Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Yet who would have thought the old man [woman] to
have had so much blood [snot] in him [her]?

Macbeth has great flow - it is hard to resist.

I used to work as a kitchen-hand in a low end restaurant.  It overlooked the fairways of a golf course - the very same golfcourse where my brother went wading the lakes at 2am when he was 9. He was looking for lost balls to sell to golfers.  My other brother and I sat on the bank watching the fog swirl and listening to the sound of the asthma attack from the daft, financially-focussed one. 

The restaurant specialised in reasonably priced group bookings - club dinners, weddings, etc. Not that the weddings were particularly cheap, but it was in the low (and I mean low) end of the wedding market.  Schnitzel night (size of A4 paper, texture of crunchy leather) was pretty popular.

The kitchen was tiny.  The only advantage was that it was split in two with a back galley kitchen. After graduating from the dishes and pots I used to prep veg and serve the desserts in the back.

Times were tough in the economy and the conditions were ratshit and illegal.  If you worked from 5pm til 1am you got hungry.  The boss was a maniac.  He would sack staff if he caught them eating food.  Frankly, I thought you would have to be mad to eat the food from this place so I had a plan.  Every shift I opened a new punnet of strawberries and ate the lot.  Luckily the bench in the back kitchen faced a wall and I would swallow the current strawberry as the cheap, sneaky dickhead crept up to catch me.

Ah, snowy bits

 It was always an interesting place to work:
  • what could be killing the mice found with their little feet in the air under the benches
  • how many days does it take for your hands to return from orange if you peel 40kg of carrots in one go
  • was it possible to buy cheaper, heavier plates because the staff hernia count was not quite at 100%?
Eventually the end was nigh.  The butcher went to cash on delivery, the veg got bendier and the wine even nastier.  I made sure I collected my wages el prompto.  During this period the whole place burnt down one night.  I know, I was as unshocked as you are now.

If I was being charitable I would say that with all that fat on the kitchen walls the place was a tinderbox.  And to think that for a period, the world had built a better mouse trap.


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