trade gossip while still getting our work done. Once I got used to a position, it was easy to do, even if we were really busy. Making sandwiches became automatic (mayonnaise, ketchup, pickle, onion, tomato, lettuce, in that order, or white/red/green/white/red/green. Mustard is added directly to the patty, or the cheese if it’s a cheeseburger.) Running the grill became automatic, and running the register was easy after doing it for 15 or 20 hours. (Interesting fact: When preparing a cheeseburger, the grill operator melts the cheese directly on the grill, then lifts it with the edge of a spatula and drapes it over the patty.) It didn’t matter whether we had 100 customers or twelve, there wasn’t much a customer could to do stump us. As an adult, I learned this was the beauty of a well-run franchise, with all the roles defined and the stations set up to make things as easy as possible.
I learned to walk flat-footed, like walking on ice, because it was not unusual for the floor to be a little greasy or wet. One of my coworkers slipped and fell backwards once, and her head bounced on the floor. She was OK, but there was only so much they could do to keep the floor dry. That same coworker fell victim to a money changing scam a year later, and I realized I was fortunate to have never had a money problem for all the hours I spent at the register.
My work schedule varied from week to week. My typical school-day shift would start at 4, and ended at either 7:30 or 11:30. Sometimes it was 7:30-11:30. Wendy’s closed at 10:30 on school nights, and closing took an hour. It was not unusual for me to close two or three nights a week. When I turned 18, the manager who did the schedules noticed it, and scheduled me to close three nights in a row the following week – Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I told him that I couldn’t do that – I still had to go to school and it was helpful if I was awake for my classes. He agreed not to close me two nights in a row from then on. Many of the other high school students who worked there were not allowed to close on school nights, so he scheduled me as much as possible to close. My parents obviously didn’t love me, or they would have set the same rule for me.
I didn’t have a favorite job, but to my surprise, the drive-through register job was fairly easy. If it got really busy, someone would come over and help make drinks, and even take orders while I stuck my head out the window and took money. If it wasn’t busy, I’d make the drinks myself. The people who put things into the bags were usually good enough that I didn’t have to carefully check their work, which made the drive-through register one of the easiest jobs. Working in the back room was pretty good too – as long as you followed the schedule for when to put more potatoes in the oven, and listened for someone telling you they were running out of chicken, you could decide what needed to be done. I could help the girls working on the salad bar, or mop a floor, or do dishes. (It was always girls doing the salad bar.) On weekends, and during the summer, I was sometimes scheduled at 7 am to open the store. We’d make taco salads, mix up chili, move new pans full of patties up to the front, refresh the cheese bin, fill up the condiments, and so on. It was pretty easy work, and it was fun because there were no customers. Then we’d open at 10:30, and I’d run the grill until lunch was over.
My least favorite thing to do was to take the grease buckets out and dump them into the bins at the back of the parking lot. These days, that kind of grease will run your car, but back then all it did was smell terrible and get on your clothes. Being a teenager, most of the hard, physical work didn’t bother me at all, other than being boring (see my recent post about working at Melling.)
I learned the important insider tricks while I was there. When we had a break, we were given a 50% discount on food, so I’d make the most of that. I learned that wrapping the large chocolate chip cookies in foil and putting them in the potato oven for a few minutes made them nice and gooey. I learned that a little of the frosty mix we poured into the machines was a nice snack. Dipping gooey chocolate chip cookies into a frozen Frosty was, as comedian Rich Hall would say, “a big fat donkey ride to heaven.” Depending on the manager on duty, we were allowed to order a burger at break time, then go back and it make it ourselves, so I’d pile mine up with pickles and onions. We used to have wheat buns (excuse me – multi-grain buns) and I loved those. I was disappointed when they got rid of them.
(As an aside, I filled out a health survey form for MSU when I was about to start my freshman year. They asked how many times I ate fast food each week, and I selected the option “6 or more”. When I got my health assessment back from them, one of their suggestions was “Eat fast food less often.”)
I made some good friends when I was there – I still remember some of their names and occasionally ran into them for years after. We had some fun, and I think the managers were willing to put up with a little of it as long as everything got done. A coworker and I once asked the manager if we could roll up our (short) sleeves because they were getting in the way of our muscles. The manager made us flex our biceps so he could see the problem. We both made our best muscles and he let the other guy roll up his sleeves and told me to keep mine straight. I tried to explain that just because the other guy had arm fat doesn’t mean he had bigger muscles than I did, but I didn’t get anywhere. We also had a manager who would let us start closing on “bar time”, a reference to the common bar practice of setting clocks 10 minutes fast to allow for the extra time needed to shoo drunks out at closing. We’d ask if we could close “bar time” and start discreetly dismantling the salad bar early and scrubbing the grill.
For a while, there was a guy who worked there who claimed he could create a cleaning agent for any kind of mess. You’d tell him you had to mop up Thousand Island that had spilled, and he’d say “I know what will work for that!” and he’d throw some soap packets and other things into a mop bucket and present it to you. One day he decided that ammonia and bleach would work to clean up some stain or another, and we had to clear out of there for a while because of the fumes. His enthusiasm exceeded his abilities.
All things considered, it was a pretty good job. I met a lot of people and had some fun. I got some experience dealing with different people, working together as a team, and being able to focus on multiple things at once.
What's Up With All The Big Watches?
There was a Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoon that was a play on “Jack and the Beanstalk.” The giant in the story was wearing a wristwatch, which turned out to be a grandfather clock strapped to his wrist. I won’t go into the physics of why that wouldn’t work (cartoons and physics are perpetually at odds with one another) but I have been reminded of this grandfather clock “wristwatch” lately as I’ve been looking for a new watch.
I have been searching for one I can wear to soccer games, around the house, to keep track of how long the hamburgers have been on the grill, and so on. Ideally, this new watch would have a stop watch function, and at minimum it would have a rotating bezel I could use to keep track of minutes. It can’t be too fancy or too cheap, something in the middle would be great.
I came across this watch, and it looked really neat. It’s a little more than I would want to spend, but it’s so attractive I kept going back to it to take another look at it.
Open this link and look at the dimensions of the watch.
http://www.fossil.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=12052&catalogId=10052&departmentCategoryId=30001&categoryId=211555&productId=22086196&N=0&Ns=p_weight0p_order_history1&rec=1&pn=c&imagePath=CH2573&utm_medium=product_image====================
It’s 44mm across. I asked M to use his estimating and math skills to figure out how many inches that was, and the answer is about 1.75 inches. Which doesn’t sound very big at first. But take a ruler, hold it up to your wrist, and imagine you are wearing a watch that is almost two inches across. That’s a HUGE watch. In fact, most of the men’s watches for sale these days are gigantic. I tried on some watches last winter at a department store, and I couldn’t make myself buy one, even though they were nice-looking. They’re too big!
On the other hand, a hubcap-sized watch might be useful. For example, these watches do tell time very well. You can see the time from farther away than a normal watch, which helps if you have failing eyesight. You could use your giant watch as a weapon in case you are approached by a mugger. You can point it towards the sun to make big circular reflections on the walls and floor to tease your cats. I’m not sure, but you may be able to store a small snack inside it. And a watch like this could be helpful if you are in a court of law attempting to prove that you own a watch – the jury will believe you, because they will see your huge watch, and be able to hear it ticking from across the room.
I have been searching for one I can wear to soccer games, around the house, to keep track of how long the hamburgers have been on the grill, and so on. Ideally, this new watch would have a stop watch function, and at minimum it would have a rotating bezel I could use to keep track of minutes. It can’t be too fancy or too cheap, something in the middle would be great.
I came across this watch, and it looked really neat. It’s a little more than I would want to spend, but it’s so attractive I kept going back to it to take another look at it.
Open this link and look at the dimensions of the watch.
http://www.fossil.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=12052&catalogId=10052&departmentCategoryId=30001&categoryId=211555&productId=22086196&N=0&Ns=p_weight0p_order_history1&rec=1&pn=c&imagePath=CH2573&utm_medium=product_image====================
It’s 44mm across. I asked M to use his estimating and math skills to figure out how many inches that was, and the answer is about 1.75 inches. Which doesn’t sound very big at first. But take a ruler, hold it up to your wrist, and imagine you are wearing a watch that is almost two inches across. That’s a HUGE watch. In fact, most of the men’s watches for sale these days are gigantic. I tried on some watches last winter at a department store, and I couldn’t make myself buy one, even though they were nice-looking. They’re too big!
On the other hand, a hubcap-sized watch might be useful. For example, these watches do tell time very well. You can see the time from farther away than a normal watch, which helps if you have failing eyesight. You could use your giant watch as a weapon in case you are approached by a mugger. You can point it towards the sun to make big circular reflections on the walls and floor to tease your cats. I’m not sure, but you may be able to store a small snack inside it. And a watch like this could be helpful if you are in a court of law attempting to prove that you own a watch – the jury will believe you, because they will see your huge watch, and be able to hear it ticking from across the room.
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