He is a young man laying in a hospital bed after a car accident. He hit an abutment or a pole going 80 mph or so.
His body is still alive; his brain is dead. He’s not coming back. His parents are just now signing the papers to donate his eyes and heart and lungs and liver. They are mourning already.
And they have no idea what I’ve just done.
I’ve surreptitiously turned off his ventilator; I know how. And I have held a pillow over his face and suffocated him. It takes less time then you think. The young man is dead.
I’ve heard it said by those who have eaten people that the flesh around the knuckles taste best. I’ve taken that as my advice, tied a tourniquet around his upper arm (I know he’s dead, but I’m hoping that this will reduce any oozing) and began my dissection at the elbow. I plan on making a stew.
It goes slower than I anticipate and know that soon someone will come in the room and around the curtain and catch me in the act. When I get caught (and how the hell is anyone going to get away with crap like this?), I’m going to say:
My friend at Whistle & Fish “dislikes most memes.” He finds the questions soft and unenlightening. He thinks he knows better (and maybe he does), so he’s posed five questions of his own.
His first question: If you had to kill and eat someone, who would it be and why?
Let me get the joke out of the way: That question is distasteful.
I thought long and hard on it, and found it odd that I have a stronger aversion to killing someone than eating him. Killing is hard; eating is easier.
I developed the above scenario thinking that the death of a person almost always impacts more than one life. When a close relative or friend dies the effects ripple through the rest of our lives. In this imaginary scenario, I didn’t want to be the cause of lifelong grief. I figured I would have to kill someone already close to death.
But I would want to eat someone young and tender, not old and gristly. For some reason, I prefer to eat a male over a female. I think it has something to do with my very paternalistic bent.
So when the time came to complete the task. I combed the local papers looking for that teenager who crashed his car and is on life support, whose family is in the process of removing said support. Sure, I would kill him, but he’d already be dead.
Did I cop out? Find a loophole in the question? Some would think I did, but I don’t think so. The reason my friend asked the question was to elicit thought and story. I believe I just gave one.
And there are four more questions left. I plan being as obtuse with those as I was with this.
This is the final installment of the Me-me-meme. Thank God.
By rule, I’m supposed to tell you about two more jobs that I have had. Again, this is my website and I’ll do it my way, rules be damned.
For the better part of the last decade-and-a-half, I have worked as a clinical geriatric rehabilitation specialist. My role is to make sure that elderly people entrusted into my care are functioning at their highest level. Some of my patients are long-term care (nursing home residents), but the bulk of my work are senior citizens who have gotten ill, went to the hospital, and need some therapy before returning home.
Over the years I’ve worked for two national rehabilitation companies, one local rehabilitation company, and a privately owned senior housing chain. My roles have been as Rehabilitation Director in several buildings, Regional Manager supervising Rehab Directors, Case Manager, and Corporate Director of Rehabilitation Operations for the private company.
Instead of boring you with job descriptions, I’m going to tell you about a lovely woman I met along the way. She was my favorite resident ever:
Claire. Oh, Claire.
Claire was a completely demented woman who lived in the first nursing home I ever worked in. She couldn’t care for herself at all. She was incontinent. She couldn’t feed herself. She couldn’t carry on a conversation, let alone make her basic needs known.
Claire, however, could walk. And walk. And walk.
The long-term healthcare industry calls someone like Claire “a wanderer.” They wander all over the nursing home. Personally, I feel sorry for these people. I always have a feeling that they are seeking something - something from deep in their past, something in their residual memories. Most wanderers like Claire, I think, are looking for their babies.
Their babies are grown. Many have died of old age. But you dare not tell them that. They don’t know that their babies (or husband or mother) have died, and when you tell them it’s the first time they’ve ever heard it (remember, they are demented and by definition, they live in the past in their residual memories).
I want you to go back and remember the first time you heard about a loved one dying. It was devastating. It is more devastating to someone with dementia, because they are lost and have no one.
But I digress.
Claire was a wonderful old woman. She had an infectious smile but, more often than not, her smile was just to disarm you so that she could wander on past you.
But every now and then, she’d stop and look deep into your eyes. And then she’d smile, punch you gently in the shoulder and say, “You’re a cracker. You’re a cracker-crack-cracker.”
And you knew it. You were “the cracker.” Claire said so, and you told everyone who would listen. Because Claire, somehow and someway - magically, reached through her dementia and touched you. Her heart touched yours.
You were “the cracker.” You wanted the world to know. She had that effect.
I miss Claire. I miss being “the Cracker.”
This is Part II of the Final Installment of the Me-me-meme.
I had to quit my job at the hospital so that I could go to school. While in school I worked as a driver for Clayton Surgical.
Clayton Surgical had two drivers: me and Duane. Duane looked like he belonged to an outlaw biker club, but he was a simple man. A wee bit of a “slow adult.” He was in his late-30s and worked for Mr. Clayton since high school.
Duane was loyal to a fault to Mr. Clayton. “Duane, stop at the 7-11. I want to grab a cup of coffee.”
“No way,” Duane would say. “Mr. Clayton says we have to make these deliveries this morning. We have no time to stop. Besides, what am I going to write on my log?”
“Just write, ‘Stopped to get coffee for Jim.’”
Nope. Not Duane. I’m not sure if he was afraid to lose his job, or afraid to let Mr. Clayton down. I think the latter.
Regardless, I made him stop. He’d drop me off and I’d get my coffee. He made a couple of stops.
He didn’t lose his job. Neither did I. As a matter of fact, I got a promotion.
Mr. Clayton expanded to three stores and an off-site warehouse with custom wheelchair shop. I managed the warehouse/shop. We still had two drivers, but we also had three shop guys and two custom seating salesmen. These, suddenly, were my guys. And it was my first management job.
I’ve told several stories about working in that warehouse:
All those are great stories, but I’d like to tell you about the Demerit Board.
I’ve tried to institute the Demerit Board in almost every job I’ve ever had since. It never worked. But with this crew at this particular time, it worked perfectly. Perfectly.
We had a little kitchen in our shop. Every Friday after work, Mr. Clayton let us stick around and knock back some beers. Everybody in the shop would stick around. It was a great time to tell stories and jokes and bust-nuts. We had a great time. It was team building, but not quite at its finest.
Team building at its finest was the Demerit Board. The Demerit Board was hung in the shop. Everyone’s name was on it: the drivers, the shop workers, the salesman, and mine. Anytime anyone made a mistake in his job anybody else could ascribe a demerit to him and put a check next to his name on the board. There was no arguing. If you got a demerit, you got a demerit. Fair or not fair, it policed itself.
On Friday, whoever had the most demerits would have to buy and get the beer.
We had the cleanest, safest shop on the planet. Orders were placed on time. Shipments hit the shelves quickly. Weekly inventory was done on time. Everything hit on all cylinders. It was a manager’s nirvana.
For a long time I never bought the beer. One Friday, while cleaning up, Woolly Bear realized this and said, “Fuck it. Jim, you’re buying the beer this week.”
“But I have only one demerit,” I protested.
He walked up to the board and hit it with 10 or 15 slashes. “Not anymore.”
Them’s the rules. I bought the beer.
:::
I’m counting that as two jobs: one company, two jobs. I only have two left to go.
This is Part I of the final installment of the Me-me-meme.
My first real job was as a busboy at The Whistle Stop (aka “The Weasel Slop”) in Seaside Heights, NJ. I worked the breakfast and lunch runs. The oft mentioned Unky Rich worked the dinner run. Several other friends worked there too.
I was 16-years-old when Nan dropped me off. There was a short, skinny man with a cheesy mustache holding a kid by his neck when I walked across the parking lot. The kid’s feet weren’t touching the ground. The little man was reading him the riot act, something about stealing tips.
The little man was Jimmy the Weasel, owner of The Whistle Stop. The kid was the ex-busboy. I was the new busboy, a very concerned busboy.
Jimmy the Weasel was nice to me. He quickly showed me the ropes. “Clean the tables. Clean the dishes. Do what the waitresses and cooks tell you to do. Don’t steal tips.” Got it.
I only saw Jimmy the Weasel once after that. He was paying off a health inspector.
I had a lot of adventures there:
:::
My next real employer (I don’t count under-the-table jobs) was Community Medical Center. I had several jobs there: Dietary Worker, Transport Orderly, and Traction Orderly.
In Dietary, I built up my skill set: I learned to clear trays, mop floors, deliver food trucks, pour hot beverages, all sorts of cool things. But the pinnacle of my dietary career was when I started working Late Pots.
Late Pots.
In order to be chosen for Late Pots, you had to prove yourself to the Gods of the Dietary Department. You had to, over the course of time, show that you were able and worthy. Even the young dietary hens looked up to the boy, nay! the Man!, who worked Late Pots.
This was the most hellacious job in the whole hospital — next to the guy who had to clean the goo that fell onto the surgical suite floors. You had exactly 4 hours to complete 6+ hours worth of work. Go!
There was no time for adventure. Or even a break. Or even time to ask for help. Night Pots had to hand-clean every cooking vessel and utensil used by the myriad of cooks that day, and he had to clean the slicers. And the fucking cooks hoarded every fucking pot until the end of the day releasing them in one cavalcade of tin, copper, and stainless steel (as such, Early Pots may have been the easiest post in the department - as there were precious few things to clean).
This was what night pots did for four hours: Beg cooks for pots. Soak pots. Scrub pots. Rinse pots. Soak pots in special solution that killed bacteria and turned the dirty, not-quite-clean areas of said pots purple. Re-scrub not-quite-clean pots. Repeat.
Just when you thought you were done, a cook would grab several just cleaned pots to cook something else. Repeat.
Repeat.
Clean slicers.
Repeat.
If you were very lucky (and very far behind), the Late Cleaner (he of the having four hours to complete two hours worth of work) would come help. However, the Code of Late Pots declared that you were not allowed to directly ask for assistance. Nor could you cry about being behind.
About all you could do was publicly curse the cooks using the most profane language. This was nearly the only respite of Late Pots. I say “nearly” because there was also the DuoFoam Bomb.
The DuoFoam Bomb.
The Dietary Department had an industrial line-type dishwasher to clean cups, dishes, and eating utensils. A loader would load dirty dishes on one end, 15-feet later, sparkling clean dishes would come out the other end. The Loader ran this assembly line operation with orchestrated precision. He was King.
Late Pots doesn’t have time for Kings.
Late Pots had a concentrated foaming agent at his disposal: DuoFoam. A single drop of DuoFoam could create a boat-load of white cleaning foam in a properly agitated sink. Imagine what a cup full could do in an industrial dishwasher.
This was the DuoFoam Bomb. When pulled off, it was beautiful. I’ve seen the dishwasher room fill four-feet high with foam. I’m choked up just thinking about it.
The trick was to get the Bomb in the beginning of the line without the Loader noticing. This way the Bomb would run the entire length of the machine, spilling massive amounts of foam everywhere.
The only person who could pull off the DuoFoam Bomb with no repercussions was Late Pots. The Loader had utmost respect for Late Pots and understood the need for the occasional DuoFoam Bomb — it kept the Late Pots guy from snapping and using slicer blades on the cooks.
I’ve seen one Late Cleaner try a DuoFoam Bomb. That Late Cleaner was taken out by the compactor and, well, threatened with compaction. He was dutifully terminated as a show of respect to the Loader and Late Pots.
The Late Cleaner played a pivotal role in the DuoFoam Bomb operation though. Generally, he was the distraction. In the best plans it was he that diverted the Loaders attention so that Late Pots could toss the Bomb.
The DuoFoam Bomb is silent. Pressure causes foam to weep slowly through the side door joints. The Loader, concentrating on his precision task, does not see this weeping. Late Pots knowingly giggles.
The weeping suddenly becomes a rage of foam as the Bomb is hit hard by a sprayer. Foam pours from both ends of the machine. The Loader quickly jumps from his seat, hits the big red emergency off button, and opens all the doors.
Too late. The damage is done.
Cascading. Beautiful. Foam.
:::
Postscript: You would think the Loader would be angry. Generally, it was the opposite. You didn’t become the Loader without graduating through Late Pots. Every Loader has thrown a DuoFoam Bomb. The Loader understands.
An hour after everyone has left, in the murky silence, you can sometimes see the recently DouFoamed Loader standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Late Pots as they soak, scrub, and rinse the very last slicer.
Before O’Reilly realized that he had opinions, he was a talking head for Inside Edition. In this clip he takes a shit-fit because his boss wanted him to read, “… to play us out” and he has no idea what it means.
Could you ever act like this at work? When the boss tells you to do something that you didn’t understand, how do you react?
Just read the freaking teleprompter, Bill.
Just do your job, you hump.
All that said, I find this very entertaining. It’s a shame that they didn’t just play these outtakes at the end of the show instead of the Sting video.
I know all you hep-cats probably saw it already. It’s news to me.
Yes, I called Bill O’Reilly a hump. And I kinda like the guy.
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I am a relative of Mary, Queen of Scots and King James I of England. Don't get too impressed; on the other side of the family my grandfather died in a carnival accident. I am of KINGS & carnies. more»
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