In the Sauce

I worked for a period of time at the local McDonald's so we could keep putting food on the table. I split time between kitchen duty and maintenance. A new limited-time sandwich had been introduced with its own kind of sauce. I spotted the new condiment bottle and immediately asked the young lady working with me that shift what kind of sauce it was. I do need to know these things if I'm to do my job correctly. Happy to help, she grabbed the squeeze bottle just a bit too hard when she picked it up and launched a little glob of sauce that landed perfectly centred between her eyebrows. I could not look at her during her explanation. 

One of my duties on maintenance was cleaning the ceilings. Once in a while, some of our teenage customers would smack a ketchup packet and get some on the ceiling. That was rare. What wasn't rare was blobs of Big Mac sauce and McChicken sauce ending up on the kitchen ceiling. I had to ask the guys how on earth that was happening. We had special dispensers that looked like stubby caulking guns for those sauces. A squeeze of the trigger will give you a perfectly measured amount for the sandwich in question. What I didn't know was that if you drop one on the floor and it lands on the pin, it will fire a generous glob of sauce with considerable force. I didn't see anyone do it, but in a fast-paced environment, it was only a matter of time. I was hurrying to keep up with a flurry of orders with only one other person in the kitchen with me. The McChicken sauce gun got away on me. When it hit the floor, it fired a stream of sauce that left a stripe on my partner, from his McDonald's cap down his shirt and pants all the way to one of his shoes. Nothing hit the ceiling, and nothing ended up on the floor.

 

Grill Glove Love

 

Generally speaking, I'm one of the easiest people to get along with you'll ever meet. I do, however, have a sense of humour, and that means that just sometimes, I can be a pain in the posterior. This was one of those moments.

I sometimes work in the kitchen at my place of employment. Favourite post is working on the grill. Most of the other work stations are less than perfect for my tall, skinny frame. I can work them, but my lower back will start protesting.

Grill gloves are plastic disposable hand gear with some heat resistance for handling raw meat. After handling the raw meat, they're peeled off and thrown away. This is to avoid contamination of the finished product. If you take them off just right, you can trap a significant amount of air in the glove, especially the fingers, and then pop them. I've gotten rather good at it.

One of my co-workers finds the pop sound annoying, and I find his reaction amusing. I was having fun popping the gloves when I was finished with them. Anyone who's ever gotten into popping bubble wrap can understand my mindset. Hey, it's therapeutic. Don't knock it.

I managed to get three pops out of one glove, three separate fingers, a personal best. This was when my co-worker's requests for me to stop went from polite to more hostile demands.

“Pop! Pop! Pop!”

“Arrgh! Just stop already!”

I gave it a rest for a little while. Didn't want to rile him up too much or too fast. I waited for him to forget about it before doing it again.

“Pop!”

“Hey! What did I say to you? Don't do that anymore!”

“It was just a thumb. Relax.”

“Just stop. Okay!”

I knew I was starting to push his buttons, but I had a great way to finish this, and I had to have one more go.

“Pop!”

He turns, glaring at me, but before he can say another word, I say, “That was the middle finger.”

The rest of us laughed our heads off over that.

Note: I did eventually succeed in popping all five fingers on both gloves before I started working somewhere else. How's that for a completely useless skill?

No Translation Needed

 

Trying Too Hard

I worked for eight and a half years for a rocking chair manufacturer in Quebec. I was the only anglophone, and my French was not the greatest. I did try to learn at every opportunity.

My assignment at work was the manual shaper, a potentially dangerous machine. My machine used cutter heads with changeable carbide knives. Carbide is quite brittle, so there was a different support backplate with each different profile knife.

One of my sets of backplates was damaged, and I was tired of making hand gestures to explain what I was talking about. I asked the lead hand what backplates were called in French. He said, "C'est un backplate." - I could've gotten that.

I Get My Comeback

Being the only anglophone in a French work environment usually worked to my disadvantage. Usually, but not always.

A special order was coming through the shop, and part of that order had to be cut on a little-used shaper with a plunging table. It's a complicated American-built beast, but it could cut profiles in really long pieces of work beyond any other machine in the shop.

Because of my experience, I got the call. For the sake of safety, the lead hand had to give me a thorough orientation before I could begin the job. This orientation included a very long list of safety rules specific to this particular machine. The lead hand plunged into this list with some skepticism. When he finished, he asked me if I understood and then if I was sure I understood. I put him at ease by showing him that the entire list was written on the side of the machine in English. We both had a good laugh over that.

The Art of Mumbling

 

Speak loud enough but not too loud. Don't speak too quickly or too slowly. Enunciate your words carefully. Seven years of public speaking training from high school through college. Spoke at church, filled in as a worship leader, etc. Then I got a job in a call centre and had to relearn to mumble.

You read right. There is a time to mumble.

As a representative, we are expected to greet our customers in a friendly manner, and as soon as they tell us who they are, we are expected to use their name. If we don't, our quality scores suffer. I want good quality scores. I get good quality scores.

Sounds easy, right? Wrong. A taxicab driver who barely speaks English is calling to apply for a credit card from his taxi on a cheap cell phone with poor reception while serving customers, trying to talk over his dispatch radio. No insult intended, these guys hustle their butts off to make a living, but...

"Could I have your first and last name, please?"

"Marfinerfemerb Haberfinerpinshab."

Saying, "Pardon, could you repeat that?" will get you nowhere. It could hurt your quality score. It'll definitely screw up your call handle time. My advice is just respond back confidently with a very garbled, "And how can I help you today, Mr. Marfinefefeemra Hebefindmaminav?" Trail off at the end of your words, and you almost can't lose. In my experience, only the first couple of letters of each perceived word are important. Fifteen years in call centres, and I think I can still count the number of times a customer has interrupted me to correct my pronunciation on my fingers. I've never been marked down for it. Even when the quality agents knew about my infamous trailing mumble.

I think it works because I sound confident, and people hear what they want to hear. The customer wants to hear their name. Quality wants to hear me say it. Kind of sounds like I did, so everybody gives me the benefit of the doubt. Everybody is happy, and I can move right on to taking care of the customer's questions or concerns.

My current employer wants us to build rapport with our customers, and you would not believe how far an agreeable-sounding mumbled conversation will get you. Got to be careful there, though. Most of the time, you do need to know what the customer is talking about.

Mumble on all you mumblers!

Fred Is Dead

 

Groundhog Day is kind of a fun sort of thing in this part of the world. Several different towns in Canada and the US have official Groundhogs for the occasion. Supposedly, if the groundhog sees his shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter; if not, spring is around the corner.

Well, Quebec's official groundhog was Fred la Marmotte. The official festivities were all ready, and they opened his cage, and Fred was dead. So instead of announcing his prediction, they announced his sudden death.

Now let's give the little varmint some credit. If he'd croaked even a day earlier, they would have gotten a replacement. This is the ultimate groundhog troll move. What does it portend? Endless winter? The end of the world?

Or is this something sinister? Was Fred assassinated? Was it COVID? Was it the booster? Did he overdose on Fentanyl? Wow, this could be big.

In any case, RIP, little guy. I salute your style.

How We Became Parents of Twins

To introduce the story, I’m going to quote one of my favourite Star Trek characters: Garak, “I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. I don’t trust coincidences.”

After the hectic weeks surrounding the arrival of our twin boys, my wife and I finally got home with the whole family together and started to catch our collective breaths. She spent a week in St. Justine's Hospital in Montreal after an emergency C-section. I had spent that week at home, nearly an hour away with our oldest son, who was not yet two years old, traveling back and forth to see her and the twins as much as possible. Leading up to that event, we received advice and information from countless sources. Some of it was solicited, and some of it was foisted on us. 

Somewhere in all this, we got a packet of information from POMBA, the Parents of Multiple Births Association. Feeling a little inadequate in the moment, I read all the information booklets and brochures in the package. I glanced at the back of the booklet and froze. The address for their offices was Highway 7, Richmond Hill, Ontario. I had traveled through there before, only once in my entire life that I know of. A chill ran up my spine as I understood what had happened.

It was the first leg of a bicycle trip. I was traveling from an address in Brampton, Ontario, to another one in Peterborough, Ontario. I was going to cover just over a hundred miles (160 km), but I had a problem. Fully loaded with touring gear, that was a tough day. On top of that, I had to get there early, mid-afternoon at the latest. To squeeze it in, I started before sunup at four o’clock in the morning. The plan was to clear the greater Toronto area before daylight. For most of the ride, I would be following Highway 7. A splash of light from my headlight on unchanging pavement in the dark with no traffic. The feeling is unbelievable. It feels like you’re going at an incredible speed, but at the same time, not moving at all.

I pedaled my way past this address on a bicycle, completely exposed to the elements and whatever some evil POMBA agent had left there for me. I don’t think they should be allowed to do that. It isn’t just that I happened to cycle there. This trip would take me to Sherbrooke, Quebec, where I would meet my wife for the first time.

It’s okay. I love my boys, but I don’t trust coincidences.

Green Minitch Time

 

Newly minted call centre with inexperienced representatives and inexperienced supervisors – a formula for some really entertaining moments. Prepaid cellphone customers were a snap to deal with. Most of the calls were just to add time to their phone. The upset callers invariably had some issue with how their minutes all got used up so fast.

It must have been within my first couple of weeks on the job when I got a guy complaining about the call log. The time stamps on our call logs were all in Greenwich Mean Time. Whose bright idea that was, I have no idea. That was an invitation to confusion. He said he could not have possibly made those calls because he was asleep at the time those calls were made.

With my several weeks of experience, I explained to him that we used Greenwich Mean Time, which was a great deal different than the corresponding time in the United States. I thought I was making sense, but he didn't want to buy it from me. He demanded a supervisor.

My supervisor, of course, was almost as green as I was. He took over the call, and I got to stand around waiting to get my seat back, listening to the supervisor's end of the conversation. He sounded totally full of crap. I probably did too, but at least I knew what Greenwich Mean Time was called, even if I didn't know how many hours different it was from say, Eastern Standard. He kept telling the customer over and over about Green Minitch (rhymes with spinach) Time. I thought it was so funny that by the time he finished, I was fit to bust.

Several other employees and I teased him about it mercilessly. When, for morale, the company wanted us to create team names, I suggested the Green Minitch Morons, putting several of us in stitches. The supervisor was a good sport about it, though. Those were the days when call centre work was still fun for most of us.