Daily Reflections

09/15/2022

Never Use Timer Four

An Employee asked me how to start the timer on the oven. I honestly didn’t know. To my recollection, I have never used any of the timers on any of the large convection ovens we have ever owned. I have, however, used our cartoonishly large 4 channel timer for all these years. From the side, it looks like a giant board game piece. Plain grey plastic. From the front it resembles the kind of toy calculator one might by for a toddler. An absurd thing, beeping loudly at random, all day in the kitchen. Channel one beeps at one beep per second. Channel two, at two per second and so on.

Now, timer channel four at full volume sounds like R2-D2 covering a Chipmunks song on Karaoke night. But less tolerable.

Channel four is banned in the kitchen. And oddly, not because of how obnoxious it is to hear. Well, sort of for that reason. Because that sound almost killed me.

It is well known enough to be an inoffensive stereotype that kitchen folk like to mess with each other. A particularly common and fun game to play is the new guy scavenger hunt. It’s a simple game. You send the new guy looking for a kitchen utensil that doesn’t not exist. It might go something like this:

“Hey, new guy, go grab the squeegee sharpener before you do the floors.”

Variations exist, much like beer pong, according to local house rules. They may include, sending the new guy for increasingly ridiculous nonexistent utensils until the new guy figures it out. In this case, new guy would be sent to retrieve this squeegee sharpener from a specific cohort. This cohort must first be able to explain why new guy can’t have the item and send him back with the news to the initiator of the round with an escalatingly stupid item request. It might go somewhat like this:

“Hey, chef asked me to grab the squeegee sharpener from you.”

“Oh, Christ, we broke that thing last week. Can you kindly remind him that he needs to order us a new one? While, you are at it, can you tell him we peeled too many eggs for the chef salad, and I need to borrow his egg re-sheller?”

The idea is to see how long it takes new guy to realize he’s being toyed with. This accomplishes two things. One, stress relief and a good laugh. (Don’t feel too bad for new guy. If it’s a good round, he might spend half his shift paid to do nothing). Second, and perhaps more important. You can very easily gauge how much kitchen sense new guy possesses and thus determine how much training is needed.

Still other variations include the ludicrous task and the phantom room. Examples are as follows

“Hey, you gotta sec? they didn’t empty the coffee machine last night after service, can you do that quick, before tonight’s rush?”

(Note: most commercial coffee makers have a dedicated hot water line to them, how many 5-gallon buckets will they fill before beginning to wonder?)

Or

“I totally ordered that new squeegee sharpener, its in the basement go grab it please, it’s on the shelf to the left at the bottom of the stairs.”

(Note: there are no stairs, no shelf. No basement. And if you can get new guy to search for the trap door in the mop room that leads to the phantom place…double points)

To be sure, there are other, crueler games and pranks. Line cooks, in my experience can be particularly creative. Most of it is fair game, so long as one doesn’t pop the Ansul system or piss off a customer. Timer 4, however, is off limits in my shop. This is a mild trauma response to be certain.

It was Summer, 1998. A fine day for a drive and I didn’t feel like being stuck in the shop. I offered to take a delivery to the oncology clinic out of town. Marshfield, about 30ish miles. I figured, nice short drive, a little steering wheel microphone jam session on the way and grab a nice lunch while waiting to pick up the Taco buffet from the break room. Head Nurse Rita was a cranky old lady, but damn if she didn’t run a tight ship in oncology and I could set my watch by her itinerary for outside food drop off and pick up. There wasn’t much to do for prep work anyway. But I think the crew saw through my burgeoning lazy streak.

I should have known when they offered to load everything for me, that something was up.

There are three little towns along the highway en route to Marshfield; Junction city, Blenker and Middleton. While these all sound like settlement names in Fallout 4, I assure they are real. Particularly the last. For, it was Middleton still in my rearview (all two gas stations, Church and matching tavern lining the highway behind me) when it went off.

Those bastards set that timer for forty-five minutes or so, I figured. Enough time to almost get where I was going and accounting for the time it sat in the van before I left. It would take time for me to come to appreciate the forethought in this act. Not exactly Jim Halpert progressively adding nickels to the phone forethought, but still…well done indeed. That much I will concede upon reflection. However, in that immediate moment when R2 began wailing its rendition of “The Chipmunks sing Ramstein”, it was far too sudden and alarming. Especially at sixty-seven miles per hour.

Did you know that one can slam on the brakes of a Ford Aerostar van with no seats in the back and get the whole windsail of a body to sway like a rocking chair? Such an action might, if one is not careful, force you to steer into the skid a bit and wind up in the ditch. I was not careful. Nor was I yet in the right mind frame to appreciate all the thought that went into this prank when color returned to my knuckles, and I realized what the sound actually was.

Nor was I yet in the right head space when I realized where it was coming from. These clever bastards hadn’t just tossed it under the seat. Hadn’t tucked into the cart lying on its side in the back. No. they carefully placed it at the very bottom of a large, wrapped basket underneath two dozen fresh fried taco salad shells.

I assumed it was twenty-four shells when I checked over my sheet before I left. Saw the basket and was reasonably sure that’s how many there were. But this was verified as I carefully took them out of the basket one by one to reach the damn timer. Interminable minutes with that blasted thing screaming at me on the side of a fairly busy highway leaned over the basket in the open side door of the van.

A fine prank, and much like mom or dad taking the ball away once you’ve punched a hole in the wall or window, channel four was banned from use. As was full volume. I still jump, just a little if I’m standing too close to it when it goes off on any of the other three channels. But one isn’t really part of the gang until one has been toyed with a little.