Just a Few Thoughts

I have worked in the service industry for a number of years, and there are many lessons I have learned from my experiences.  The whole process has caused me to change both as a person, AND in the way I interact with people on a daily basis.  While there is a very large portion of people who have encountered the joys and woes of this industry, I know that there are still many who have not.  For those people, I have composed a list of some of the lessons I have learned throughout the past few years.

1. Hot coffee is HOT
2. Human beings as a whole are extremely self-centered
3. At least 50% of the population ‘knows the owner’ and is therefore entitled to special service
4. “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.”
5. Most people don’t really pay attention to anything that’s going on around them
6. One word: MULTITASKING
7. Hot plates are HOT
8. Being overtired makes basic necessary skills like balance, coordination, and multitasking very difficult (particularly when coupled with a hangover)
9. Humans are gross.  Kids have an excuse to be messy.  Their older family members do not.
10. A penny left on the table is actually a compliment (provided it comes with a real tip)
11. Our collective society seems to have an irrational fear of flushing a toilet that someone else has used first, and would rather to continue to fill it with used toilet paper.
12. Hot cheese sauce is HOT
13. You will be expected to know exactly what the customer has ordered, is drinking, is wanting, AND is THINKING, even if it’s not your table.  OBVIOUSLY all servers are psychic.  Figure yourself out.
14. You are and octopus and therefore have eight appendages with which to carry every plate out to any table all at once.  Use them all to avoid nagging.
15. Dishes are breakable, drinks are spill-able, and trays are easily unbalanced.  You will learn this quickly, especially if you are clumsy.

There are many more lessons and many more hot objects to be aware of, but these are some of the most important.  If you’re looking for a career in the service industry, you would be wise to keep them in mind.

Watch for my list of advise for customers!

My Secret Shame

I was just reading over an old blog entry, and I saw a spelling mistake I had never noticed in my proof reading.  It was a fairly common mistake that I always inwardly condemn and I was ashamed to realize that I had made it.  I had used the sentence “I didn’t hear him”, but had spelled ‘hear’ as ‘here’.  Horrified at my belated realization, I hastily clicked on the ‘edit post’ link and found myself presented with a page riddled with red-underlined spelling mistakes.  I couldn’t believe it.

Ever since elementary school, I have been an excellent speller.  As time went on, I also began to notice that I was becoming more and more of a grammar snob.  Here are some examples of my snob-like tendencies: reading an email completely lacking in punctuation (which is exasperatingly common these days), makes me cringe and curse aloud.  I can’t even text in shortened terms, and I’m the only person I know who will ACTUALLY use a semicolon in a text.  Also, have you ever heard of someone with a favourite punctuation?  I have one; the aforementioned semicolon.

Admitting to all of that, I’m sure you can imagine my horror at this page of spelling errors.  Clearly, I have slacked off on my writing for long enough.  My days of practicing my print primarily by writing down food orders must end.  To ignore the warning signs of my looming illiteracy would be doom!

My New Obsession

What I’ve been doing the last week:

Preserves

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be adding grape jelly, lemon loaf, and strawberry lemonade concentrate (because I finally got a candy thermometer) to the collection.  Yay!

Short-Term Memory Loss

One thing I always remember about looking back at eighties fashions is shoulder pads.  Why women were so convinced that they needed to go around looking like football players in order to look fashionable, I may never know.  I remember my mom looking back at photos from these years, wondering out loud, “What were we thinking?”  Those were the years filled with tapered jeans, leg warmers, one-shouldered shirts, and scrunchies.

Except now the eighties are back!  Once again we have liquid leggings, mens’ blazers, brightly printed t-shirts, and ruffled taffeta available to the masses.  We’ve refreshed the cuts, a little, but it’s eighties alright.

So here’s my thought.  If a person were to keep all of their clothes for, say, 25 years, perhapse the fashion trends would eventually return to the original inspiration.  Is the trick to staying in fashion keeping your clothes for two-and-a-half decades until fashion gurus have finally forgotten the styles of 20-odd years ago and decide that said styles are again ‘in’?  And in fifteen years, am I going to be looking back at pictures of me today with the younger generation saying “what was I thinking”?

Oh well, I suppose we’re doomed to repeat ourselves, and I guess I’m ok with that.

As long as they don’t bring back shoulder pads.

Forward This Message to 25 People to Prevent Your Account From Being Permanently Deleted

A facebook message I recently received:

“Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,there have been many members complaining that Facebook is becoming very slow. Records show that the reason is that there are too many non-active Facebook members and, on the other side, too many new Facebook members.

We will be sending this message apround to see if members are active or not. If you are active please send to at least 15 other users using Copy+ Paste to show that you are still active. Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks will be deleted without hesitation to create more space.

Send this message to all your friends and to show me that your still active and you will not be deleted.

Founder of Facebook,
Mark Zuckerberg”

 

I’m sure you’ve all received email and facebook messages such as this in the past (several, if you’re like me).  Every once in a while a wave of them comes across and inboxes are suddenly flooded by people trying to save their email adress or facebook account from being deleted.  It’s clear to me that these messages are a scam, considering major sites like facebook  have much better ways of keeping track of what accounts are active and what are not.  We know this from emails like “Idbuildthat, we haven’t seen you in a while.  We’d love for you to rejoin our community!”. Not to mention that if the founder of facebook was going to send a message out to every active member of facebook, he’d probably want to make sure that his message wasn’t quite so riddled with spelling and grammar errors as this one.   So WHY do people keep forwarding these messages?  And what is the purpose of creating them other than to cause a lot of junk mail?

Oh and by the way, I received this message on January 21st and my account STILL hasn’t been deleted.

Pancake Woes

Since moving out in October, I have come to the frustrating conclusion that not only do I lack the basic skills of coordination and multitasking required to cook, but I also carry a crippling laziness and non-motivation preventing me from learning. Not to mention my acute fear of cooking anything involving meat because I’m pretty convinced I won’t be thorough enough and will be the cause of extremely uncomfortable food poisoning. So I don’t really cook. This might be ok if my living partner did. But he doesn’t. I eat a large amount of my meals at the restaurant where I work, and do my best to get by with what little cooking I know (in other words, I eat a lot of eggs, soup, and sandwiches, with a casserole or some pasta thrown in here or there). I know that my mother is reading this right now and cringing.

Last week I decided to cook scotch pancakes, which are an absolutely fabulous dessert pancake. They’re relatively simple to make – pretty much the same as regular pancakes, but smaller and SO much more delicious. However, how do people cook pancakes while half asleep? I had had a pretty long day on not enough sleep, so I was just about falling asleep at the frying pan by the time I was halfway through the batch. Pancakes ARE generally considered a breakfast food, so it must be pretty common for people to make them while half asleep. How? I was wobbling on my feet standing in front of the stove, and the pancakes were sticking, and they wouldn’t flip, and a lot of them got scrambled… The whole experience was just rather messy. Thankfully they all tasted awesome, despite looking a little questionable.

I was almost done cooking when Nick joined me at the kitchen table (I was sitting at my laptop when not waging war with my spatula). I continued my frying pan arguments, glad to be almost done. Then I sat back down and put my hand down on the side leaf of the table.

The leaf collapsed.

The plate full of wonky pancakes I had spent the last HOUR AND A HALF cooking went flying, with my glass of water, onto the floor, shattering glass, stoneware, water, and squishy pancakes across my entire kitchen. It was a sad day to be a pancake. Or a dish. Or me. I announced my defeat and went to bed.

Rose and Sabrina’s Encounter With the Creepy Stalker Guy

So I am officially the least dedicated blogger ever.  For a month – a MONTH!! – I have been sitting on the most fantastic excuse to blog, and I haven’t written A WORD.

I. Am. Terrible.

So now I shall tell you the story.

About a month ago, Rose and I decided that we wanted to start jogging.  On the night we planned to do this, however, I was overcome by my own laziness and we decided that some uphill walking would suffice.  So we decided to take a stroll up the mountain (if you can really call it that – it’s kind of like a very large hill) near my place.  It wasn’t late at this point – proabably about six or six thirty, but it was dark out.  We meandered our way up some indirect residential street, taking pictures of Christmas lights as we went.  When we got to the top, we took a break and some pictures from the look-out.  As we started to walk away, a guy leaned out of his car (where he was BLARING Alanis Morissette’s ‘You Oughta Know’) to ask us the time.  I didn’t hear him the first time, asked him to repeat himself, but refused to walk close to his car.  We answered his question and continued down the hill, taking a more main road than we had on the way up.  After a few seconds, the guy started his car up again and drove down the hill past us.

At the bottom of the hill, Rose and I took a left, and after only a block or so realized we were going in the exact opposite direction we wanted to be going in.  We turned around, crossed the street, and when we got back to our original turn-off from the mountain there was a car parked on our side of the road with someone sitting inside.  He yelled something out as we passed, but as all the doors were closed and the windows rolled up, we clearly could not here him.  As we picked up the pace and were debating whether or not it was the same car from the top of the mountain, the guy re-started the car, pulled back into the road, drove a block or two up, and parked in the shadows on the other side of the road.  As he passed, we knew it was the same car.

We kept walking, and after just a moment, he got out of the car, crossed the street, and started walking towards us.  We started to get nervous and I kept my head down as he approached.  Just as we reached him he said “Hey ladies how’s it going?”

Rose, always the friendly one, answered with a “Fine.”

I, being bent on paranoid self-preservation and feeling slightly threatened by the scary stalker man, looked him dead in the eye and said “Walking home,” as if that should answer his question readily enough.

I was actually startled to find him attractive.  He was young, and the kind of guy who if he asked me to dance in a club I would probably be flattered.  What REALLY freaked me out in afterthought was the fact that he probably COULD convince girls to come home with him in the right situations.  So what was he doing trying to pick girls up on some dark back road like a creep?

Anyway, he didn’t take my hint.   He kept walking behind us, asking us if we needed a ride anywhere.  I think I just gave him a cold “No”, while Rose gave him a slightly more concise “No, we’re good thanks!”

He persisted.  “What’s your names?”  At this point, I felt Rose’s iron grasp around my elbow, and we walked away as quickly as we could without breaking into a run, and he gave up following us after a few seconds.  We took a completely round-a-bout route to my house because I didn’t think we should take any chances (did I mention I’m paranoid?), and took up hiding out in my suite.

The worst thing was when we decided to call the cops – being the good samaritans that we are – to file a report.  I gave control of the phone to Rose, knowing my very sad communication skills, and could only shake my head as I listened to the questions.  They were very routine questions, the kinds of things we PROBABLY should have been paying attention to: the make, colour, and license plate number of the car; the height and build of the guy; what he was wearing; etc… Unfortunately, the car was in the shadows and neither of us know ANYTHING about cars, so we couldn’t answer any questions about that. Our description of the guy was also painfully pitiful.  When Rose looked at me and asked me my description of what he was wearing, all I could tell her was “Baggy pants and…  A jacket.”  I couldn’t even think of what colour they were.

So…  Rose and I are awful witnesses.  I hope we never see a real crime.

Christmas Cards

Lately I’ve been experiencing a major artistic block.  In writing this is pretty common for me, as anyone who keeps up with my blog is aware; I rarely make regular entries.  I also haven’t written a story since I finished my creative writing class at Camosun.  I come up with ideas that I think are great, but I never write them.  Once in a while I will write down the bare bones outline, but most of the time the idea fades farther and farther towards the back of my memory until finally it teeters over the brink into my subconscious and eventually out of my mind completely.

So writer’s block is pretty normal for me, but unfortunately the block has taken over my art, as well.  It’s been a nuisance, and very frustrating, but on top of that I decided that I wanted to design my own Christmas cards this year.  I cannot FOR THE LIFE of me decide what to draw.  I was googling Christmas pictures tonight, but I’m finding no inspiration.

So.  Suggestions?

Inchers

Have you ever been on a bus, and a person plops down next to you, and then continues to inch closer and closer to you for the entire bus ride?  And no matter how much you squish yourself against the window, that person still keeps moving to an awkwardly close position?  This is the kind of person I like to call an incher.  There are many different kinds of inchers: the afformentioned bus incher, the intersection incher, the line incher, and many other wonderfully exciting varietys.

The intersection incher is the person making a right-hand turn at an intersection while you try to walk across the crosswalk in front of him or her.  For some reason, there seems to be a large number of people who have issues keeping their foot on the brake and off the gas.  The intersection incher will inch through the right-hand turn, refusing to allow you any sense of safety while crossing in front of them (despite the fact that you DO have a GREEN LIGHT) by sitting still for an extra seven seconds. You have no idea whether you should run out of the way, or stop in the middle of the intersection and wave him or her through, yelling, “Well obviously you’re in a much bigger hurry than I am, so go ahead!”

The line incher is most commonly found outside of nightclubs on a Friday night.  This person stands in the line and, despite the fact that the line in front is NOT MOVING AT ALL, somehow manages to continuously move forwards, squishing the people ahead into an uncomfortable clump.

The inchers must be stopped!  They take a normal, daily experience, and turn it into a completely awquard scenario.  Very frustrating!

How about you?  What kinds of inchers do you have in your life, and how do you deal with them?

My Leaved Friends

I moved a week and a half ago.  With a boy.  Oh.  My.  Goodness.  A brand new adventure haha.  Anyway, I decided a while back that when I moved out my house would need to be filled with foliage.  I’ve bought two plants since moving in, and I brought two with me.  Then Erin came over and asked what their names are, and I realised that I hadn’t named any of them.  It shouldn’t be strange for plants to remain nameless…  Unless you’re me.  There must be no unnamed plants in my house (also laptops, tattoos of people or creatures, and in fact the home itself must never go nameless).  So Erin and I went around naming my pretty leaved friends.

There’s Jack, the good luck money tree:

Bill, the tropical of some description,

Isabella, the peace lily,

And Edith, the Kalanchoe

They’re so lovely!