Foodservice experiences

[ExomatrixTV]

• The PFAS Cover-Up ... 2 Dutch-English Special 2023 Reports

[shaberon]

Seems unfortunate that before we get nano-particled, we have already cooked our way to the point where the average person is 16% teflon.


So far, I have not seen a commercial kitchen use that weird stuff. Remember, your house is an experimental site to mix polyester carpet fibers, rare earths, unbreathable gases, bursts of electro-magnetism, and other questionable habits.

Commercial is better because we are pretty much plain steel and bleach. That's what I call "a vaccine".

I did not get to speak about all of my safety tips, just a few, and dropped that job. I have done almost nothing for a week, because one of the main problems with cramming me into a corner, was that it absolutely demolished my legs and back, in a way that I have not normally felt that horrible, ever. After a week or so, the knots loosened out, so I suppose I am ready to look for something else.

The economic prospects around here are next to nothing.

With the military as next-door-neighbor, we found their dietary habits include eating the next neighbor's dog.

Sheesh. I know there are at least two acorns in that vast tract of land. No shortage of deer either. Where do they go when they are not walking around? Maybe they really do sleep at the North Pole.

[shaberon]

I found out something obnoxious the hard way.

So the unemployment claim I made was a little rare and unusual, but aside from that, let's say you have a valid claim for whatever reason.

I can earn the reward, but I can't actually apply for the dang stuff.

DES has tacked on a federal identity verification, which only works with a smartphone.

I tried going into the local office to verify myself, and they won't do anything. I cannot personally stand there with an ID and verify that it is me. You have ceased to exist, except electronically.

I fiddled with that procedure and got halfway into it, selecting "I don't have a smartphone", and after I uploaded pictures of my ID, it then tells you that you have to have a 15-minute video chat.

???

This is non-productive. It means we have to have a data center with employees, which costs millions, whereas losses due to identity almost certainly do not approach that. The vast majority of fraud consists of information that is inside the claim, not the person claiming it--things that take in-depth investigation.

The only way I can do it, would be again to borrow someone's phone, which may not even work because we are so far out that the phones usually don't get their carrier service. So I don't know, and the verification system is nowhere near explanatory enough to let you know what to expect. All you can do is click on the next step and see what happens.

Secondarily, unlike some countries, DES does absolutely nothing to help you with job placement. The closest is that, say, for example, you had an HVAC license that went obsolete in 1952, they would help you in to remedial lessons to make you employable at this time.

I have no idea why it might take more than about a minute for someone--or some facial recognition software--to decide if you look like the person on your ID, or, why a corresponding photo of yourself is inadequate.

Whoever came up with this, I would rather smash their hands with a hammer, so there is no danger of them ever working again.


It may be more of the "feel safe" stuff like I just went through on all the discussions with the employer (useless). You know what, you should actually feel that life is really dangerous. Making it through a typical work day in one piece is itself an accomplishment. Most of the danger is in driving there, but everything is dangerous. That is what you should feel, so that your actual responses are tangible ways to prevent injury, not psychological manipulation of your feelings while pretending that ordinary risks are not present. Sounds "politically correct".

Incidentally, I had to invoke the Labor Dept. again and help them figure out that the original complaint I filed--in May--has also been buried without being addressed, because I guess it got swamped in talk and other details.

You cannot work at a fast pace in some kind of confined space with a bunch of people constantly interfering, this should be obvious. Especially when these people have no clue about how to work, which makes them dangerous, which turned into the straw that broke the camel's back so I quit.

Now I get to jump through hoops because of the "potential" of identity theft, because on the private side I don't want a smart phone. Sheesh. What a wad. Oppressive and next to useless, for the pittance they might decide to offer you. No wonder that during my life I have been introduced to the new terms "tent city" and "homeless family", and even though I'm not the one doing anything wrong, I have come close to that point more than once now.

[shaberon]

I moved back to retail.


This of course was after waiting for all signs of Covid madness to vanish. So, on a personal level, I guess I am one of the fortunate few to be able to say that it never affected me, is like a rumor.

I prowled around and picked a place because I could sense that the patronage was more reasonable and level-headed than I usually see. This turned out to be a good guess. And so after all this masking, our stupid wars, and the regular drudgery of every day life, this part is like a sigh of relief:


Thank you general public!


This is among the first times I have ever experienced that no human egos are raising themselves above me. Everyone has been super easy to deal with, and this makes a big difference, especially to someone who does not know what it is like to function without having to press through multiple conflicts. This part is good and reassures me that, even in America, there are those with whom it is alright to share a planet.

On the other side I found a few weird things.

I have never seen "locked access to a dumpster". What this means is that there is one time a day that you can take out the trash, a bit like guiding a herd of cattle. It happens to be in the middle of the afternoon. What this means is that we collect garbage overnight in open cans that just sit there. I cannot imagine what would consist of a better bacteria breeding pit. I have never seen anything where throwing out the trash at night was not standard. This is not impressive.

Parts of the health code are arbitrary, you know, humanity made it millions of years without sanitizer being applied to surfaces. And this has practically nothing to do with the outbreaks of any disease. Meat and cheese sitting around in warm air do. That is what we have, minus the few minutes that the garbage cans are emptied. So this seems a bit backwards. Actually, the routines are all backwards, compared to what I have already experienced, in places that are more than twice as busy.

The worst one is out of our hands, I was told that the laundry was taken once every two weeks.

I found that out immediately when standing there saying what is this rotten stench.

Garbage may not actually decompose in a few hours, but, folks, soiled rags are the same thing, and again I have never seen anything where you don't at least pull the bag at the end of the night and put it somewhere else. Not let it stand around in your food prep area. No one picks up laundry every day, but you use a hamper in some access point that is not right where you are working.

That stuff is sketchy, but, if, physically, there is nothing I can do about it, then I, personally, cannot make any difference. It's not like six or eight minor health code violations that I can simply see because I know how it works. Those are like special collections by design. Kind of surprising. But this is an add-on department, an imitation started maybe about ten years ago as a venture towards "competition", not something established by experience of "this is what we do". And so it is a little awkward, not quite in the big leagues yet, and just does its own thing. What is that primarily?

Purdue. Purdue. Purdue.

The kind of stuff I do is incidental or off to the side, and there are so many ways to Purdue that I have not been able to wrap my brain around it yet. But that is where we still are as a society.

Most of all that is strictly average, but, psychologically, I am not at all used to being treated halfway decently, many thanks to the neighborhood for acting like normal people!

[shaberon]

Getting back to this. What occurred today is I removed multiple unopened cases of guacamole. Product that never saw a shelf. I was told it was around six hundred units.

The thing I have kept in mind was a couple months ago. I was told to make two orders. I made one and then was sent on break.

I was told to make two packs of something, and then on each one I was told to overproduce by a dozen units. So I've thrown in twenty-four more pieces than the order calls for and then it turns out it was not due for four days. So that was almost completely useless.

Then someone else made the next order which was at least eight whole birds and the customer refused it.

The amount of poorly-planned waste in the industry is indeed staggering.

Poor quality of communication often has something to do with it, and some of the physical errors are a little embarrassing. The business model itself is make-believe. It's like wandering a fantasy castle made of edible goods, most of which are not being eaten. A bit like Willy Wonka except far less entertaining.

[shaberon]

Strange day. This is not what I was told:

Boar’s Head Provisions Co. recalled liverwurst because it may be tainted with the listeria bacteria, the U.S. Agriculture Department said. The agency said a sample of Boar’s Head liverwurst from a Maryland store tested positive for listeria.

Boar’s Head Provisions is also recalling deli-sliced meats made the same day on the same line as the contaminated liverwurst at a Virginia plant, the USDA said. The sample was from an unopened package, collected by health officials as part of an investigation into the listeria outbreak.

The recall is affecting North Carolina-based grocery chain Harris Teeter. The chain has closed their in-store Fresh Foods Markets temporarily and voluntarily out of an abundance of caution for the recall.

The Boar's Head recall of over 200,000 pounds shipped nationwide applies to meats sliced at a deli counter, not prepackaged meats. It includes a number of multi-pound packages stamped with an Aug. 10 sell-by date, including bologna, garlic bologna, beef bologna, beef salami, Italian Cappy-style ham and Extra Hot Italian Cappy-style ham. Also included is Steakhouse Roasted Bacon Heat and Eat, with a sell-by date of Aug. 15.

Vegetables, herbs sold at Walmart, Aldi, Kroger recalled due to Listeria concerns...

I was actually told about Plague, which, as far as I can tell, is one case in Colorado.

Listeria may set in within a few days, and then may take one or more weeks to boost its symptoms, which will likely begin as a nauseous reaction but then it can lead to fever, and hospitalization may be required. Two people have died. The outbreak has been observed in New Jersey and Illinois. How that leads to looking inside unopened packages in Maryland is beyond me. Typical fatality rate is about 1/8, 260 out of a baseline 1,600 cases per year.

What I actually did in response to this made no sense at the time. My immediate belief was that there must be a recall--obviously so.

What you should know is that bacteria that live in sealed plastic packages are usually far more dangerous than stuff rolling loose in the environment. They're mostly anaerobes. That's what nitrates are for, so, e. g. pastrami is unlikely to be affected this way. People used to think these nitrate salts are bad for you, and what happens is they are a natural fact in, for example, celery juice. This is 10x concentrated compared to salt form, so, this was used in order to slap "nitrate free" on the label.

Now it says something like "except for that naturally occurring in celery juice".

If we weren't using this, Listeria would be everywhere, along with worse things I don't want to think of the names of.

Now the pre-packaged stuff costs around 50% more than fresh, which means hardly anyone ever buys it, and those products have been sitting on the shelf for months. So it is mostly "pre-outbreak". Otherwise the packaging itself would be essentially meaningless to anaerobes.

These germs have been riding around the country for at least two weeks. Are we saying that 200,000 pounds made in the same day is definitely the container? I doubt it turns out to be that simple.

[shaberon]

Round two was even more mind numbing.

They issued another recall and didn't tell me what.

Let's see...people died in two different states, so, they opened a package in a third state, "blamed someone" i. e. presumably a worker for skipping a safety step, and recalled everything from that time and place. That obviously must not have been the full explanation.

Apparently what happens, in addition to pulling whatever the product was off the shelf, they offer a refund on "similar" products even if those have not been found to test positive or were not from the same specific source. And so last night, someone dumped a pile of these returns into our service area.

Folks, you can't do that. I absolutely *can't* have that stuff under normal circumstances, let alone during an outbreak. Now there is no way I can say I didn't collect a pile of streptococcus, botulism, Hep C, and things I don't want to name because I have already waived my rights for survival. You can't send anything from the outside back into where food is handled.

The keyholder manager person had no idea that the packaged germs are *far* worse than typical food poisoning or other spoilage effects, or most open disease transmission. That's a simple fact, if it is already in the food, it is far worse than something "mishandled" or left open or whatever. You can eat most blue and white molds and be fine.

So we sling a bunch of food that is theoretically infected with something fatal, and, you think they incinerate that or something? Nope. Garbage. By "they", I mean me personally. That means it is 90+ degrees already, and while I am baking in the sun in the parking lot, I am flipping I don't know how many hundred pounds of stuff into the dumpster. One of the trash bags just rips. It's too heavy to even pick up the stuff. And then we pay the trash man extra for this.

So I gush out all this sweat, and, I can sense myself dehydrate in a matter of minutes, because I'm not usually prepared for strenuous activity to that extent. I manage to grab a bottle of water as I'm going back in, and then, I get so busy that I couldn't open it for an hour.

Felt a little dry.

It is a little weird that "someone" decides they should return unrelated items, and yet, standing around in what you think might become a heated debate or something, not a single word is said. Nobody, nothing like "Hey, have you heard...", or, "Why are you open?", it just keeps rolling along as usual.

Abnormally so. I'm used to it. You show up and grind frantically until it's over. I didn't know there was any question about it.

Some people have techniques to dodge it.

Having been at the same place about a year, in the early part, one morning I start training this guy. Then our hours were slashed. I kind of objected, saying, am I training my replacement? That doesn't make sense, why would you cut my hours to train someone new?

It worked itself out for a while, and, this is the person who's unusually slow, and I would say a bit distracted and prone to do things other than work, such as talk. It doesn't matter how busy I am, I can see out of the corner of my eye if someone is standing around talking, or trying to occupy themselves with some trivial or irrelevant task. I watched this go on long enough that already, months ago, I blew my stack at the same previously-mentioned keyholding manager to terminate this person. They, of course, "will talk" about it.

So, a few months down the road, it turns out this hours-cutting thing is a predictable way for this company to end the fiscal year, like two months of it. All my hard work is fit to cast me into the sub-poverty level, then I'm told that re-instatement "will be performance-based", and then I'm told the slow person got a 43 on a secret shopper.

So, now, of course I would like to replace the person with myself, as I said. Instead, we hired an additional person.

Sounds like it's time to look around. That is reliably unreliable.

Those people would not make it through a shift at a normal establishment.

It's the wilderness. It's like being removed from civilization. I 100% know everything around me because I already know, and, it is not that difficult. And by 100%, it means I see something wrong with basically everything, constantly. Amazing. It's like watching people drive down the wrong side of the road. But then you can't communicate, you can't really say anything...you can but it doesn't go anywhere, because it will actually be dismissed.

I mean, literally. The things I have been told recently just by trying to pry into those noggins in a gentle, almost childish way, have gotten me exactly what I don't want to hear every time.

I have anything from a union to the regulatory agencies to back me up; I understand labor law. I could have told them the difference when I was a teenager, but, I have never actually experienced it until getting stuck in this area. This is the third place in a row where something was obviously wrong from day one.

[shaberon]

I got to the bottom of this. Not me, and, not really, but, I am going to try to re-gather from going around in dazed circles, underwhelmed by the dysfunctional American workforce.


Now, again, in case most people are not familiar with "the system", what happens is that big companies hire a third-party auditor to issue recommendations about what they need to maintain a good health rating. Even Walmart does this. It's typical. Never heard of it being an issue. Ours is an issue.

I looked at the latest report.

It told us that "potentially critical" was bowls/spoons/etc. being left turned up; anything is supposed to be inverted. I thought everyone knows that. They get this bad mark, and, I turn to my right, and, within arm's reach are stacks of bowls face up, with some food particles in there. That's never supposed to happen. Is it a public health risk? Not at the "critical" level. But someone isn't getting the message.

The report said it was "minor" about garbage rolling all over the place.

Well, a real "critical" issue is anything like piles of garbage, rotten food, insect infestation, attraction of wild animals, things that anyone can look and see, well, that is an ideal bacterial breeding ground.

These audits are a phenomenal source of stress, causing rapid mental deterioration into a cacophony. Those people cannot understand the first thing I said. I don't care about "auditors" (inspectors, owners, or anyone else like that) because I know what I am doing and I am confident it will be fine, and, if need be, something can be adjusted. If something is not right, the truth is, those people are going to be absolutely useless to fix it. They can't do anything. In order for them to exist, we have to find a way for them to talk, and file reports. Every actual worker requires about six of these non-productive backup assistants.

I don't currently know anyone who's qualified as a "worker", I know people who are employed.

From what I have heard, it is the same with respect to this summer's outbreak.

The production facility was running with sixty-six uncorrected violations.

It was contaminated with Listeria.

There's the value of audits, and so forth, it doesn't really matter since foodborne illness is going to come from the manufacturer in a sealed package, which can kill you. Nothing will be done about this, unless someone gets caught.

I have never heard of a food poisoning, etc., coming from anywhere I have been.

I then saw a piece of mail explaining how the company was investing $684,000 into re-building its image by sampling. I already know the people I work with can't accomplish that. The samples were made, and, in a couple of days, trashed.

There is an exorbitant amount of waste built into the food industry, because we are so avid about the expiration dating system that people have difficulty operating. For example, in the wake of this outbreak, I found someone started marking fresh products with price tags, which means it says all of those products are already expired, because that kind of price tag is valid for that moment only.

I'll say this again. I can sell you something that says it expired June 25, 2021, that is not an issue. The date is only indicating "peak freshness". It means something like the dye that is in the salmon is going to slip and fade slightly. It is not compelling and cannot possibly have anything to do with safety.

A merchant is liable for actual issues. The reason is irrelevant. If it came in a bag from a manufacturer, the blame can be passed. Otherwise you are stuck with full responsibility for anything that happens. If I come in to work on Listeria, I can be prosecuted just for that. No type of dates are going to waive any liability if the public is harmed.

[AutumnW]

Posted by shaberon (here)
This is a piece of equipment:








If I have the brand right, this has nothing less than rosewood handles. Rosewood! Sounds important, doesn't it? I think it may be. You save so much by switching to those comfortable plastic handles. But we have this large cheese knife, I think, for cutting dough. It may also be used for cheese, but I cannot confirm this.

Today I just want to make a note that I received this, in hand, at the bottom of the sink at the beginning of a shift. In other words, somebody stuffed it in there and walked away. But not before adding a couple of half sheet pans. Now if you scroll back up to that picture of the sink, it should be obvious that the compartment is a bit narrow. Here is what happens when you drop half sheet pans in it: they get stuck.

Combine these items and you get a giant razor that is locked into place.

Never mind that the whole thing should have been empty if no one was working there. To change shifts, you drain and clean, and then no one can exactly "put a knife in the sink".

I can't count how many times that has been screamed at the back of my head when I was never about to do it. At this employer, this is no longer a first, it makes the second knife I have grabbed by the blade which was not just "in there", but immobilized by everything on top of it. Touchy reflexes kept me from getting hurt on those.

So far these are also "no longer firsts":


Multiple fires. Don't think I've ever had this come up.

Multiple entire glass racks dropped. Never heard of this.



And I "found" something outside, in the dark. It is a pallet which has been placed adjacent to the laundry hamper. The only laundry I handle is about sixty pounds of soiled rags. That is because instead of anyone taking some out during the day, they just pile up until it becomes apparent that I will be working with people who cannot put rags in a bag. With grime like that, it should be obvious that it needs to be trotted away relatively soon, not walked on for hours. If I wanted to guess at the least sanitary item possible, it would be a damp rag with mixed proteins such as meat and cheese smeared on it. Bear in mind that almost all we have to sell is meat and cheese. This is probably the lowest rated type of cleaning on the scale of things.

The other kind of mixing you want to avoid is that such as the drain fly moving from mold to uncleaned oily crumbs to water with layers of vegetables and fat, and so on. Same thing that makes roaches a problem. The roach itself is not infectious, but insect bodies repeatedly contact any bacterial and fungal sources that are around, and introduce them where they are not.

I found the pallet while disposing of the great bundle of rags by tripping on it, and again touchy reflexes got me through without incident.

On the other hand I am paid better than some trained hospital techs and I don't want to work in a hospital.

I don't even go anywhere around here, so it is hard to imagine working at all.

I wonder if I can find anyone who will agree with me. Maybe that is the thing to do. The applicant interviews the place, to see if you would work there. I suppose I've never "changed" jobs by choice. Well, that's not true. Once. I think. That seems right. But if I do anything, it will be more commute. The new person has an hour and a half commute and was not there. That is not unheard of around here, in terms of your personal car and the highway, an hour is not uncommon, and in some cases more. Is that really conducive to the right way to live?


I am not sure if you call it the "end of civilization" when neither where you live or work holds up to some basic discussions at approximately a five-year-old level. Anything else is at my own risk.


That is what "they" do with rosewood-handled knives on a commercial basis, is use them for other than the intended purpose, and handle them negligently.

I was wondering who cut the cheese.

[shaberon]

Posted by AutumnW (here)
I was wondering who cut the cheese.

Those bozos? I was trying to block it out of my memory. I gave it a chance with the expansion to see if it would bring in anything more along the lines of what I wanted to do, and it turned out not. I stacked up some plywood or something and that was it.

When you do it industrially, you do it by wire. Except when you need this:





It comes in sixty pound wheels. So that is really a lot of fun. Unfortunately today we need to introduce another kind of equipment:






The reason being is this. There will be no more liverwurst. Not on an industrial scale. You better resort to hand-crafted batches or Schaller and Weber maybe. This reels the mind.

It represents mankind's highest achievement known as crony-ism.


So, we get this investigation into an outbreak. Listeria is in the statistics every year, but, this time it was tied to something. Specifically, liverwurst.

I'm not sure why you would blame or ban the product.

It turns out the facility in question had an FDA agent assigned to it permanently.

That means the person who had this role did what is famously known as Absolutely Nothing.

Remember, this guy has authority to summon a Marshall who will carry a fully-automatic machine gun. This is what they will do if, for example, you say that organic cherries are beneficial. Wrong! You must submit it as a New Drug before you can do that.

So, it was rather vague what the "uncorrected violations" were. It turns out that inside the place had obviously visible piles of mold, insects, and decomp.

Remember, this represents a successful business + governmental oversight.

So, of course, it means whoever was inside the facility, was equally lax.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt that it might have been random low-level environmental Listeria that was not really anyone's fault, but the answer I am given says otherwise. The people who are in charge are the ones I describe as can't do anything. I believe this may be an example. Out here in the wilderness I have found my own examples, which is all usually quite vapid. Typically it translates as me being the person to do something about it. With the outbreak, this has been well-performed by The Establishment. But there were only a few fatalities and it's done.

My feedback would be exactly this, that you probably should not have pushed liverwurst through the industrial system.

The reason is because in the wilderness, no one will pause to clean it.

In other words, if I were to predict a vector for anything septic to travel, that would be at the top of the line. It will leave a paste that will pick up dandruff from 1974 and then it will turn into a shell, a tacky coating, and you can never get rid of it, and then you will get fruit flies. If anything it just needs to be knife cut and rinsed away promptly. It's simple. Spreading it all over a bunch of equipment just sounds like a bad idea.

I don't drink, so I'm just going to have an imaginary toast to something that is not there.

[shaberon]

I knew it. The day after I posted that about liverwurst, the associates made a similar mess with corned beef.

That is, they spread it on some equipment, left the beef out, and left.

I just cleaned it up and ignored it.

The next day, they did the same thing. But I was busy. Couldn't clean up after them, the beef sat out all night, so I had to throw it away.

That's the "small" version of what our supplier has done. The actual supply is half missing, maybe more. The company has to pay for its killings, which to me sound like they constitute manslaughter, or at the least, criminal negligence. Then the hospital bills for the survivors. Then our company is apparently suing for lost revenue over the inventory we had to dispose of. I'm not sure how that helps restore the market.

I'm not sure how to restore the market. My sense is more along the lines that a company like that should be shut down.

I won't ever be able to make a recommendation about it. All I would be able to do is direct your dissatisfaction to those who won't clean. I tried to take this as a random act of nature, but it's not, it's complete malfeasance on the part of those you look up to. I spend most of my time disposing of things that are actually good, and they won't spend any time handling something that is obviously foul.

On our part, I have completed a dismal round of questioning that relieves some of my assumptions. So far, everyone has voluntarily told me they hate people.

Do I hear "give me some money please" on the part of those who are committing this lunacy? Of course! Everyone wants money, they don't want to do the right thing, or treat others with graciousness.

This is a "state-ist collective", not a "nation".

I would still be surprised if I find anyone who is able to communicate with me. Everything seems hopelessly broken on about a four-year-old level. How you stand around ignoring a food supplier transmitting fatal diseases by gross negligence, or, an epochial hurricane, is jaw dropping. It's like having a blancmange for a tennis partner. I mean, literally, the thing about the floor is exactly what I said when I started, and despite a repair being made and people being told about it from someone else, and they still won't do it right. Maybe I should rewind the story of what I just went through about the same thing at the last place I worked, up until the point where I ran out of legal standing because the state lost my initial filing.

If it wasn't for this, Americans would have to go back to the farms.

[shaberon]

This was a doozy.

Mind you, this is another case of "panicky southerners", at a time when our mountaineers are still dealing with real hardship.

I go out and it's snowing, tiny little particles that look like fake snow out of a can, except they are two feet apart.

When I reached the end of the driveway, it was raining.

So I go into work and I see one of the stations is closed, dark, nobody there.

I just start as usual, and a little bit later on, I'm told, by some special arrangement, we're closing early. Apparently it's a sign of danger. So, we tear everything down, and I'm left with thirty-nine over-produced birds. There's no way to re-purpose that much chicken. I suppose one moment, it was anticipated a crowd was coming, and then the ball was dropped. We put up a sign due to "inclimate" weather.

So, I leave the egregious amount of waste behind, go home early, and find out there was a wreck. It was indeed one of the guests from the store -- one that lives here. He managed to wipe out about a quarter mile from the house, in the area I just passed through without concern. The vehicle was a loss, that's the *fifth* one here in a relatively brief span of time. The other four we keep as a collection, at least that one got hauled off.

Additionally, this is while we discovered some two months ago that out salad bar is freezing items. It's just for looks. The stuff is ice. We put food in it, waste it, rinse and repeat. Of course, I could easily find the instructions for the machine because I understand how stuff works, but no one was interested. So I let it go.

Then today I get a few more "tips" tossed my way that were ultra annoying, because it is the same things everyone else apparently fails at forever. I know how to do this work, and they won't listen to me, and yet I find myself on the receiving end of these remarks. Why don't you talk to a brick wall. It's like this everywhere. Ignorant and weak. Not my fault. Part of this is the same "floor cleaning disability" that has dampened, so far, all three of my jobs in this area.

So we lose a few people, due to reasons I'd rather not explain, so I'm told I can work more hours. Great. You're trying to kill me at the same time as running this state of failure. I just deal with it because I need more hours. And so I go and check, and, it's less.

You do absolutely nothing right, complain about it to everyone, and just try to kill off the person who knows better.

My parents and teachers never explained this to me. So, I have my own things to say about the cycle of poverty. Americans will throw you under the bus, and expect to be cheered for it.

This place is broken from the floor up.

[palehorse]

Wife bought a Chinese PTFE cookware (Chinese Teflon copy to be exact), first cook a bubble came up and a strong smell of chemicals, I warned her to not buy that, I use iron pans for everything, got a complete set, they are heavy duty cooking and food taste better too. So now we see the steel in the pan without the coating, I removed the coat like I was removing a sticker from the pan, the usual very poorly made Chinese crap, the store selling it got hundreds hanging in there, I wonder if other consumers got pissed off or they ate the PTFE stuff with the food! Here I go with the Teflon conspiracy lol

Above I saw that long knife for cutting cheese, damn who uses that thing when you have wires to do it neatly and only requires 1 person not 2 haha seems like Portuguese at work!


[edit]
found 1 video using a wire device to cut hard cheese. I saw people cutting without the device, you actually only need a strong wire (steel is good) and a piece of wood to give some leverage, otherwise you can cut yourself handling the wire.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=E-JgpU4WtzU

[shaberon]

At it again.

There are so many of these I haven't bothered mentioning it any more.

This was a little bigger. I thought she was dead.

I packed a considerable quantity of merchandise for a lady, and she would have kept going if I didn't run out of stuff. She then asked me for a bag, and I don't have bags, I only have packages, the transit is up to you. She said to hand it over, which I thought would have been terribly awkward, but it turns out she had a cane with a platform on top, as if made for the purpose. She stacked the stuff on the platform and I was satisfied that she had received it securely, at which point my process ends.

I turn around and remove my now-empty bowls, and as I'm going off I hear splat! which sounds exactly like the containers I just handed out.

I turned back around to see what happened, and where's the lady.

i noticed some people in the outside area start to react, and so I step over to my gate and then I find her on the floor, she face ploughed it, arms out, no sound had been made and she wasn't moving. I thought she might have died or might be so fragile she broke her neck and needs traction, I'm leery about handling someone like that, so I didn't. But she was alive and they were able to get her propped up, and, she gained lucidity, while having a big bloody gash straight down the middle of her forehead.

Well, after the two previous gigs where I found establishments operating crass negligence, particularly with regard to the floor. The current one is no different. They will hose the floor while we are still in there working, and so, of course, this makes dirty footprints all over the place. Instead of correcting the behavior, the answer was to put a long carpet runner effectively sideways across the concourse, which, you're definitely not supposed to do that at all. Then I find out that another person had gone splat for the same thing. The lady hadn't a problem with her merchandise, it was that a wrinkle had got pulled in the carpet runner and she caught that.

So far, that's just two victims of two things being done wrong.

A few days later, one of the ones who loves to hose the floor while we are working, complained to me I was making footprints. I stopped talking.

These people insist on being backwards.

I need to work on a way to commute to civilization.

Positive or interesting experiences about food itself recently:


Nothing.


It took about a year and a half but the garbage finally ploughed me relatively recently.

[shaberon]

I must have missed a structure change because I don't really recall making this a Roundtable topic, but ok.


I inhabit an absolutely Orwellian 1984, which I got a slightly longer review of yesterday by someone going in to the confusion about food. Of course, they have no clue what they are talking about. Being dragged around in life, I come to this town of about 50 - 60,000, and this is what I see from looking around.

The town in the sense of what was here is dilapidated, half abandoned, as you can see in the basic 1940s brick constructions, up to one spot that looks like probably 1970s that is shabby and half empty with a busted up parking lot, the sort of thing where I used to fit in perfectly well. That's the only thing that looks approximately normal.

All the rest of it is clearly carpetbagged.

By this I mean like two hundred newer strip malls of recent build with the false fronts and junk like that. Scads of companies that represent outside investment. These complement a few major employers that are international in scale and are obviously an outside investment by someone looking for tax favoritism. So, this is all semi-colonized.

The eating establishments in the insect colony are all fast food.

I don't do that. According to the Department of Labor, that's not cooking, it's manufacturing.

I can't find anyone that knows anything besides fast food and Cheetohs.


Here's what wigs me out. If you know anything about the history of cannabis in the United States, you know that primarily thanks to patent holders of polyester, we criminalized a common plant and have ruined many lives over it, even recently. We've made industries on hunting it and a whole prison-and-rehab scam. I've never known of a situation where any of them or it hurt anyone, but we have this huge alcohol economy because of cops getting mowed down by machine guns.


And so with all this stuff about "advertising" and "promotion" and communication and environmental awareness in general, here's what happened.

I go in about a month or two ago, and right up by the front door is an entire pallet of cannabis seltzer.


Let's see. This "controlled" substance is suddenly "just there" in mass production from some ISO certified facility that in turn is mass reducing a paneled herb to a concentrate. They have killed it, and over-written it with various flavorings and foofy names. They are happy to provide it at a very high price, which is approximately three times what you would pay for the limited imports of Portuguese Porto. It's soda water and pot juice. And I had just read a local headline not long ago about how they were so proud to bust numerous stores in the area for "gummies" that work the same way. Somewhere around April or maybe June. I mentioned what I saw in the paper to someone and was assured, yes, they kept going, that was just the beginning.

Pardon the difficulty to wrap my head around the situation.

Now I can go into public and see a three-year-old kid barely able to walk pushing around a mini-cart of liquid THC.

Since this has been happening, what has been said...not a word...

I have a limited appreciation of cannabusiness because I see it about the same way as food, of which the mass produced variety is usually less appealing than heritage or organic or close. I can't find anyone that understands me, at all, which is alienating because for instance I started working in a bakery that also makes organic breads, that is still running as a local distributor. I would almost bet real money that the edge of that zone is the end of where this is normal. All of these words have been twisted around to mean something else. If you look around, you start to realize that. For instance, work has certain definitions, to which my associates are painfully visually ignorant.


The expression "barnyard" seems relevant.

With the new product, so far that constitutes a lack of experience. Kind of creepy. It is, it's actually creepy, I come from a type of culture that is not present and simply unknown around here. Frequency with which the right tool for the task appears to be selected is none. We're doing random stuff with chemicals and hoses which is indescribable watching it drip from safety lamps on the ceiling while an electronic alarm that is not supposed to go off is screaming. I found that on a device that was itself off. I threw away a batch of eggs for the second time. Not the same batch, another one.

I trust nothing. I regularly encounter something that in my judgment poses an actual health risk, and so I don't want to think about what actually happens in any place I am not standing. If I go there, I have to fix something. Perpetually.

I usually say nothing, which is not my nature, but a form of compact that is the resort.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by shaberon (here)
I must have missed a structure change because I don't really recall making this a Roundtable topic, but ok.

Yes, Mark re-engineered the menu structure several months ago. It's not 100% perfect yet! We can easily move this to any other section you think is more appropriate. (Culture and The Human Condition?? Not perfect either, but is that better?)

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

I could easily make a new sub called 'Food & Drink', or something of that nature, a subject that doesn't have a home just yet, and put it in either Culture and The Human Condition, as Bill suggests, or Science, Technology, and Health. It wouldn't take a moment to do, and I'm sure it be populated with other threads around the forum that fall under this general category.

[shaberon]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
We can easily move this to any other section you think is more appropriate. (Culture and The Human Condition?? Not perfect either, but is that better?)

Well, it doesn't matter very much to me; I can find it wherever it goes.

Of course, this is a mixed subject because I am talking about "stuff", but, over the top of that, it's the human behavior.

I could just say third day in a row I threw out eggs because letting them sit out and warm up is begging for food poisoning. This ought to be a no-brainer for the human being, but rating something for no brains apparently isn't low enough.

If that doesn't make you queasy enough, how about some warmed-over eggs with a bottle of Cornbread flavored THC seltzer.

I am not supposed to know that this sort of thing is remotely possible.

It's like I've been flung into a realm of forbidden knowledge, where so many things I see are brand new to me. I can honestly say that things like washing the ceiling lamps with floor cleaner are a "first". It would be difficult to feel more removed from nature.

Today I had to answer a question about an advertisement, to which the truth is I don't know. I approached the type of being that has access to the information, and, using their machine, the answer given was I don't know. If you ask me something about an advertisement or a price, I turn into a sock puppet. I realized I'm more likely to give a wrong answer, because whatever I say might be based on outdated information. I have no idea. I just know what stuff is and how to do things. I'm lost when it comes to the overly man-made scene consisting of false words.

This is very nearly the same thing as the thread on Advertising, especially considering that Bernays broke through by boosting the food industry with fiction. I am just going through it constantly on a manifest basis rather than an abstract subject. And, there is more to it. I just happen to think the food system is the underpinning of a society. I also think this is very important and it needs to be repaired. The next factor is simply inflation so you will be paved by the cost of living. We will soon have it where every single bite costs a dollar or more.

[shaberon]

I noticed something recently, being on the receiving end of corporatism.

Every so often, capital burns labor. Usually this is done by slashing work hours. Right now we have seen this in auto-collide with a slightly different approach called reducing an hour of opening.

That's like minorly closing.

I think we may be paying for a dumpster. It died the other day, right as I went to use it, then I nearly died trying to move our juggernaut garbage some other way.

I'm not sure. It's a bad economical sign compared to telling me how tariffs fix everything and all our prices rose.

That's out status quo. Higher prices, lesser wages.

It didn't work to give me a raise with a "mysterious" criticism that we know is just your way of preventing someone from getting another 1%. Trivial raises are kind of insulting, and work backwards when it's taken away by different means.

There aren't many alternatives; escape is not easy. This industry is being run by incompetent fools.

[Mike]

Posted by shaberon (here)
I noticed something recently, being on the receiving end of corporatism.

Every so often, capital burns labor. Usually this is done by slashing work hours. Right now we have seen this in auto-collide with a slightly different approach called reducing an hour of opening.

That's like minorly closing.

I think we may be paying for a dumpster. It died the other day, right as I went to use it, then I nearly died trying to move our juggernaut garbage some other way.

I'm not sure. It's a bad economical sign compared to telling me how tariffs fix everything and all our prices rose.

That's out status quo. Higher prices, lesser wages.

It didn't work to give me a raise with a "mysterious" criticism that we know is just your way of preventing someone from getting another 1%. Trivial raises are kind of insulting, and work backwards when it's taken away by different means.

There aren't many alternatives; escape is not easy. This industry is being run by incompetent fools.

Incompetent fools or maybe deliberate con men. Or both?

I worked at a restaurant called 'The Friendly Fisherman' many years ago. I always had stubble growing back then, and the manager pulled me aside one day and insisted I shave every day and arrive at work with a rubbery face. The faint stubble drove him mad. But he made one exception: I could grow a mustache exclusively, but that's it. So in other words it was okay to look like a 70's porn star but not okay to look like a slightly rugged (but otherwise clean'ish) young man from the aughts.

There was a kind of incestuous thing going on in this restaurant (like all the restaurants I worked at), which amounted to keeping a small social circle within our group and rarely venturing outside of it. When work was over, I couldn't wait to leave. I was practically jumping out of my skin by the time we closed. But mostly everyone else remained and drank at the bar for hours afterward, just rotting away in that dismal place and giving all their $ back to the restaurant. I could never understand it, but they thought I was the weird one for not wanting to stay there.

It was a mess. Half the staff were on coke, and everyone was f#cking each other, and alliances were formed and broken on a daily basis. If a camera was there it would have made for a great reality TV show, one of those competitive ones where you're rewarded for your deviousness by not getting kicked out of a house or whatever. I was so anxious to leave by the end of the night that I never even bothered to hang around and collect my tips. I asked my manager to keep them in a small envelope for me and I picked them up whenever I felt like it.

My discipline held firm until one fateful night when I hooked up with the bartender Amanda. This after months of resisting, mind you. Turns out she was also hooking up with Trent (my manager, the one who insisted I only grow a mustache). This was all further complicated by the fact that she was married, which I did not know at the time (not being pious here..I likely would have done it anyway). So now I had to hang around after my shift and wait for my tips; I couldn't leave them with Trent anymore because there was now tension between us and he couldn't be trusted.

One night when I was waiting for my tips, guess who arrived at the restaurant? Yeah, Amanda's husband. He found out that Amanda was being unfaithful(he read her texts) and turned up angry as hell. I watched in horror as he walked in and beelined straight for me. But he blew right by me and confronted Trent instead. Amanda told me later that although she'd erased all the text messages we'd exchanged, she hadn't yet done the same with her's and Trent's, and the husband discovered them. So I was off the hook. Trent, meanwhile, caught a beating I was told. I never saw it tho.. I slipped out of there like Chavez from Young Guns.