Schedule Conflict

This would make a better story if I could remember exactly the time and circumstances of my return to Boulder, but I do recall that my mother and father had picked me up at the airport (ratty old Stapleton, not the glorious circus tent that is DIA) and were taking me home. I asked them if we could stop by Arby's before they dropped me at my apartment - not because I had a hankering for Beef 'n' Cheddar, but because I was anxious to check the schedule for the upcoming week.
When I got to the back door, I stopped and knocked since even though I was a manager and had my own set of keys, they were laying on my dresser at home. The face that greeted me was unfamiliar, but I was able to put together a guess pretty quick. It had to be "Susan." She was taking over for the departing Waldo, my mentor and inspiration in the fast food business. I had decided to cut her some slack before I even met her, since Waldo was going to be such a hard act to follow. Then I looked around the back room. All the signs, objects and personal touches had been removed. Over the course of my employment at Arby's, I had drawn dozens of cartoons which had once adorned the back wall. They were all gone. But the most disturbing development was that the mini-vac that Waldo had won on his ill-fated "Tic-Tac-Dough" appearance was nowhere to be seen. One of my favorite employees rushed by with a stack of trays for those who wished to "dine in." "Hey Buckwheat," I called, "Where's the Wink Martindale Mini-Vac?"
He gave me a scared, sad look, and pushed through the swinging doors past the slicer. What was more telling than his lack of response was his nametag. It said "Matt." I had trained this kid. I had made his nametag myself with the Dymotape label maker. It said "Buckwheat." Until now.
Finally I moved over to the small desk next to the oven and examined the coming week's schedule. I wasn't on it. The little plastic toys that used to crowd the desk were gone, and apparently so was I.
"Susan" appeared behind me, shocking me out of my haze. "I wasn't sure when you would be back." She moved past me to sit at the uncluttered desk. "You're Dave, right?"
"Dave-O," I said, recalling my Arby's name with some difficulty but a degree of pride.
"Maybe you could pick up a couple of lunches this week and maybe next week we can see about..."
I had stopped listening. I hadn't worked lunches, except as favors to hungover types desperate for my intervention, for years. I was a closing manager, and fiercely proud of it. I had taken the job at Arby's out of desperation. I had bailed out of my initial attempt to go away to school, and I needed something to keep my days full while I reapplied myself to getting into another college. I didn't stay there because of my love for the beef, I stayed at Arby's because of the people and the fun. Now that fun was gone, and from the looks of the schedule, so were many of the people.
On the way out I grabbed my nametag. It was a specially made - embossed. Waldo ordered them whenever he made someone a manager. Mine read, "Dave-O, Assistant Manager." I went out the back and the door closed behind me.

What's Your Beef?

Some things I feared when I was working at Arby's: Getting stuck on "maintenance" for the third week in a row. "Maintenance" was a catch-all job that required the employee involved to scrub down the entire back room, a kitchen/walk-in freezer/office combo, and washing all the dishes from the day's beef preparations as well as being on call at a moment's notice to show up at the front counter with a smile on to help any sort of customer rush that might occur. Another thing that we all learned to have great and abiding respect for was the razor sharp circular blade of the meat slicer. It could slice a sponge in two with just a whisper of pressure. My wedding ring covers the scar I carry from the one moment I forgot to respect the blade. The last thing that I truly feared while working at Arby's were the words "tour bus." On semi-frequent occasions, a great diesel-powered machine would roll into our parking lot and disgorge its contents of teen choir members or junior soccer players. Dozens of them. All at once. Into our lobby that had just been cleaned and suddenly that slow time after the lunch rush that was going to be used to catch up on all the prep work and maybe even get an early start on maintenance was gone. We took two to three customers at a time and got them served in two to three minutes, as our roast beef Jedi training had taught us. Until it was over. And then we went scurrying about, trying to catch up to the point where we were when there was no tour bus in our parking lot.
The list I just gave you did not include "having a police officer come into the restaurant." If anything, that would have been a relief. As a matter of fact, having an older brother in law enforcement allowed me to serve my share of officers, on duty an off. If you work fast food long enough, you welcome the periodic appearance of someone with a badge, since it tends to limit the possibility that your store will be robbed during that transaction. There was a story about a manager from the Arby's on the other end of town, run by the same owners, who was working late one night when her crew was held up. Jo Ellen, a legend already in the company because of her dedication to all things roast beef, came out of the back room to witness the beginning of the crime and, legend has it, she talked the guy out of robbing the store and since he had obviously fallen on hard times, maybe he wouldn't mind taking an application with him as he left. Jo Ellen didn't need a cop. Her husband worked in a dynamite factory. She had no fear. The rest of us, however, were happy to have the company in blue.
Which makes me wonder why the drive-thru crew down in Florida would take the chance of offending anyone who might come to their aid. The comment made about "not serving police officers" was "just a joke," according to the beefy powers that be down in Pembroke Pines. The furor set off by such a prank caused the national office to issue the following apology: "We take this isolated matter very seriously as we respect and support police officers in our local communities. As soon as the issue was brought to our attention, our CEO spoke with the Police Chief who expressed his gratitude for our quick action and indicated the case is closed. We will be following up with our team members to be sure that our policy of inclusion is understood and adhered to. Further, we will be following through with disciplinary action up to and including termination of the employees involved, as appropriate." And this reminds me of yet another piece of my Arby's lore. We used to number our punchlines so that we wouldn't get into trouble for saying anything off-color in front of our ravenous public. Instead of saying "that's what she said," we would just sing out, "three." We didn't have a number for "we don't serve police officers." Maybe because it wasn't funny. 

Where's The Beef?

If you know anything about me, you know how much I need me a good Beef 'n' Cheddar every twelve or thirteen years. It used to be much more frequent than that. Sometimes more than once a day, if I were working a long shift. And there were some long shifts, back in the day. When I spent what would have been my freshman year in college working for Arby's, there were a lot of long shifts. I opened the place, and worked through lunch. Eventually, I worked my way into an Assistant Manger's vest, and that led to closing the place which, on the weekends, had me getting out of there sometime after one or two in the morning. In all that time, there was a consistency: Beef and Cheddar. 
Maybe it was the onion bun. It probably had more to do with the primal meat and cheese connection that has been the top of my food pyramid. That, in turn, is probably one of the driving forces behind me getting a job slinging America's Roast Beef, Yes Sir! It would have made more sense for me to run my own McDonald's franchise, but Arby's happened to be the closest fast food restaurant to my house, and I had an in: one of my best friends already worked there. Looking back, I can see why I was such a find as a prospective employee: high school graduate without a class schedule to juggle, available night and day. I could have made it a career path if I had chosen to, but that wasn't in the cards. And so, my Beef 'n' Cheddar fixation fell by the wayside.
Now, years later, I find myself drawn once again into that cheesy, meaty vortex. It might have something to do with nostalgia. I forced my family and friends to accompany me on my fiftieth birthday to the nearest Arby's we could find. We ate and we laughed and shared stories of those late nights and early mornings. Later, we all moaned and complained about how they just don't make them like they used to, but I think they really still do. It was beef and it was cheddar. Or what approximates that combination in the world of fast food. It could be this lack of verisimilitude that brought on Jon Stewart's series of par-ad-ies. Why be hatin' on Arby's like that?
Why set yourself on fire in front of one? The creepy part, for me, was that one of my co-workers who was also my girlfriend back then moved to Phoenix where last week a man was found engulfed in flames outside that franchise in the Valley of the Sun. A quick thinking store manager rushed out and turned the store's fire extinguisher on the man. And now you can feel free to write your own horrible, terrible Daily Show bit that will probably keep me away from Beef 'n' Cheddar for another few years.

Dave Works Late Night

 I was sitting outside the school where I work after dismissal, supervising those students whose parents had not yet made it out to pick up their children from a hard day's learn. A colleague and I were commiserating about other jobs we have had, the ones that did not bring us the kind of awkward satisfaction that this teaching gig does. The jobs we used to hate before we learned to love the stories they provided us. 

I used to work late night at Arby's. The Roast Beef Place. This was before they had "the meats." This was back when diversifying your fast food menu was a potentially dangerous move. That was for other places, like Jack In The Box, with their hamburgers and tacos. My crew and I were responsible for slinging "roast beef" sandwiches of various sizes and condiment combinations at the public. We stayed open on Friday and Saturday nights until they were Saturday and Sunday mornings. We locked the doors at two. 

As it happened, this time just happened to coincide with the hour that most of the local bars shoved their customers back out into the world. And some of those inebriated souls would wash up in our parking lot. The more clever of these were the ones who took it upon themselves to make an early exit from their drinking holes to make sure they had plenty of time to fill their colons with meat before passing out until well after sunrise. The challenge for us, the closing crew, was that we were operating on a very scientific but sometimes flawed formula that told us how much "roast beef" we would need to get us through the night. The compressed loaves that would eventually be sliced thin and loaded onto a variety of buns took hours to cook. The last loaf would usually come out of the oven around nine PM. It was not the closing crew's primary concern to make the food. We would continue to slice and sling, but it was our job to hose the place down and get it sparkly clean for the next day's business. 

This led to a number of interactions like this: "I'd like three Super Roast Beef sandwiches."

"I'm sorry. We're out of roast beef. We can make you a Turkey Deluxe or a Hamchy."

"A Hamchy?"

"Ham and cheese."

"But this is Arby's. You're the roast beef place, right?"

"You're right. But we ran out of roast beef. See, we close in an hour and.."

"You're out of roast beef? This is Arby's!"

And so on. I suppose we could have locked the doors at that point, but we had been filled with stories of the franchise owners, Mike and Cowboy, who liked to make late-night drop-ins to their stores to make sure that things were humming along just like they expected them to be. It also took a certain number of hours to clean and sanitize the shake machine and the meat slicer and hose down the floors and counters and prep the next day's potato cakes. We were hostages. Fast food prisoners. 

On those occasions that the meat didn't run out, things were clean and ready to go for the next day, and the doors were locked, there would be a rapping at the door. Hungry drunk boys pleading for just a Beef 'n' Cheddar before they attempted to drive themselves home. Sometimes they offered us money above and beyond the market price. A few times, I relented, much to the dismay of the rest of the crew who were itching to be off and away on their own late night sojourns. Mostly I would throw up my hands and mouth "I'm sorry," even though I knew they could hear me just as well as I could hear their drunken whining on the other side. But mostly I tried to imagine how anything we had to offer was going to make their condition any more fortunate. 

Which is why getting paid to sit on the retaining wall in front of an elementary school at the end of the day feels like a pretty sweet deal.  

Enough To Eat

 There was a time when, if somebody had asked me, I would have jumped at the opportunity to make fifteen dollars an hour. A six hour shift at Arby's. for example, would have put ninety dollars in my pocket before someone came and took money back out of my pocket for taxes. But still, it would have been quite the boost. This would have been a time when the rent I was paying was on a one bedroom apartment. The groceries I was buying were subsidizing the roast beef sandwiches I was getting for each shift and the regular drop-in dinner at my parents' house. That stop would have most likely included a chance to do a load of laundry instead of spending my quarters in the facilities in the basement of my building. This would have been a time when the cars I was driving were purchased for less than a thousand dollars, and the gas I was putting into the tank would have cost me just above a dollar per gallon. 

Fifteen dollars an hour? You bet. 

But that's not what happened. The jobs where I earned minimum wage paid me just that. The minimum. When I finally climbed up that metaphorical ladder to become the manager at a book distributor, I was finally making enough money to buy the occasional Arby's sandwich for myself. Not that I did, but I could have. Because I was finally making more than the minimum wage. Which meant, in California, I was able to afford that one bedroom apartment and start thinking about expanding my family. I have mentioned in this spot before that the circumstances that led to me and my wife being able to put a payment down on a house began with the untimely death of my father. The chunk of change that accompanies the passing of a loved one should be put to some good use. Thus, another rung on that ladder toward comfortable was achieved. 

When I took the big jump into the salaried position of teaching at a public school, some of the fear of getting by went away. Only to be stirred up by the occasional contract dispute or strike that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with my fellow union members. Which isn't exactly true, since I have been able to ride the escalator of an organization that looks after its members and pays active attention to things like cost of living. I would love to think that the hourly rate that I now enjoy is both commensurate  with my skills and abilities as well as geared to the realities in which I live: early twenty-first century professional in California's Bay Area. 

I can now make it on my own. My son does his laundry in our basement. A college graduate himself, he flinches in anticipation of rejoining the workforce once the swirl of economic despair and global pandemic slows to a point where he might find work that would pay him fifteen dollars an hour. Or more. Because fifteen dollars an hour is the minimum he should expect when gas now costs upward of three dollars a gallon and a Classic Beef 'n' Cheddar costs more than five. 

And aren't we all just a wee bit tired of having millionaires telling us what we can afford to live on? I wonder when the last time Joe Manchin was in an Arby's. 

Bottom LIne

 The guys who owned the Arby's franchise where I worked went by the names "Mike and Cowboy." To this day I do not know their actual names, nor could I at the time distinguish one from the other. All I knew was that every so often these two jokers showed up in the back room of our store, where we worked as a well-oiled and periodically drug-addled team. They came ostensibly to check in on their investment, which was humming along just fine thank you very much. We were a streamlined operation serving two to three customers every two to three minutes and we were all very clear on the concept of "clean as you go." Compared to a lot of fast food restaurants, the crew stuck around. Years at a time. We had one family in particular whose offspring used Arby's as a rite of passage. When they were old enough to don the brown polyester dashiki, they were welcomed in and given a shift. 

Mike and Cowboy didn't do the hiring. They were far too "busy" to be mired in such minutiae. Instead they turned their laser-like business focus on the things that really mattered. Like the time they used our prep area to conduct an experiment. They made a large order of french fries and a small in a small portable fryer. They weighed them both and were gleeful at the result. The small order was within grams of the large. The creepiest part about this was that they made this discovery at one of the few Arby's that did not serve french fries. 

Mike and Cowboy were my window into corporate greed. 

And over time, they served as a model for Derek Giacomantonio, the McDonald's franchise owner who invited a convicted felon to stage a fifteen minute training video at their fry station. While Mister Giacomantonio was quick to point out that the visit from the twice-impeached former "president" did not constitute an endorsement, he didn't have any response to questions about the fact that particular restaurant failed its last health inspection. 

Then came the avalanche of negative Yelp reviews. Followed up by an E. coli outbreak that spread across the Golden Arches. Consequently, McDonald's stock plummeted. 

I'm pretty sure Mike and Cowboy wouldn't have let that guy server fries without washing his hands or wearing a hair net. If they had been interested in staffing. 

At all. 

In House Support

It is an interesting time. Not just in the hurly burly world of politics and foreign affairs, but here on the home front. My son is preparing to move into his first house. His house. Not  his parents'. It is in most practical applications a similar operation to the one that got him moved into his freshman dorm. Or the on-campus apartment into which he moved back in September. The question of his being emotionally prepared for this leap is no longer on the table. This is somewhat true for his mother and me, but we still find ourselves sitting around the kitchen table, or nearly around since two of us  can't really go around, wondering about how this story continues to grow.
I have spent the last week unraveling the story of my own meandering departure from my parents' home. I lingered longer than a lot of my friends, that was certain. The "gap year" I took after I bailed out of what would have been my freshman year in Santa Fe turned into its own learning experience called "working at Arby's." I can't be sure if it was planned or not, but my mom and dad weren't going to make it easy for me to slink back into my room in the basement. I had to get a job, and that job gave me the scent of what might  be out there as an adult. The relationship with my high school girlfriend was strained by the lack of a storybook ending. I just hung around, and in between shifts at the fast food restaurant, I clung desperately to that thing that I thought was going to be my salvation.
That's not how it  turned out.
I did make a mini-career out of Arby's. I did hold onto that girl until I went away to school the following year, but by then, the sweet story that would have been about enduring love had already been strained to the breaking point. It was my sophomore year, or my second year since those terms don't easily conform to my six year college career, when I moved back to my home town and into an apartment off campus. The habits I had  acquired as a member of the Arby's crew and the opportunities available in a freshman dorm had already done their work. I was in college to learn, but not always what was being taught in the classroom and lecture hall. I was generating my own misspent youth.
So here  I am, some thirty-plus years  later, looking at my son piecing together his own version of growing up. I think of the parties I threw in that first apartment, with the "Bon Voyage" banner that became our decoration for all occasions. I imagine there will be similar debauchery taking place in the living room and front lawn of the house my son is renting. We share enough for me to imagine that he will be going to bed at nine o'clock and rising early to head over to the library to study. He  might get up at nine. He might  go to the library, but I know what this first house is for. It is a learning experience. The good news is that my son seems to be a quicker study than  his old man.

Retirement Plans?

 I have been employed since 1974. That was back when I was mowing lawns to make enough money to buy a waterbed. Since then my work history has been many and varied, with an emphasis on staying employed to make sure that I always had gas money and a few extra bucks to buy albums. 

Albums. Records. Vinyl LPs. Like the kids play these days. 

I am not naïve enough to imagine that I would have been fighting for scraps out in the streets if I hadn't kept working all those years. I had a pretty amazing safety net in my parents' support. Room and board would be taken care of, but that official John Chambers Planet of the Apes gorilla mask did not fall into either of those categories. So I saved up my pennies, nickels and dimes and eventually dragged all of those wadded bills and clanky bits of change to the magic shop on the Pearl Street Mall and made a point of wearing that furry chunk of latex out of the store. 

As my teenage years dragged on, it became increasingly important for me to remain nominally employed in order to keep gas in my car and the latest audio configuration in the dashboard. When I was a senior in high school I had a girlfriend for the first time and became abruptly aware of just how expensive being in a relationship could be. 

The "gap year" I ended up taking after I bailed on college in Santa Fe brought my parents to the mild brink of an ultimatum: I was not to be allowed to sit around the house all day waiting for my girlfriend, who was still in high school, to be free. I was told to get a job. 

Full time. Working at Arby's. 

It was probably this experience that hastened my return to academia, and after taking a year way I was off to my freshman year with the good graces of my parents who felt that I should concentrate on being a student. For that year, I was not required to have a job. I lived a life of relative privilege along with my fellow dorm mates, spending freely on the things that make college life. Mostly beer. 

When I woke up from that drunken brawl of a liberal arts education, I returned to an apartment in my hometown where I picked up where I left off: at Arby's. Now I was a dual threat. I was a student by day and the closing manager by night. 

It would be another decade of installing steel office furniture and running a video store before I was ready to launch myself into adulthood, and another five years after that before I stopped doing "jobs" and started my career. When I stopped being paid by the hour and started getting a salary. 

Now, all these years later, I find myself wondering how I might possible retire. Stop working? What if I need a gorilla mask? 

Maybe Arby's is hiring. 

Random Acts Of Roast Beef

As fond as I am of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Entropy, I had never thought to apply it to my experience in the fast food business. Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system, and the Second Law tells us that things become less ordered over time. That reminds me of Arby's.
When I was first hired, a "fresh Tuna" as we were called, I was able to learn the menu in a matter of minutes. Part of my mastery came from my time spent on the other side of the counter, but even if I had arrived as a blank slate, I would have mastered it within the hour. It was simple by design. There were seven sandwiches:Regular, Super, and Junior Roast Beef, Beef 'n' Cheddar, the Turkey and Hamchy, as well as the Ham and Turkey Club. On the side, you could get an order of Potato Cakes, and for dessert there were Apple or Cherry Turnovers. Remembering our soft drink varieties and shake flavors was the only mild challenge. We were a Pepsi franchise with lemonade and orange drink as our non-carbonated alternatives. Jamocha and Black Cow were the exotic shakes in addition to the vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. These held significant enough intrigue that people would cross the Taco Bell parking lot to add a Black Cow to their tostada.
If you could remember to put three ounces of beef on the correct bun, or one and a half on a Junior, you could fly around behind the slicer and appear competent. Every so often you got a special order that asked for tomatoes to be added or subtracted, or cheddar cheese sauce substituted for the slice of Swiss that was microwaved on top of the Hamchy. But if you remembered to fold the wrapper back with that special stripe, even those orders wouldn't upset us. And this was the way it stayed for some time, until the geniuses in marketing came up with the notion of adding sub sandwiches to the menu. Immediately we increased our choices exponentially for the consumer. Good for them? Perhaps, but it played havoc with the speed and order of sandwich making. "Can I get cheddar cheese on my French Dip?" "Could you heat up the Italian sub?" Both at the counter and behind the slicer the expectations of our service, two to three customers in two to three minutes, never changed even though we had cranked up the sandwich entropy. Our "America's Roast Beef, Yes Sir!" buttons became relics of a bygone age.
Meanwhile, across town at our sister store, they had installed fryers. And a salad bar. We satisfied ourselves with the notion that we were still the essential meat and potato operation. Then one day the owners, Mike and Cowboy, appeared in the back room with two small Black and Decker deep fryers. Blessedly, they weren't big enough to make french fries, and we were told to continue to bake our Potato Cakes, but we were told that this was how we were going to be able to add the new Chicken Sandwich to our now overloaded menu.
To make matters worse, the Chicken Sandwich even came on a new bun: a poppy-seed roll. No matter how we swept and cleaned there were always tiny seeds in every crack and on every surface. The frozen chicken breasts were fried in the back room, and so the slicer operator had to trek back there to drop them in and fish them out with the same grace and ease that he or she had previously moved from refrigerator to bun toaster to sandwich board to warming table.
It would make a better story to say that I left Arby's because I had become so confounded by the relative complexity of their menu. I think it had more to do with coming home from a vacation and finding that the new district manager had removed all my cartoons from the bulletin board over the time clock, That and the fact that I had, after rising to the lofty status of Assistant Manager, reached the high end of my career track at Arby's. Unless I was willing to become a whole lot more invested in menu alternatives. I moved on to a job unloading trucks for Target. How that process involved bringing order to chaos will have to wait for another day. Right now I'm hungry for a Regular roast beef sandwich, with just a squirt of Super Sauce, for entropy's sake.

In Charge

 I've been in charge a few times. 

I was pep band president when I was in high school. Much of my orchestrated tomfoolery became legend, at least for a compact group of individuals. Eventually all that anarchic energy proved to be my undoing. As it turns out, being the authority in an anti-authoritarian group is a pretty tight rope to walk. 

I climbed the ladder at Arby's all the way to closing manager. They gave me the keys to the register and a nice brown polyester vest. I enjoyed it as much as I suppose anyone could enjoy a job in fast food, and my managerial style was modeled on which I saw around me. Roast beef sandwiches with a side of silliness and never ask anyone to do a job, even cleaning the shake machine, if you haven't done it yourself. I came back from a week's vacation just as the old guard was being phased out, and a quick perusal of the back room showed me two things: I was not on the schedule for the next two weeks and all the amusing/gross cartoons I had drawn and tacked up around the bulletin boards had been removed. Aloha, Arby's. 

Eventually I found my way to a video store, a setting which suited my needs for a job during college: Flexible hours and plenty of time to watch movies. Friday and Saturday evening rushes were tolerable when balanced out with the doldrums of a Sunday afternoon. That was when I instituted "theme days," during which each employee was encouraged to pick a film from a particular category. Like "rubber suit monsters" or "sweatiest movie ever." We traded free movie rentals for pizza from the place up the sidewalk in the mall. A change in ownership made all that fun go away. 

I used all that experience to my advantage when a spot on the warehouse management team opened up. Turns out that I was the responsible one: newly sober and a newlywed, I was going to build a family out of the tiny margin that book wholesalers made. Until the employee-owned company expired under its own counterculture weight. 

Now, some thirty years into my teaching career, I still get asked, "Why didn't you ever become a principal?" Well, as you can see, I had my share of time wandering around with a clipboard, checking other people's work. Watching the intensity of the interactions between management and customers in this realm gave me pause. I don't shy away from student or parent connections, but I also know that somebody else has the office, and the metaphorical brown vest and keys to the register. I understand that offering someone a two-for-one coupon at an elementary school won't bring the same result that it used to get in fast food. I have carefully massaged my job description to be as helpful and supportive as I can possibly be just before taking on an actual title. 

And every so often, I get some leftover pizza. 

No Bones About It

 This is close to my son's heart: Buffalo Wild Wings is being sued for selling "boneless chicken wings." If your database is anything like mine, your brain just switched to a Gary Larson cartoon of a Boneless Chicken Ranch. Dozens of limp fowl laying on the ground, hanging over the fence, dangling from the sign. 

Not a pretty sight. 

But funny. 

And this is the feeling I got when I read about Aimen Halim, who purchased an order of the aforementioned "boneless wings" back in January, assuming that the "food" he had purchased would be the meat of a deboned chicken wing. At first blush, this seems like a reasonable argument, since this seems reasonable. Until you take into account where Mister Halim was standing when he chose this menu item. He was standing in a fast food establishment. He was getting these "wings" for just under a dollar apiece. The time and energy required to carefully remove the bones from a chicken wing, batter them up and fry them is astronomical compared to dumping a bag of pre-formed, breaded, processed "chicken" into a fryer and taking the time to let them cool only slightly before tossing them onto a piece of parchment paper. 

It's fast food.

Aimen might also be surprised by the fact that Arby's may or may not have the meat, but the actual "roast beef" they are serving on their sandwiches bears little to no connection to the meal your mom used to make. Depending on your mom. I have plenty of anecdotes regarding the "beef" that is cooked and served under that moniker, but I can't say that it is worth litigation. It's Arby's, for god's sake. 

Here's another anecdote, as long as we're in the neighborhood. In high school, friends would buy an order of chicken wings at an establishment called The Red Barn just to watch me eat them. Bones and all. I had made the logical leap that any "bones" left inside those deep-fried pieces of chicken had long since degraded to something easily digested, given the proper amount of chewing. 

Of course, it never occurred to me that suing The Red Barn for what would become decades of stunt eating, but then again, Mister Halim probably unaware of the case chemical engineer Ander Christensen brought before the Lincoln, Nebraska city council. His approach was a little different: “Our children are raised being afraid of bones attached to their meat. That’s where meat comes from: it grows on bones." Now if someone can just show me the anatomical chart that shows where the "nugget" is grown on a chicken.

Closing One Eye Really Fast

 "Wink" is one of those words that you rarely describe. It's so much easier to just demonstrate. Kind of like when someone asks you what a goatee is, the first thing you do is reach for your chin. But, if you have access to any one of the nearly two dozen game shows hosted by Winston Conrad Martindale, you could just show them a clip from that. For the Wink, not for the goatee. 

Young Winston Conrad chose early on in his career as a broadcaster to jam his first and middle name together, hence "Wink." This is how he was known professionally, first as a disc jockey and eventually as a game show host. 

I know what you're thinking: Doesn't he have a more than just mild disdain for game show hosts? 

Well, it's true that certain members of this fraternity have gone on to land squarely on my list of less than favorite people, but there are plenty of exceptions. Alex Trebek would be one of them. Another would be Wink. 

Not everyone knows that Wink began his career as one of the earliest supporters of the music of one Elvis Presley, becoming pals with The King Of Rock And Roll after coercing him into his first radio interview way back in 1956. It was as a DJ that Wink found his calling, sticking with radio off and on for another forty years. 

Somewhere in there, he found his way to the TV studio where he became a fixture hosting game shows of all kinds. Starting in 1964, the briefly billed "Win" Martindale asked contestants "What's This Song?" In living color. In quiet hopes that no one noticed the similarities to that other show where folks were asked to Name That Tune. 

For parts of four decades, Wink could be found somewhere on your TV dial, giving away fabulous prizes, cash, and a home version of whatever game he happened to be running. It was somewhere in his stint with Tic Tac Dough during the early 1980's that I had my degree of separation with Wink reduced to two. My good friend and trivia pal Waldo managed to land a spot as a contestant on Wink's show. He figured himself a sure-fire winner with his arcane knowledge of most everything. He had not accounted for what would happen when the lights came up and the cameras went on. Out stepped Wink. All that acquired wisdom evaporated. 

Waldo lost. But he left with a lovely parting gift: a mini-vacuum which he brought back with the tiniest bit of bravado to the back room of Arby's, where it stayed until someone noticed that we never used a vacuum at Arby's. But for a while, it stayed there as a monument to what might have been. I took the trouble to scribble Wink's "autograph" on the side of it. 

Then it was gone.

Now, so is Wink. He went to the big studio in the sky last week, passing away at the ripe old age of ninety-one. From Elvis to Waldo, Wink stomped across the airwaves. He will be missed.

Aloha, Mister Martindale!

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

 In my sixty years on the planet, I like to imagine that I have had sixty extra hours to sleep, due to all that silliness surrounding setting clocks back in the fall. This illusion disappears abruptly as soon as I remember that I have sprung forward just as many times. This sum zero equation began long before I was born, 1916 to be precise. It moved from Europe to the United States in 1918, and we have never looked back. Or forward. You understand the problem here. 

The initial thoughts surrounding the artificial movement of clocks in a coordinated effort to allow humans to walk around more in the light of day. Saving daylight, get it? Its origins can be traced back to one Benjamin Franklin, who suggested this practice to help save candles. That was before 1918, so Ben's notions fell by the wayside. Even though a number of countries hopped on the Daylight Savings Time bandwagon after successful implementation in the German Empire and Austria-Hungary. Generations of otherwise clever people have bought into the notion that they are "saving time" by pushing the hands of their clocks backward, then a few months later shoving them forward again. It's supposed to be good for us, like LIFE cereal. 

Mostly, it has created its own swirling eddy of confusion, not the least of which is how to make the most of the experience. I have very deeply embedded circadian rhythms, and the suggestion that one day I will magically awake an hour earlier because of the manipulation of all the clocks in my house is ludicrous to me. The chore of tracking down all the chronometers in and around me is enough to keep me fretting late into the night, and up early the next morning to check my work. 

The stupid clock in the car is always the last one to be reconfigured. That usually gets done within a week or so of the magical hour when the time pixies alter our existence as only they can. 

Then there's this: When I worked late night at Arby's, we were open until two in the morning, since nothing feeds hungry drunk boys more than thinly sliced "roast beef" and potato cakes. Inevitably, it was that one Saturday in late October when two o'clock suddenly marched back to one. The powers that be at the franchise office issued an edict that told us all to treat this as a "value added" hour. It was a chance to ring up an extra hour of sales, so why not keep those doors open? 

Because the only people out in search of the menu offerings at Arby's during that hour were not specifically equipped to manage their digestive systems any better than they were able to hold their alcohol. Looking back on those years, it was those few extra hours that I had tacked onto my life in brown polyester that I regret the most. 

Will I miss Daylight Savings Time? About as much as I miss a Beef 'n' Cheddar. 

Meat

 I don't make a secret out of the fact that I once worked at an Arby's. There are moments when I wear it like a badge of honor, not unlike the  name tag I wore on my polyester beef-serving tunic. It was a time in my life when I discovered that there were alternatives to college. Working in fast food gave me a window unto the world of work. Real work. Real greasy work that became the ladder upon which I climbed. All the way to the closing manager position. I did math. I carried a clipboard. Still wore a name tag. 

Which is why I have such a hard time getting upset with service employees in general. These are not the ones making the decisions about how the food they are about to consume got there. They are merely the conduit through which the grease was passing. These are the ones that took the job because, not unlike myself, it was an entry level position. They are not the ones who decided it would be a good idea for a roast beef restaurant to introduce a chicken sandwich, for example. 

Instead, these are the people who came to work one day and found that the comfortable existence they hand led with seven featured sandwiches, five beef a turkey and a ham and cheese that was cleverly renamed Hamchy, was suddenly made infinitely more difficult with the addition of NEW menu items. I was happy that I worked at a location that didn't have a fryer. No french fries. Everything went through the three ovens in the back: beef, potato cakes and turnovers. Then one day, the national office decided to roll out their version of sub sandwiches. Not only did they require a whole new set of buns, but the three varieties promoted by the corporation needed portions sliced and arranged ahead of time, including new and exotic salami and pepperoni, and their construction was more of a horizontal endeavor rather than the vertical stack to which I had become so accustomed. 

Then, shortly before my time adjacent to that big brown cowboy hat ended, the guys who owned our franchise brought in two plug-in fryers. This would be the chicken station that I had been hearing about. Hot oil was not introduced to the terrors of the workplace that had previously been limited to the razor sharp blade used to slice beef. Customer service remained mostly unchanged, but pity the poor sandwich maker and the now seemingly endless combinations of tasks involved in filling just one order. All of it made to order. Extra cheese? No problem. Horsey Sauce instead of Super Sauce? No worries. Double toast that bun? Why not?

So I fled. I left that world behind, but the memories/scars are always just below the surface. A few years back when I started hearing Ving Rhames announce that Arby's has the meats, it made me sad for all those folks who had just received their name tags and were thrust into a job where there were now dozens of menu selections, all of which could be specialized at the point of purchase. And only recently, the place that used to proudly announce itself as an alternative to the hamburger has now enthusiastically joined the ground beef ranks. Now Ving is shilling Waygu Steakhouse burgers. 

And I suspect that a whole new group of name tags were just turned in, leaving to find a job that didn't require so much thought. Like teaching. 

Special Orders

 I talked to a lot of parents last week. Not one of them was outwardly upset with me or the school for which I work about starting the year with distance learning. If there was an undercurrent of tension, it was felt primarily in the way they approached the technological hoops through which they were asked to jump. By the second day of school, I had parent trooping back to my station, Mister Caven's Computer Corner, where they would huff and pull out the loaned Chromebook they had borrowed for their child to use and puff something to the tune of "This doesn't work."

Suddenly, I was projected back to another time. A time when I waited on customers who wanted Arby's Roast Beef sandwiches. Inevitably, no more than once a day, one of those customers would wait in line for a second time to let me know that their sandwich was not up to par. Their suggested solution to this problem was that I would ask the person behind the meat slicer to make them a new one. Which, to this day, seems hysterical to me. The chances of us making an identically subpar sandwich within the minutes that it took to make the first one sit somewhere squarely at one hundred percent. Conditions being what they are, in a fast food restaurant during lunch rush, you're probably not going to get anything on the epicurean spectrum. You're going to get Arby's. Straight up. 

Back in the present, the parent who stands before me is asking me to solve their technology issues, which tend to be using the correct password. Or turning the machine on. Or in some cases, having a connection to Al Gore's Internet. This is what they are asking for outwardly, but somewhere just below the surface I can see the stress and anxiety that is weighing them down. They are parents. Not teachers. They have been cooped up in their homes with one or more children for five months and there is no quick end in sight. Desperation has begun to set in. 

One parent asked me, after I had practiced signing her daughter in to her Chromebook, "When will this end?" I chose not to play coy. I told her that the neighborhood we live in is one of the bright red ones on the COVID-19 map. "Do you think it's real?" she asked in the same defeated tone. I told her that I know that it is real, and I wish that I had a light to shine at the end of the tunnel. I wanted to reassure her with a date or a number of weeks that everything would return to normal. 

But I didn't have that to give. 

So I made her another roast beef sandwich and sent her on her way.  

Franchismo

Franchises. I have worked for a few. I have entertained and enthralled dozens with my tales of the back room at Arby's. I got a name tag for that. And a nice brown vest. With a pocket in which I kept the keys to the register. After a stint at Target, where I was not even required to wear one of those hokey red vests, I found myself ensconced in the rarefied air of a locally owned video store. Customers knew my by name, thus badges were not necessary.  They knew me by reputation. I was the guy they could go to for advice about movies they had never seen, but was disposed to rolling my eyes whenever I was asked "what'snewthat'sgoodthat'sinthatIhaven'tseenyet?" You want to see what everyone else is watching? Be my guest. Sigh.
And I got away with that. For a while. Until our store was sold away to a lawyer from out of town who had it in his head that owning a video store might be a fun way to spend his time because practicing law turned out to be an awful lot of work. The lawyer turned us into a National Video franchise store. If you haven't heard of them, that's okay since they went belly up not long after the store in which I worked passed away quietly back in the late 1980's. It may have been the overhead. All those blue polyester shirts. And name tags.
So I know a few things about franchises. Which is probably why I had to click on the story whose headline read, "Vin Diesel Says The 'Fast and Furious' Franchise Will End After Three More Films." First of all, from Vin's lips to my ears, right? And it also got me thinking about what it must be like for him and the rest of the F&F crew to work for a franchise. It's probably a little different than my experience at Arby's, and even though I like to think of my video store experience as part of my film career, I don't guess that Mister Diesel is required to wear a name tag while he is on set. If you're curious, by the way, three more "Fast" films will bring the total to ten. Not content to stand on lucky number seven, probably because of the less-than-lucky fate of the late Paul Walker, And that one made a hemi-powered drone full of cash, so why not make them until that particular stone has been wrung dry?
The first episode in this saga roared across movie screens in 2001, and there has been a nearly constant biennial stream of fast cars and tough talk coming from the producers of this series ever since. That will mean that this franchise will last a little over twenty years. Nice work, if you can get it, even if it doesn't come with a nice blue polo shirt.

Pro-letariat

When I was a member of the Board of Directors at an employee owned book warehouse, I became enamored of the phrase: living document. What this meant was that if we made some decision or edict and put it into our corporation's bylaws, we always felt safe telling our shareholders, who were also our employees, that it was a "living document." This meant that anytime we wanted we could go back and change our minds. To be more precise, that should be "when our shareholders changed their minds." I was not much of a politician in those days. I tended to bend far too easily to the winds that blew hot and fierce through the warehouse. And in the offices. I was already keenly aware of the division between "labor" and "management," but this was the first time i had encountered a tiered division of responsibility. At Arby's, I took orders, made sandwiches, pulled potato cakes out of the oven, and cleaned the shake machine just like everyone else even though I wore a brown vest and carried a key to the cash register. When I unloaded trucks for Target, even though I was nominally the supervisor of our crew, I crawled into the back of the trailer to grab those Cabbage Patch dolls that were desperately needed out on the sales floor. When I ran a video store, I came in early and stayed late. I operated chiefly as "one of them," but I had this other job to do.
That was the money part. I got more money because I was counting money. I was responsible. If something was missing or didn't get done, I was the one who got the call. I was responsible. This trait worked for me, at least in terms of moving quickly from the entry level positions to the spot with a clipboard. This was what I learned from my friend Waldo. He was a District Manager for Arby's. He was in charge of three stores. That meant he traveled in his company Volvo from store to store on any given day, checking in on us all. He still made sandwiches and pulled burned potato cakes out of the oven, and he gave some of the best customer service to people who just wanted fast food I have ever experienced: "And how many cherry turnovers would you like with that today? That will be only two dollars and forty-nine cents." But when the lunch rush was over, he repaired to the back room where he had his coffee with two milks, grabbed a clipboard and pursued what he described as "creative management." This was the part of the day that he separated himself from the brown polyester masses. We knew not to bother him during these times. Was he busy making a schedule? Was he forecasting sales? Was he trying to remember the hieroglyphic doodles he made during his brief college flirtation with Egyptology? It didn't matter. He was, at that point, the boss.
I tried to remember this as I moved into my management position at the book warehouse. I tried to find time to wander about with my clipboard, but I was far too easily distracted by the work that was going on around me. I was also aware of the way warehouse workers viewed their counterparts on the other side of the wall. Where there was carpet. And climate control. And jobs that involved sitting. Over the years I trained a number of great book pickers and packers who eventually worked their way out from under my thumb and found themselves in swivel chairs answering phones or looking at clipboards of their own. This schism was felt most keenly when we met as shareholders, office and warehouse all crammed into the lunch room at the end of a long day. As a member of the Board of Directors and a warehouse guy I was envisioned by many as the voice of the worker. Or maybe that was just me. That meant when the vote came down from on high to consider hiring a General Manager, a CEO, I found myself in the position of being the swing vote. Our employee company had been run for decades without that top-heavy level of management. We were all in this together, weren't we? Would I be the one who twisted the dial, turned the knob and signed his name to this change in the way things had always been?
All of that life experience flowed through my mind as the case was made by Phil, the head of our Board. I looked out at the faces of my constituency and felt this tiny surge of democracy come over me. When it was my turn to speak, I said this: "I hate to break ranks here, but," and then I proceeded to have my five minutes of Jimmy Stewart monologue. It was as sincere as anything I have written or said in my life, and when I was done I felt two sets of eyes on me: the ones who agreed with me and the ones who didn't. Those who didn't ended up outnumbering those who did, and we ended up hiring the great big manager, who ended up spending a great deal of time in his office, looking at a clipboard. I was out in the warehouse, picking and packing books alongside my employees. I never did get that whole division of labor thing.

Funny Man

 The thought of telling jokes for a living stalls out with the memory of standing in front of a couch full of stoned Arby's employees. I was the new guy, but I was definitely the funniest one at the party. 

Or so I was lead to believe. By the voices inside my head. I was always making people laugh at work. Certainly my reputation as a class clown was cemented during my senior year in high school. Why wouldn't that continue on into my twenties? 

The lesson I learned that night was about being on stage. When you are presenting to a crowd, even a half dozen wrecked fast food workers, the expectations are different. I was not clear on that when I took my position in front of the coffee table to deliver what I assumed would be a killer set about being wasted on the job. It could have been that the material wasn't that good. I had not spent an adequate amount of time working up my routine beforehand. Like no time at all. I was making it up on the spot. I was, as the pros say, "riffing." To a couch full of blank stares. 

What I had not taken into account, but I realize now some forty years later, was the intrinsic difference between standing next to someone in a classroom or at the counter of a roast beef sandwich emporium gives you an anti-authority edge. The funny bits are coming from an unexpected angle. Who talks back to their Elementary Functions teacher? Who takes sarcastic glee in someone ordering two Beef 'n' Cheddars, potato cakes, a cherry turnover and a large Diet Pepsi? Who cracks wise when the situation is not specifically designed for such japery? 

Me. Me and a whole slew of funny people throughout history who were never able to make it past open mic night, or get their own sit-com. Or make a bunch of stoned Arby's employees crack a smile. 

Every few years my wife will wonder aloud why I never became a professional comedian. The simplest answer comes from just how sour those grapes turned out to be. The longer version has something to do with that story I just related along with my lack of understand of the gulf between being a wiseacre and a comedian. 

Or a guy who writes a daily blog. 

Infinite Combinations? Thank You, No

Oreos.
Milk's favorite cookie.
The reason I don't mind sitting for fifteen minutes in the canteen after I donate blood.
The number one selling cookie in the United States.
Why mess with it?
I ask this because of Pumpkin Spice Oreos. Mini Oreos. Football shaped Oreos. Double Stuf Oreos. Big Stuf Oreos. Mega Stuf Oreos. Golden Mega Stuf Oreos. And the list goes on. Triple Double Oreo. Triple Double Neapolitan Oreos. Triple Double Chocolate Mint Oreos. 
As you can see, we have begun to stray far afield from the traditional  creme filled chocolate cookie sandwich. Orange Ice Cream? Blueberry Ice Cream? This is not Baskin Robbins, this is Nabisco. Or Mondelez International, if you're keeping corporate score. Before that, they were one of the Philip Morris Companies, but since milk doesn't have a favorite cigarette, things got shuffled. 
It has only been in the past ten years or so that this need to generate permutations of a favorite. With the possible exception of the amount of "Stuf" inside, Oreos have been pretty much the same for more than one hundred years. 
Why are we suddenly so challenged by our snack food attention? 
I can remember when I went to work at Arby's, back in the mid-eighties. I was a happy and proud purveyor of America's Roast Beef, Yes Sir! I became proficient at making the basic menu of sandwiches: Junior, Regular and the Super. Each came on a bun regulated by its name and size, and the Beef 'n'Cheddar with it's onion bun and cheese goop required mild additional attention. For those who showed up at a roast beef restaurant craving something other than roast beef, we offered the Hamchy (microwaved ham and Swiss cheese) and the Turkey (a cold sandwich without a clever name). Somewhere in my third year of working in the brown polyester world of fast food, it became important to create more variety in the menu. That's when the Subs showed up. Not long after that, we brought in a fryer for boiling chicken planks in grease. Not long after that, I left that world for good. I could not abide by all of those non-beef items being sold under the guise of Arby's. 
I have a similar feeling as I stand in the cookie aisle and look at all those "Oreos." 
What hath we wrought?

Patronizing

I used to work late night at an Arby's in Boulder, Colorado. This provided me with money to subsidize my parent's generous gift of putting me through school as well as a series of life experiences that have put me in good stead for lo these past forty-ish years. Hungry drunk boys who came in looking for "food" who could barely speak the words "Beef 'n'Cheddar." Lost pilgrims looking for A) Mork's House or B) The Boulder Dam. But one of the Arby's moments that sticks with me the most did not occur on one of those hazy late nights. Sometimes I worked the lunch shift. An entirely different beast.
Working the counter at a fast food restaurant during the hours of eleven in the morning to one in the afternoon is no sprint. It's a marathon, and you have to pace yourself. Most days, it was hard to see the five booths we had for seating in our lobby because the crowd was so thick, lined up for their meaty treats. Two to three customers in two to three minutes was our expectation, and the best of us could do even more if we were in our best form. And eventually, the siege was over, and it was time to wipe things down. "Dave, go grab a lobby," came the order from my manager behind the slicer. I grabbed a sponge on my way through the back room, out and around to the lobby where the debris was piling up. Wipe this, that, and check the trash bins, making sure that there were no large chunks of "roast beef" left beneath the tables. Nope. Good.
What's this? A business card? Some IBMer left his credentials as a lopsided thank you for that speedy service? No.
"You have been patronized by the KKK," read the card. I stopped my hustle and bustle and read the card again. This was Boulder after all, recently described by Newsweek magazine as the place "Where the hip meet to trip." This was not something I expected to find while scouring a fast food lobby and scooping waste in the direction of the trash.
Trash. The Invisible Empire. I carried the card with me into the back room, set down my sponge and made a point to pin the card to the bulletin board above the manager's desk. It stayed there for a week or two, inviting a good deal of comment from my fellow employees. It also stayed on my mind each time I found myself on the other side of the counter, trying to imagine the face or faces of the person or persons who dropped that ugly reminder. I had heard stories from old-timers about how they had been held up and how their initial terror had become a story to tell young Tuna like myself. I wasn't terrified, but I told the story to anyone who would listen way back then.
And I'm telling it again here because the Ku Klux Klan continues to exist. Announced appearances of this hate group continue to draw many times the number of counter-protesters than those in the bed sheets and pointy hats. Those are the ones we can see. The frightening thing is that they continue to exist at all, and continue to spout their racist screed to anyone who will listen. And there are much worse groups showing up in their wake. Imperial Wizards and Grand Dragons have given way to Proud Boys and Boogaloos. These idjits don't want to be invisible. They want to be the news.
That's scary.