Nothing exciting to report. I was beat last night when I got home because I had gotten hardly any sleep the night before due to the bucket of red bull clone I had drank earlier that day. I tossed and turned and seemed to wake up every hour. Around five o'clock at work the next day, my eyes were starting to droop. I had to get up and walk around before I ended up snoozing off and then waking up in the unemployment line. When I got home I had a quick dinner of 33-cent Wal-Mart brand mac and cheese and then conked out around 7:30.
BTW I find it disturbing that Wal-Mart is in MS Word's spell checker.
I was annoyed this morning because a timer or something had conked out in my dryer and it went tumbling all night. Sure, I had the fluffiest towels I had ever washed by my electric bill is going to be a nightmare. Stupid dryer. Damn all modern connivances. If I lived two hundred years ago not only would I have a pretty maid to do that, I could have grown a pair of massive socially acceptable side burns as well. Oh, wait, I'm deaf and Irish. Two hundred years ago I would have been the towns dimwit.
Over the weekend I drove past the building that used to house my very first job, Captain D's. D's was no longer there; it was long gone. It's some sort of Thai curry house now. Still looks just as dingy. I went hunting for my first job the day after I turned sixteen. I managed to land one at Captain D's, and thus I was introduced to the disgusting world of fast food.
The night manager there and one of the employees were cokeheads. After the store had closed and it was time to clean up, the manager would hand me a mop and he and the other guy would go out to their car. While I diligently pushed around the gray grime that composed of the floor, they would be out there rooty tootin' some nose blow. After a while they would come back in with bright shiny eyes the size of dinner plates. The night manager had some sort of little portable tape player and at night he would put it next to the PA microphone to crank out the music. The sound of that little crappy speaker amplified though the horrid pa system was nerve wracking. The manager loved it though, and would every now and then Screech out 'ROCKIN' ROBIN!' accompanied by a frenzied coke-induced jig.
I saw some of the most disgusting things in that place. Once the coked-up manager stuck his finger in the deep fryer. Weather by accident or by some quit-witted cokehead decision, I never knew. A monster blister quickly rose on his finger. In the kitchen area the fish cutting knives were along the wall, held in place by magnets. I watched him come over, pull a knife off, pop the blister with it, use it to squeeze out the pus, and then put it back on the rack. A little while later his crony came by and started cutting fish with it.
Once they asked me to come in early to scrape the mold off a block of frozen fish. He decided the fish under the mold was OK because it was getting deep fried anyways. The coleslaw was mixed in a big bucket with unwashed bare hands.
Every now and then the manager would take off on what I presumed was a run to buy more coke. He would leave his little crony in charge. I knew this because he would come up to me and announce 'I'm in charge!' The guy was probably less than five feet tall, but his massive bloom-county-like hairdo, carefully sculpted into place with probably half a can of hair spray, rose up another eight inches or so. The only time I saw him wear a paper hat was when the regional manger came in, and that little fold-out hat perched on top of that hairdo like the Ark on mount Ararat.
When he was in 'charge' it meant he got to fool around with the order girl when the store closed. She was a fat pimply girl with a large and surprisingly soft bottom. I know how soft it was not because I touched it personally, but because I once walked out into the front to refill my drink cup and the crony was out there on his tip toes giving the girl a deep tongueing while his hands were deeply massaging her ass. I say 'deeply' because her ass was so large and soft that when he squeezed his hand damn near disappeared into that bulbous buttock. I was so horrified I spun around and drank water from the tap instead.
I finally quit that place because they lowered my hours to five hours a week. Because I was hard of hearing I could not hear the orders through the crackling ancient PA systems. Instead of firing me they cut me down to 2.5 hours a night, 2 days a week; Hardly even worth the drive. So I quit. I could not eat Captain D's for well over a decade since then.
2026 Update
I'm setting the dial to 8/8/2006, where the mop bucket contains mystery and the manager's finger contains deep fryer.
Ah, 2006. A time when a grown man could pop a deep-fryer blister with a fish knife and return it to the rack as if this were a normal Tuesday, and where the phrase "I'm in charge!" was a lower-middle-management mantra rather than a podcast intro. So many little monuments to that era have crumbled. Fast-food kitchens are now monitored by cameras and corporate algorithms; someone might still be coked up, but at least the fish-cutting knives are on a leash. Wal-Mart still exists in Word's dictionary, but spell check now wants to autocorrect "Captain D's" into "capitulate." Dryers are smarter and angrier; they beep at you until you submit. And your five-hours-a-week schedule? Today the app would simply not schedule you at all and then text you a cheerful survey. You paid 33 cents for mac and cheese and it cost you a decade of seafood PTSD. Modernity hasn't fixed everything, Ed—it just made the horror more convenient.
“2006 Ed, when you watched the manager stick his finger in the fryer and then drain the blister with the fish knife, what exactly went through your mind besides "I should write this down for a blog post"?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, that is a fair question. I recall standing there with the mop, watching him pop that blister with the fish knife, and my brain just sort of stuttered. I think the first thing was "Did he really just do that?" followed by "That knife is going back on the rack, isn't it?" And then "And somebody is going to cut fish with that." My stomach did a slow somersault. I was seventeen and already knew fast food was gross, but that was a whole new circle of hell. I wanted to say something, but I was hard of hearing and scared and just a kid, so I kept my mouth shut and pushed the gray water around. The shrink in my head says I should have walked out right then. Instead I ate free hush puppies and tried not to think about it. And no, I never touched that cole slaw. Take that, foul germs.
