The Things I Learned From Food Service (Part Two)

10) "It's not a turd, bro..."

On a recent day while working at my school's cafeteria a pretty typical group of fraternity guys stumbled in drunk as heck from their night of "Bro-lympics"and took up a table right in the middle of the cafeteria. It was all fun and games and loud off-key singing until a food fight broke out, and then this girl took action. I watched with dismay as everything from chicken strips to steamed carrots went air-borne, recognizing that what goes up must go down and what went down would mean an hour on my hands and knees picking crap off the carpet. I wanted to strangle them.

Instead, my fellow coworkers showed me the right way to handle it. Two of the tallest, most intimidating chefs went out and told the food fighters to tone it down and I was satisfied. I was a little shocked later to see these same students shaking hands with the chefs, even laughing and joking with them like old friends. When I asked one of the chefs about it, Will  broke down the situation for me. He explained that he and Kelly had gone out there with an attitude of respect and so had gotten respect in return. It was as simple as that.

Later in the night one of the students found a shriveled, blackened lump by the silverware trays and, convinced it was a piece of excrement that somehow wound up on the floor in a public place, he immediately started to shout: "A turd! A turd!" One of his more sober friends eyed the lump, approached it from all angles, and finally gave it a swift kick. He concluded that it was, in fact, a grossly shaped baked potato and that ended the excitement.

Now every time I see a baked potato I think "it's not a turd, bro!" --I remember that night and how impressed I was with the chefs and the importance of treating a problem customer with respect, even when they act like idiots.

11) You will make messes.

I have seen many a strong person break down when dishes tip and food goes everywhere. After a long day of minor annoyances building up one after the other a plate of cookies crumbling to their doom just seems like one straw too many, and often tears ensue. I've been there--and I'm telling you now that no matter how big the mess is your day will go on. If your cafeteria is like ours and a handful of students break into sarcastic applause take a bow! If another coworker or student (or heaven forbid--an important person such as the President of the College) is the unfortunate victim of the spill break the tension by laughing it off with them and helping them clean up. Grab some cleaner, wring out the mop, and move forward. You'll be glad you did!

12) There are Big Potatoes and there are Small Potatoes. Know the difference.

This is one I am still learning. Food Service is full of little issues that become crises. At my catering job a young woman approached me and asked if we had any pens she could borrow. As funny as it sounds, this one simple request blossomed into a full-scale mission in a matter of moments. It rippled through our ranks of staff as though someone were chanting "pens...pens!...PENS!" into our collective consciousness, filling us with anxiety and adrenaline. Before long there were a total of five of us scrambling around the front register, the office, the basement and the hallway looking for a writing tool for the lady to have. In the end our manager simply produced one from her pocket and handed it over. And just like that, the crisis was over.

This is what is called a Small Potato.

On a different day, when I was a waitress in Wyoming, our cafe got slammed with customers and I found it difficult to keep track of all the orders. In an effort to help as many people as possible I would try to memorize orders to save time writing and delivering tickets to the cook. On this occasion there was a man whose order I forgot somewhere in the shuffle, and after an atrocious twenty minutes I finally remembered that his food had never come up on the waiting line. Completely mortified I had to go back to his table, interrupt him in his book-reading and ask him to tell me again what his order was. Luckily for me, it was a quick order to prepare and in less than a minute I had a hot plate of delicious things that could soothe his injured spirit. Not so luckily, I learned a pretty hard lesson about the limits of the human memory. From that day on I carried the notepad of tickets with me to every table and wrote everything down even though it took longer to serve everyone in the cafe.

This is definitely an example of a Big Potato. It was a true dilemma and disgrace for a customer to be forgotten so completely, and it was a situation that did call for some adrenaline in order to go the extra mile to make it right again. Too often I think we employees of the food industry forget what is worth our extra stress and what is not. Our jobs could be made so much healthier if we could just distinguish between the two and learn to calmly produce the metaphorical pens from our pockets, then move on to more important matters.

13) Use your resources.

I've heard of managers who are unsympathetic when it comes to employee problems, but by and large the authorities in your work are there to help your work environment be the best it can be. Most jobs have an "Open Door" policy for employees to be able to discuss serious issues like harassment, abuse, theft, dishonesty and bullying in the workplace. Even less serious things like laziness and bad attitudes should be topics that can be brought up safely and confidentially to a manager or employer with the assurance that action will be taken.

I'll be honest, I never used this policy until this year. In years past I took a lot of crap from my coworkers and never reported it, choosing instead to bear the burdens silently and just wait for things to improve on their own. Last semester there was a situation where two of the girls I worked with in catering left me to clean up an event entirely by myself. For an hour and a half. This included not only wheeling six carts loaded with dishes, linens, serving trays and leftovers across campus to the cafeteria but breaking down all of the tables individually, loading up dirty linens into giant burlap bags, and lugging half a dozen trash bags across the frozen lawn to fling into a dumpster. When the girls finally returned, giggling and oblivious to my frustration, and obnoxiously asked "Oh, you're still here?" I was ready to explode. I seriously considered quitting right then and there.

For whatever reason, I decided instead to just talk to my general manager. Matt was not only kind and understanding, he immediately took steps to improve things for the future. He called a staff meeting and informed the girls that the night had been a total failure of teamwork. After chewing them out he asked me if I'd like to move to a different department of the company where hours were more consistent and coworkers vastly more cooperative. I haven't looked back since.

Employees need to know that someone is on their side. It is my firm belief that gossiping about other coworkers behind their backs is petty and doesn't breed good teamwork. Don't over-burden your manager with Small Potatoes, but don't allow yourself to be a victim of a poor working environment either. Use your judgment and stand up for yourself--more often than not you'll be voicing frustrations that the whole group shares but didn't have the courage to say.

14) Pick your battles and don't fight dirty.

Going along with #13, this bit of advice comes directly from an unfortunate experience I had this week. During a busy afternoon shift my coworkers kept disappearing right when they were needed most--behavior that some of the older coworkers said was pretty typical of those two. Smack in the middle of the chaos with dishes piling, messes being made, people asking me where things were and a line of students at the register I realized that I was completely alone. I found my delightful coworkers in the basement and had some words with them that were not exactly conducive to a nice work environment. While it might not have been the most mature approach I felt justified with my frustrations and didn't apologize for what I'd said later.

My coworkers went off the deep end. They were snarky and sarcastic for the rest of the shift, left me the most unpleasant jobs for closing and more than once I'd turn the corner to find them talking smack about me to others. It didn't surprise me that the younger of the two was acting so childish but I was shocked that the older employee, who up till then had always treated me with kindness and respect, had suddenly showed her ugly side and showed it in force. I am not naturally good with conflict or with stressful situations and at one point I got emotional and had to head to the bathroom to cry it out, which I HATED because it made me seem weak and bullies prey on weakness.

At the end of the day I talked the situation out with both my managers and came to two conclusions:
A--Even though I was justified in feeling upset about the situation, I should have communicated the problem better so that they didn't feel like I was attacking them out of the blue. I had ended up triggering a war I wasn't prepared to fight with just a few poorly chosen words, and for this I am sorry.

B--Always take the higher road. Even though these coworkers had a history of poor working choices it wasn't my place to tell them so, and I should have just gone straight to the manager and let them deal with it. Watching the maturity of these two dissolve in front of my eyes showed me exactly how quickly coworkers can turn on each other, and their insistence on fighting dirty has convinced me even more of the importance of fighting fair.

To be continued...

The Cure

Today I gave in to the demands of my body and stayed home to sleep, eat mac n cheese, listen to a lot of acoustic music and cry. A lot. Two of my favorite shows, Glee and Parenthood, set off the waterworks first and then I think I just cried for the sake of crying. The school nurse suggested I get a humidifier and drink a lot of water to flush out all the stuff in my sinuses. In the same sense I think sometimes crying can flush out all the stuff we store inside--allowing us to release things we can't release any other way.

In any case, I feel better now. And I've had a lot of time to gain some perspective and think about last night. One of the local high schools sends kids to come help with Food Bank sometimes for service hours, and last night I had the unique experience of meeting Fausto, an incredible young man who wants to grow up a little too fast. He was a real trooper--he didn't complain once in the three hours it took to pack and deliver all the food. He was positive and talked a lot, and the longer the night went on the more serious our conversations got. He told me how he can't wait to have a career and a family, how he doesn't know where he's going yet but he is excited about the future, and how he attends church every single day.

I'd never heard of someone who spent that much time in church and was surprised at how seriously he took his faith and his lifestyle. The more we talked the more I felt like he was older than me, shining with that inner light that people who spend a lot of time trusting in something other than themselves have. He was glowing.

I was blown away by Fausto--how he could be so young and so mature at the same time. I like to call myself an "old soul" but he was beyond that, listening to me talk about my struggles with faith and offering his gentle advice with all the grace of a church leader. By the end of the night I kept thinking to myself: what am I missing here? I've spent all semester stressing about all the places I fall short in and all the things that have gone wrong, and here is this kid who has as many if not more unknown trials in his life and uncertainties about the future, and yet he is so serene.

Countless times I have blogged about thinking positively or encouraged a friend to keep their chin up. That there's always a brighter tomorrow. Why is it so hard sometimes to maintain that perspective? To think outwardly and give all I have to today and the people around me? Why do I spend so much time hollowing myself out and examining all the broken parts, when I should be thinking I'm here today and I am a survivor.  I know that a lot of it is because I don't trust in something other than myself. I barely even trust myself.

The absolute truth is that I'm never going to find a cure for my depression, or for the past, or for the present. Not until I am ready to trust again. I need to acknowledge that I am strong and I have something to offer the world. I need to embrace the fact that I can't do everything alone. I need the people who love me and the people who don't. And yes, I need God. Everyone keeps saying that He never turns His back on any of us. I need to know that that's true.

I have had friends from every religion you can think of and many who don't belong to any church at all, and I have come to understand that every human being has faith in something. It takes faith to believe that the world spontaneously exploded into being, that Boddhisatvas watch over us, that prophets lived and performed miracles thousands of years ago and that prophets live now. It takes faith to get up every day and faith to keep going to that dead-end job. Trying to get a degree. Raising a family. Completing drug court. Getting chemo-therapy. Trying photography. Healing a broken heart. Moving somewhere new. Battling old age. Forgiving yourself. Finding someone who loves you as much as you love them. Holding on.

Faith is the cure. And it's about time I try to have some again.

Some People Just Won’t Like You

When I was a Freshmen in college I was assigned a first-year mentor to help me adjust to life on campus. In addition to teaching me about sororities, service hours and how to fight the flu by pouring water up your nose (this is REAL--Google Neti Pots!), my mentor told me something I will never forget. 

“There will be people here who do not like you. This is just fact. You need to be prepared for that.” 

I don’t remember when this conversation came up, but it has always stuck with me. When I heard it I was incredulous. I rolled my eyes inwardly and filed it away somewhere, confident that I was just too easy-going and too nice to not get along with everybody. How naïve we Freshmen can be. 

It can be considered a miracle that I made it eighteen years without anybody disliking me openly. Oh there were fights between friends, and one teacher who definitely had issues with me, but nobody expressed to me outright that they did not like me and never changed their mind later. 

Until college. 

I now have met and worked with students who for one reason or another could not get along with me. I’ve had coworkers who hated me and teachers who dismissed me. I’ve had people I look up to ignore me and people I love disown me. In short—I have witnessed all that human nature has to offer. And sometimes it’s not nice. 

At first, I rebelled against these situations. With my mentor’s words echoing in my head I would desperately call for a truce, asking a coworker for some middle ground or trying to figure out what the source of their dislike could be. Was it because I was quiet and compliant and therefore weak in their eyes? Was it that I worked hard and got praise from our employer or teacher and was therefore irritating? Was it because I was still learning the job at hand and seemed slower than those around me? I tried to be faster, tried to speak up more and even tried to suck more at my job; but all with no progress. They just didn’t like me. 

This issue has been hard to deal with this year because one of my housemates falls into this category. It’s not that we don’t get along—we can share a meal or catch a movie or rub shoulders in the hallway without any animosity. It’s just that we aren’t exactly “bosom friends.” We stand on neutral soil, staring each other down from our opposite ends of the house, my third housemate the ally in between. Our geography is part of the problem. Being on two opposite ends of the house is already polarizing enough without the added opposites in work ethic, values or frugality. There have been a couple of arguments over the school-year that made me feel certain we were from two different planets. 

When I asked the Switzerland (go-between) house mate whether or not our roomie hated me she said: “No…” and then added thoughtfully, “but she doesn’t particularly want a friendship with you either.” 

I could be really upset about this. I could wonder if there’s something wrong with me or walk on pins and needles when she’s around trying to find within her a friend that will last through our lifetime…but sometimes you just have to accept what is. Embrace the fact that sometimes there are people who just don’t like you. And you undoubtedly find that you just don’t like certain people either. It doesn’t mean that you have to be rude to each other, or treat each other with disrespect. And it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you. It is just another natural and unfortunate piece of the human psyche.

So if there’s a coworker, friend, family member or neighbor who irritates the hell out of you and you don’t know why; or they are irritated by you and you don’t know why—don’t worry. Be happy. There are plenty of people who will like you for who you are. Keep those ones around and let these others roll off your back. 

*Picture by Google*

Stress And All Its Friends

(This is what Shingles looks like ^ )

"You're healthy," says the doctor to me at the West Valley Medical Center this afternoon. "Well, medically speaking you're healthy. But you are still sick."

In doctor-speak he was trying to tell me that I had tested negative for Strepp so I didn't need to take any meds to get better, but because I was still sick (fever, sore throat, etc.) I needed to be careful. He gave me his number to call if things got worse and I headed home, tallying in my mind the number of times I have had to go to a medical clinic in the last year.

Seven. Seven times I went in and came out with a prescription for something semi-serious. Three cases of Strepp, one ear infection, one UTI, one Shingles (real) and one preventative-Shingles (thought it was--but it went away thank God.) This trip, unsuccessful though it was, made eight visits total.

It USED to be, as a child, I got sick maybe once a year. Every winter the flu spread like wildfire through the elementary halls and parents braced themselves for the outbreak, stocking up on chicken noodle and 7-up. After I walked across the High School stage, diploma in hand, it was like all the adult "FOR REAL" germs sprung at once from wherever they'd been hiding, poised to strike at the vulnerable young college Freshmen. Since then I have gotten infections, viruses, flus and colds every few months on the dot--usually during finals or periods of high-stress. Worried about that upcoming Political Science final? Have a head-cold! Tackling personal relationship problems? Strepp will clear those right up! Or how about, desperately seeking out a job so you can pay tuition so you can get a degree so you can go to Masters so the rest of your life will work out ok?? SHINGLES BABY!!!

P.S.--Shingles is the adult form of Chicken Pox. The virus does not leave  your body once you've had it as a child, but instead it remains dormant until a time when the body is compromised by infection, stress, or other negative factors. The rash that spreads does not itch as chicken pox does but hardens and burns, making the area feel like it is being rubbed raw with burning sandpaper. It is contagious to those who have not had chicken pox before, and is treatable with antibiotics. 


P.P.S.--Normal people don't get Shingles until they are well into their 50s or 60s. I was just special.  

My body hates me. Well I guess that's not fair. My body doesn't ask me to be a student or to have a complicated life. My body doesn't pile on the commitments and then hope I catch up later. And my body certainly doesn't care much if I land a job at McDonald's or a high-end social services center in the future. What I really need to do is break down the stressors in my life. Or at least find a way to cope with them differently than my usual insomniac, neurotic, panic-attack method. <--(not a winner!)

Another thing that will really help is when I'm finally able to work out all the inner knots and make peace with the past. You see, I'm not going to church right now. The last time I went (not counting Conference last weekend) was November of 2011. It's not that I don't like church or what I learn there...it's more like I'm not sure I belong there anymore. My crisis of faith is part of my crisis of self, trying to reconcile that person I see in the mirror with the actions I put into motion two and a half years ago.

But where do you start when you want to forgive yourself? Where do you go for comfort when those you've hurt have none? Try to do any of THAT without stressing!! Like the doctor said, outwardly, I'm healthy. But I'm still sick inside.

Fall term I tried to deal with my stress by staying busy. I kept shoving things into my schedule until I didn't have time to feel stress anymore--I didn't have time for much of anything!! Later I tried to deal with my stress by taking the total opposite approach--"chilling the f*** out" as a friend from school advised me to do. If I missed a class, it was no big deal. If I slept in, more power to me! It was fun for a while, but resulted in a major push at the end to ensure all my grades would be up to par, which was more stressful than working hard all term would have been.

What I need is  a hybrid. A way to work hard and be successful without compromising my sleep or my health. I'm no longer taking yoga classes because I can't afford them, but I'm looking for activities to replace them. Bike riding or walking regularly might be good.

This is my trial and my dragon to face. I'm not sure how to cut it up into manageable parts right now (or ever), so until that day, I'll just try to sleep more and stress less. (HAHAHA) Yeah...we'll see how that goes. 

Snapshot

What does this picture mean to you?

Or this?

What kind of emotions does it convey?

Would you want to go there?

Can you tell what she's like?

Or what trailing cows feels like?

Or taste the iron in the air when this lightning strikes?

This road is not one you've walked before-- and the view beyond is not in your memory.

...but it is in mine. And a photographer's job is to bring that memory to you.

These snapshots come from my heart and my cheap digital over the space of three summers in Ten Sleep, Wyoming on my cousin's ranch. I see them and I see fireworks. My waitressing uniform. Calves bawling. Kittens purring. I smell steaks cooking. Firewood and ash. Wet alfalfa. I feel the sage scratching. The sun burning. The fear of being caught in a lightning storm. They are part of my history but they are part of my present too.

Snapshots can represent a person too. These are some of my favorites:

 Can you tell that I'm insecure? Or that Tim is compassionate? Or Coulter thoughtful? Or Rob artistic?

A snapshot can be worth a thousand words, but they can also be misinterpreted. Ignored. Deleted. Or forgotten. Just like people. In my internship I have interviewed several faculty, students, and friends on campus and done my best to gather up a snapshot of who they are. I have a limited space of time--usually an hour--to figure out the mystery of the individual across from me. What makes up their past and present. What their passions are. Why they matter. Most of the time the best material I gather doesn't come from the questions I ask but from what they are willing to share and how well I am able to listen. After the interview is over I have this burning image of the person in front of me and I rush eagerly home to translate my scribbled notes into a snapshot--a perfect representation of that individual at that time for the rest of the world to see. It is the very hardest part of this job, because it's almost impossible to transfer what I witness in an interview to the printed page.

Today I interviewed our athletic director at the College of Idaho and I was blown away. He has been here thirty years and dedicated all of that time to the students, the coaches, the community and his family. He has MADE the College part of his family and it shows. His passion for this school and its programs is incredible, and as I sat and listened I wondered how I could fit such a big person into such a small piece. How do I fit any of my interviewees into neat paragraphs? How do I take the custodian's motherly instinct and the lives she's changed and save it to a word file? How do I capture enthusiasm? Compassion? Sacrifice? Or grief?

While I was in my writer's funk earlier this week I considered all these things and realized this is where my drive to write begins. I see the elements of a snapshot forming and I have to take my pen and capture it before it slips away. Maybe the picture will be a little out of focus, or at a different angle, but the subject should be represented in its unique entirety, if I've done my job correctly. I should be embracing this quest, not shunning it. After all, the void is where we go to discover the deepest truths.

I need to remember this.

I encourage all of you to make a snapshot of someone important to you. Dust off some paper or pull up the keyboard and write. And then keep writing. Until the person you're detailing can almost step from the page and take a bow. Sometimes we owe it to the ones we love to try.

*All pictures taken by Robyn Sanow. All rights reserved*

Shades of Mediocrity

Lately I have been in a slump. I get inspired to write in the early hours of dawn, sit down and type furiously, believing that I'm creating something beautiful. Only the next day when I re-read my handiwork all I see are typos, illogical gibberish, and arguments that don't matter as much in the daylight as they did at night. Today I spent a few hours looking at old blogs and essays from high school and I hated everything I saw. I went to flickr.com to upload some new pictures, only to find with one click hundreds of photographers around the world with talent far surpassing mine. Part of me suspects that no matter what I say here, or upload, or shout from the rooftops...it will make little impact on the world, if any at all. And I suppose that thought is sobering.

So what am I doing, anyway? Why take the pictures? Why write the words? My photography and my writing are my passions. Personal, small, and unique to me. My pictures show the world through my eyes--and maybe I'm not sure what that's worth, but if someone sees one and gains joy from it I suppose I can call that success.

My writing is something else. It's more of me than I ever really share in person. And it's less. I say things here when I need to vent. Or cry. Or celebrate. I write about people I love and people I loathe. I write to remember someone, to thank them for years of generous living and to tell them what they mean to me. I write to forget someone, to sort out all my feelings for them and leave them somewhere behind in that giant file labelled "To Make Peace With Someday." I write to make myself bigger in so many ways, and yet sometimes, like today, all I feel is smaller.

Self-doubt is a common enough theme in art, and I think Simon and Garfunkel sing it best in their song "Homeward Bound":

But all my words come back to me
In shades of mediocrity
Like emptiness in harmony
I need someone to comfort me 

Homeward bound...I wish I were homeward bound...

Wish I knew what the future held. And if these drops really accumulate to much water in the end...

Planet of the Space Heaters

Over Christmas break I finally took the plunge and said "I do" to one of the most incredible people on this earth: my husband. In the weeks surrounding the event we met with a number of mishaps including a mysterious pain in the abdomen that set him back several days at work, financial issues, the mad dash to find a dress (four days before the ceremony), difficult exams at school, incorrigible housemates who lived in filth, car troubles, family troubles, spiritual wrestlings of the heart...but for the life of me all I can remember of the entire month of December is: joy.

The stress of the days before the wedding completely dissolved in the weeks after it, and the hindsight that is love has since traded in all of the negative for the euphoria of experiencing everything anew as a newly-wed. Feeding ducks on the river. Game nights with in-laws (who were kind enough to dismiss a certain new daughter-in-law flooding the bathroom and ruining the carpet.) Pumpkin bread. Christmas giving. New Years' kisses. These are the highlights of my Christmas break. The highlights of my new life.

As I return to school the difference between that life and this are startling. I feel like I've landed smack onto a different planet, one with the cold reality of returning to a long-distance relationship.

In cooking terms to "shock" something is to halt the cooking process by suddenly dousing hot food into ice-cold water. Coming back to college was much the same. Due to some kind of oversight by one of my housemates the heating got turned off in our house in Caldwell, plunging me literally into a freezing cold new environment that almost snuffed out all the warmth of now being a "Mrs." We bought or borrowed an army of space heaters and crouched around them, trying to stay warm until the heating got turned on again yesterday. On my first day of my Psychology class the teacher informed us that statistically, 58% of us were doomed for failed relationships and divorce. Only 8% of us would ever make it to old age as in love with our partners as we were on day one of married life. Looking around the room I realized that of the forty-odd of us that meant I had a 3.2/40 chance of being in that 8%. More ice water: in the mail I got a questionairre about my college plans for next year. Where would I be living? What was my meal plan? Would I be needing student loans? With surprise I realized I didn't know the answers to these questions yet as my husband and I hadn't worked out what we could and couldn't manage on our tiny budgets.

Through all this anxiety I had to take a step back. On the day that I left for Caldwell we visited with my mother-in-law quickly before hitting the road and she reminded me of the bigger picture. As I whined and complained about leaving everything behind and once again joining the world of exams and work and limited communication with the man I love, she told me of a time period in her marriage when her husband was in the Navy and she was living alone in California with no contacts or friends. She heard from her husband sporadically over several months, sometimes going weeks without a word. She made only a few phone calls a week, usually on the weekends when it was cheaper. And she only had one day a month in which she could rent a car and see the town, running errands and tasting the freedom of vehicle-owners for those precious hours. "You, on the other hand," she looked at me pointedly, "have a cell phone and can talk to anyone anytime you want. You have friends at school. You have classes to take and things to do. You don't have to worry about a man overseas." SO STOP BEING A BOOB!!!  (The implied message and italics added.)

She was right. I know I can't afford to despair about the little things. Not when there is so much to do and so much to still be thankful for. On the refrigerator in her home there is a magnet that says "bloom where you are planted." Over the last few days I have thought of her story and that phrase many times, trying to take courage from her example and the examples of other women in my life who have had to be separated from loved ones. I'm planted here at least until graduation, so I had better make the most of it. Enjoy the challenges that this time will bring and just remember that at the end there is light and love and life.

In honor of this I decided to rename my blog and try to write and think and live more positively. I have tried an experiment like this in the past, but I didn't have as much to motivate me as I do now. I'm beyond thankful for my husband, my family (both old and new), my friends and teachers and this town that I've been planted in. May I learn to bloom!