Fundy U: BJU edition

[mounty]

(01-21-2011 04:41 PM)JordanMaria Wrote:  Once in a while, some D-bad would get smart and stick his glass right in the middle of the mac & cheese so it was like glued to the tray. That would really slow the line down because we'd have to stop, pull the glass off then scrape out the M&C. Ick.

Yeah, I remember hearing the screams. I worked as a cook for one year before getting the heck out of Dodge - life at the M&G was ever so much better. Though I gotta say, of all the jobs at the Dining Common, I think Cook was the best. We made all the messes and Potwash had to clean up after us. And who can forget "Hard-Boiled Egg Baseball" on Saturday afternoons? (Man, did we get it for that one!) Shredding those 5-pound blocks of cheese was great, too, because every 10 minutes we'd have to stop to clean the blades off, which meant dense little rolls of Land-o-Lakes Cheddar were forever being handed out. Then there were meatball days and the endless "better test this to make sure everything's cooked" trips to the ovens.

Probably the funniest story was one weekday afternoon, me and another cook were just chilling, waiting for the soup to cook or something, when one of the girls in the Salad prep area let out this blood-curdling scream. We both ran over to where she was pointing to where the corner of the walls met the ceiling (and it's a high ceiling) where a "palmetto bug" (ie. a Dolph Lundgren-sized cockroach that flies, ie. the demon-spawn of Satan) was chilling. I always carried rubber bands, bracelet-style, while I was in the kitchen (and yet bracelets themselves are wrong?) so I loaded one up, took aim, and zapped it off the ceiling. The other guy timed his jump, leaped into the air and landed hard on the hell-creature a split second after it hit the ground. Yeah, we were totally heroes that afternoon.

There were downsides. I still won't touch pork chops from anywhere. (Look at the schedule, and if you're on for that day, you trim your fingernails down to the edge of the whites, and once it's done you scrub vigorously for half an hour.) No cook ever lasted a semester without getting burned by those stupid, drippy valves on the steam pots leaking near-boiling water onto your sneakers, and of course you don't know it until your entire foot is burning. I've still got scars on the underside of my forearms from reaching into the ovens to get trays out.

But all things considered, it was a pretty cool job, and Mr. B was a great guy to work for.