The last couple of weeks have been so, so crazy friends. This actually happened a couple of days after the events in this post, but I'm just now getting a chance to tell y'all about it. Strap in.
Let me start at the beginning. One thing that I didn't mention in that post was that my boss, Marvin, was out of town that week. So I was handling the cookout all on my own, which was fine. We'd planned for it. At several points in the week, I did get a profound sense that oh, this must be what it feels like to have children. I about told several people to go outside and get me a switch. (For those not from the South, that means a small branch to spank with.)
I wanted to do something nice for Department B, because by that time they'd been working almost a month without a day off. They'd cycled through the local restaurant offerings, and I thought about what is easily scale-able for a bunch of people, and volunteered myself to make bacon and pancakes. I've done it for a crowd before, but never by myself. How hard could it be?
Let me start at the beginning. One thing that I didn't mention in that post was that my boss, Marvin, was out of town that week. So I was handling the cookout all on my own, which was fine. We'd planned for it. At several points in the week, I did get a profound sense that oh, this must be what it feels like to have children. I about told several people to go outside and get me a switch. (For those not from the South, that means a small branch to spank with.)
I wanted to do something nice for Department B, because by that time they'd been working almost a month without a day off. They'd cycled through the local restaurant offerings, and I thought about what is easily scale-able for a bunch of people, and volunteered myself to make bacon and pancakes. I've done it for a crowd before, but never by myself. How hard could it be?
Well. So I call up the grocery store the day before and warn them that I'm coming. I then proceed to purchase 100 lbs. of bacon. (That's 45.3 kg for my non American friends.) Its a lot. The checkout guy's face when I showed up with an entire buggy of bacon was something.
So anyway, I get everything back to work, go to dinner, and decide that I don't have enough time between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. to take a nap. I head into work at one and get started.
This is the part where you will know if you know me in real life, because I have told this part of the story to many people. Everything on the internet said you could cook a pan of bacon for 15 to 20 minutes at 400 degrees (204 C) and it would be done. Well. The oven in the breakroom doesn't work that way. I had to crank it up to 550 degrees, and it still took 45 minutes to get one pan of bacon done. That's not a lot, especially when you're feeding about 20 people a round. I also had trouble getting the griddles for the pancakes to stay on, because I kept tripping the power strip. I finally just pushed the meal back by an hour and a half, because I wanted it to be ready. I will not do that by myself again.
Anyway, at this point it's like 4 a.m. I do not have makeup on, and I have been awake for about 20 hours. One of the supervisors asked me, completely serious, if I had been out in the sun. No, sir, that's just what my face looks like. Also, I've been running around for three hours like a chicken with my head cut off.
That meal went more or less ok, as did the others that followed. After the somewhat disastrous first attempt, I took the rest of the bacon home to cook. It worked much better, even if the house did smell like bacon grease for two solid weeks.
However. I do have some complaints about the way in which these men complimented me. Did they say, "Hey Bees, this is good, thank you." Well, some of them did. But I had not one, not two, not three, but FOUR SEPARATE PEOPLE over the three meals tell me that my cooking would make me good wife material. Thank you? If they thought I was offended by this, they would be horrified, but it's offensive. Why can't they just say thank you? If I was a man, nothing would be said about my marriageability based on cooking. It would just be, hey man, this is good. Sometimes, working in a male dominated industry is terrible.
And now, what everyone really wanted to hear about. One of the supervisors (!!!) told me that if the food was any good, he'd have to hurry his divorce along so he could marry me instead. He is easily twice my age, and a very, very strange man. Not sure on what world he thought it would be ok to say that to someone, especially someone my age. I think at that point (when I had also been awake for probably 30 hours) my brain just shorted out.
No thank you. I shudder just thinking about it. No. Just no.
*Walks out of the room, then comes back wagging finger*
And another thing!
I have been proposed to over food before, but it was for my triple chocolate cupcakes, from someone roughly my age, and those deserved it. Bacon and pancake mix (from a box) most certainly did not rise to that level.
Anyway, at this point it's like 4 a.m. I do not have makeup on, and I have been awake for about 20 hours. One of the supervisors asked me, completely serious, if I had been out in the sun. No, sir, that's just what my face looks like. Also, I've been running around for three hours like a chicken with my head cut off.
That meal went more or less ok, as did the others that followed. After the somewhat disastrous first attempt, I took the rest of the bacon home to cook. It worked much better, even if the house did smell like bacon grease for two solid weeks.
However. I do have some complaints about the way in which these men complimented me. Did they say, "Hey Bees, this is good, thank you." Well, some of them did. But I had not one, not two, not three, but FOUR SEPARATE PEOPLE over the three meals tell me that my cooking would make me good wife material. Thank you? If they thought I was offended by this, they would be horrified, but it's offensive. Why can't they just say thank you? If I was a man, nothing would be said about my marriageability based on cooking. It would just be, hey man, this is good. Sometimes, working in a male dominated industry is terrible.
And now, what everyone really wanted to hear about. One of the supervisors (!!!) told me that if the food was any good, he'd have to hurry his divorce along so he could marry me instead. He is easily twice my age, and a very, very strange man. Not sure on what world he thought it would be ok to say that to someone, especially someone my age. I think at that point (when I had also been awake for probably 30 hours) my brain just shorted out.
No thank you. I shudder just thinking about it. No. Just no.
*Walks out of the room, then comes back wagging finger*
And another thing!
I have been proposed to over food before, but it was for my triple chocolate cupcakes, from someone roughly my age, and those deserved it. Bacon and pancake mix (from a box) most certainly did not rise to that level.
We had a supervisor (who just retired) that would "propose" to anyone who made any kind of food that he liked. If he hadn't been such a terrible person, it might have been an amusing quirk, but instead he was a raging a-hole to anyone who didn't suck up to him.
ReplyDeleteI wonder who that 20 minutes at 400 degrees works for - I tried it recently. It was more like 40 minutes.