"No, bacon isn't meat!"
Okay, now, I have been in mid-argument and realized I was wrong and perhaps taken great measures to defend my position. If you haven't, you're probably a 40 year old virgin living in your mother's basement content to play video games until the next comicon rolls into town. But, I've never said that the sky wasn't blue, water wasn't wet, sex wasn't better with a partner, or defied anything that the rest of the world banks on because it is fucking factual.
To make matters worse, this sentence, this vehement proclimation of grand stupidity, was screeched by the manager of the kitchen that currently slices a piece of my soul away each and every day. Usually, when it comes to matters of not knowing what menu item is which, you can count on the servers to royally bugger it up... maybe the new cook, from time to time... a front of the house manager with huge aspirations of coming back and displaying their 'big girl pants' can gum the works too... But, one can generally rely on the kitchen personnel to be able to identify which item belongs to which food group.
The problem? An ego the size of the Goodyear blimp combined with an undiagnosed eating disorder and no one policing the police. Welcome to the food service industry, y'all!
My 'boss' (and we'll get back to why that is in quotations shortly in this daitribe, I assure you) is a formerly morbidly obese individual that adheres to a diet that makes no sense to anyone with half a brain, makes her miserable, and causes her to lash out at anyone in sight. She is so obsessed with food, that it is all she talks about. Each day, we are treated to stories of what food she couldn't eat that was being served wherever she went after work. Just today, she showed us pictures of cake she couldn't eat on her phone. She suffers from all the classic symptoms of someone with Bulimia Nervosa.
She also isn't much of a manager. And here we fill in those quotes. When I needed to leave the mental health field, I fell back on the one thing I was good at, restaurant management. I've been in and out of the food service industry in some capacity since I joined the work force. I've managed for everything from Mom and Pop shops to franchises to multi-million dollar corporations. In other words, I know my ass from a hole in the ground. I was with my current company for two weeks as a manger before I declined the position as guy at the bottom of the barrel in a huge pissing contest and took a much less stressful position in the kitchen. I realized very quickly that I would be the guy pointing out the elephant in the room to a group of women that were so enraptured by their own self-images they couldn't see beyond their noses, and I didn't need the stress.
My 'boss' has been with the company since it was damn near founded. She is in her position due to her loyalty and through her means of manipulating everything around her to make her seem indispensable. As far as the owner of the establishment is concerned, if this woman ever quit, the building would burn to the ground, the world would cease to turn on it's axis and whole galaxies would be sucked into a black hole that would bring Romulan mining ships from the future to destroy what was left of earth.
Can't feed your face? Be sure to feed your ego.
I have a fairly high opinion of myself. I do. I feel I'm generally smarter than the people I interact with on a regular basis, that my opinion should carry more weight, and that people should metaphorically bow to my superiority. But, my ego only extends so far. I'm able to admit when I'm wrong.
For example, when a waitress puts in an order for a Bacon Cheeseburger with meat and cheese only, and I don't think to add the bacon... I might not begin a 5 minute long argument over whether bacon was a meat or a garnishment. I'd probably chuckle, admit I fucked up and fix the problem. Particularly if I were running the show.
How big is your need to be right, that you can state "Bacon is not a meat", and actually believe it, just to... be right?!?
Not only is your statement idiotic, it borders on blasphemy. Bacon is the food of the Gods. It is seconded only to cheese, which should have it's own food group. In a perfect world, we would have bacon flavored beer, gum, and edible panties. I would (and actually have) eat bacon for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If given the choice between a BLT and oral sex, I would promise to not drop the crumbs in your hair. Bacon isn't just meat, its the meat doctors warn you about. Bacon is the cigarette of the meat world. It should come with a disclaimer: Hey, I'll clog your arteries and kill you with my fatty meaty goodness, but you'll crave me unto death, regardless!
I'd probably be able to take it all in stride, if this weren't the same woman who I had the following argument with (same day):
When our chef, I grant him that title because the man is good at what he does, asked me for help in creating a fish taco, my first response was; "Do we have cilantro?" I thought this was an innocent question, in fact, I was way off base.
Enter the bacon-hater. "No! We don't have cilantro. I don't like it."
"Okaaaaaay. But, we're talking about a mexican style feature, and cilantro is a pretty prevelant mexican spice."
"I don't care. It stinks. I can't stand the smell. We'll never have cilantro in this kitchen."
Awesome. Welcome to *name of restaurant excluded due to serious fear of lawsuit*, home of the un-fucking-spiced fish taco.
Oh, yeah, somewhere in my diatribe, I forgot to mention that our kitchen manager can't cook, huh? She can't. God forbid she have to saute something. God forbid the spice goes beyond oregano or parsley. This old bitch has been in the business of making people's food for 40 odd years and didn't know what a shallot was until our chef suggested we use them. How can you not cook and manage a kitchen? A-fucking-mazing.
What do I know about mexican style cooking? Damn little. But, I do know that traditionally, your sauce is spicy and you garnish with tomatoes and sour cream to counter this. I tried in vain to explain this to both the general manager and the bacon-hater. Our chef rolled his eyes and gave me a smirk that told me all I needed to know. I was wasting my breath. And oxygen is precious, Al Gore says so.
This whole blog, this rant of all rants, reminds me of something I once heard and firmly believe; You should love what you do for a living, but never do what you love for a living.
Moving onward...
The most intelligent thing I heard today?
In describing yesterday's blog to the aforementioned chef, and my concern that I might have seemed insensitive suggesting that welfare recipients be required to have inuetero birth control devices implanted, he responded with: Some people think, and I agree, that people on welfare should not be allowed to vote.
I gave this a lot of consideration.
Convicts don't have the right to vote. Are we talking about ripping the rights away from free individuals, the same as we're talking about stripping those rights away from convicted prisoners? We're not.
Bald reality; if you are on welfare, why would you ever vote for anyone but the current party? Why would you ever vote for a canidate that mentioned welfare reform? Answer? You wouldn't. Because you've already accepted a bribe.
How can we expect anyone that is garnering free money from the government to vote impartially? We can't. Welfare recipients probably hold a stronger political opinion than your average man on the street, simply because their paycheck is dependant upon it.
I probably sound like I'm down on assistance programs at this point. I'm not. My mother found herself divorced with two of her four children as minors. Between her, myself, and my brother, we worked about six jobs to put food on the table. I wish she had qualified for some type of aid.
I guess my problem is; because my mother was honest about the income my brother and I were bringing into her home to support our sisters, she couldn't get it. But, thats the catch. My mother was honest. Welfare is such an easy system to abuse. There is little to no regulation or follow-through. Once you've pursed your lips on the government's tit, the milk flows in a never ending supply.
It saddens me that there are people that genuienly need assistance, and can't get it because there are people that are already taking that money, have it locked in, and no one is policing the situation.
As a side note: blogger gives you the ability to review your readership, see your traffic and where it is coming from. I'm happy to report that 4 days in, there are 6 sites reccomending this as a blog worth reading and linking readers here. I'd insert a smilie, but I reserve those for texting with my girlfriend, for fear I'll get kicked out of the John Wayne Club...
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