A disillusioned college student. A part time summer job. Hashbrowns by the carton.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

Casa de Waffle

Bon chance y'all. I'm outta here. Actually I reckon I'm still going to be blogging about WaHo from time to time. But as of today (I picked up my last paycheck this afternoon at the shift change at 2) I am no longer an employee of the Waffle House. Le sigh.

I am now a former employee of the waffle house. And I will be able to look back fondly and with whimsy upon my days as a grill operator. That was fun. Gosh the past tense can be a real comfort sometimes.

Short paragraphs are fun.

I invite you to read my past entries if this is your first time visiting grisandeggs.blogspot.com. They are becoming fewer and further between these days, but it's ok. だいじょぶですよ, as they say in Japan.

My last day was uneventful. I really had that 2nd shift cooking thing down to a science, man. I knew exactly what I was doing, what needed to be done when, what I could get away with leaving for somebody else to do. And I only actually worked there for maybe 45 days total. It's hard damn work though. And that ain't no joke. Respect your waiters and waitresses and short-order cooks, I implore you! They are some of the hardest working folks for the money they make that you will ever meet. I need to backtrack a bit here: I guess I'm not trying to glorify what I did for 45 days this summer, but rather to raise awareness (maybe?) about the folks that do this 5 or 6 days a week. every week of the year for US$2.50/hour. (that's a waitress salary before tips)

I have the luxury of being able to duck in and out of this world of minimum wages pretty much at will. I mean, I'm a college student. Mommy and Daddy are pretty much paying for everthing right now. So, I don't know where that puts me. I don't know what that means. But it feels kind of weird. I'm still not sure exactly what "The Waffle House Experience" will mean for me in the long run.

I was emailing a commentor on this blog recently about what she called "The Waffle House Experience," and what I kept coming back to was the "people"--that nebulous, almost smarmy sounding word from the world of used car commercials. You usually hear people on commercials talking about "the people" in the same sentence as things like "value" or sometimes in political ads "values." So, at the risk of sounding like a used car-salesman-turned-local-politician, I will say that after working at Waffle House for 45 days, I have really come to "value" the "people" there. Not just the other grill operators and salespeople (the cooks and waitresses) but also the regular folks who come in there EVERY SINGLE DAY. I'm talking about Jack and 'Nita, Gayle, Dick, Jerry, everybody from the WNC Farmers Market, folks from Enka-Candler... the list goes on. Kudos to you, the heart of the Waffle House Experience.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Whoops!

Seems like my last couple of posts have been swallowed up by the internet deity as pennance for some html sins I unwittingly comitted. Sorry, folks. I swear I've updated this thing at least twice since june 29th!

Actually yesterday was my last day. I'll want to write about that eventually. Also, my boss decided he'd quit yesterday too. Yeah, the one who just had a baby/shotgun wedding (C'est amour, non?). Actually the post about the shotgun wedding/baby may have been swallowed up too. Hrmph. I'll need to revisit those warm and fuzzy thoughts I reckon. So, stay tuned!

Also, this blog now has a link from the Waffle House Shrine! I feel so much more legitimate now! Thanks Kamran! (His website has been around since 1996 when he was a Duke Freshman, and I was a wee sixth-grader. Gosh, those were the days.)

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

More Writing about the Waffle House

I've still got to finish my "shift in the life" series. I'm not sure when I'll get around to that. I hate to say it but these last couple of days working at the WaHo have been downright dull. It isn't as if we haven't sold a lot of food. It's been really busy a couple of days. But I guess the sheen of it all has been smudged by frequent use. There's bacon grease on what was once the emmaculate face of my grill experience. The past is clogged and obscured with waffle batter, and the future is but an eggy film slowly turning greenish brown in the summer heat. I am living day to day in a world dominated by hashbrowns, and noisy waitresses who can't stop complaining about their singularly strange lives. Honestly it's not the cooking and cleaning I mind so much as I mind interacting with those crazy women... some mothers, some divorcees, some drug addicts of one degree or another, all complainers. Complaints are what seem to keep these women going. It's only a matter of time before I end up on somebody's list of complaints. I'm living in fear. It's an annoying way to live. Additionally, it seems the complainers attitude has rubbed off on me. Fuck.

I went out drinking with a couple of waitresses and their boyfriends and roommates the other night. That was interesting. One girl got completely sloppy clobbered on bud light. I thought she was a complainer sober! Sheesh. She wouldn't stop. We ended up at Denny's where I was introduced to some cocaine-dealer friends of theirs, and we all split a couple orders of nachos, chili fries and fried cheeze mmm mm good! I will most likely elaborate on these experiences in the future.

Also, last week I worked with a woman who wore clown makeup. I don't think she intended to look like a clown but, that was the achieved effect I'm afraid. The lengths people will go to defy their age are sometimes astonishing. And when cosmetic surgery is (for whatever reason) not an option, the results of such heavy applications of pale powders, burnt rouges and scary-as-hell eye-liner is, well... scary as hell. I will say one thing, the makeup lady, was not a complainer. In fact, she was a hard worker. She kept the dishwasher going full speed ahead. She got all of her sidework done ahead of schedule, which is a good deal more than I can say for just about any complaining waitress. She barely said a word to me the whole shift other than to ask me where the whisks or the skillets were kept or something like that.

So there you go.

One last thing, our Juke Box runs on vinyl records! How cool (outdated) is that. The Juke Box maintenance guy even gave me three records from it when he came in yesterday. The only problem is, I don't have a vinyl record player. So, if anyone wants any Waffle House vinyl just holler.

Monday, June 20, 2005

Bad Depression-era Bildungsroman

I just got off work and spent the money I earned in tips getting into the dance hall for the last couple of numbers--mostly waltzes, not really my style. Then when the dances were over I sat staring dreamily at the stage as the musicians were packing up their instruments. The girl that I came to meet stood me up. (Not really, but that's what it felt like.) I slowly eased off my threadbare dancing shoes, the leather soles worn thin from years of hootenannies at dance halls like this one, the Grey Eagle in Old West Asheville, down by the river. I feel like I'm in the middle of a bad depression-era bildungsroman or maybe a künstlerroman depending on how you look at my life so far.

I'm tired. I'm going to go to bed.

Sunday, June 19, 2005

Foamy Eggs: A 2nd Shift in the Life of a Waffle House Grill Op. (Part The Second)

Jeez! I didn't realize how long that title was until I had to type it again.

So, after cooking a pot of chili--incidentally the pots that we use are pretty big (probably hold more than a gallon) and are made of stainless steel and are called "grits pots" even though half of the stuff we cook in them is not grits-- it's time to cook start cooking grits. Put a "grits pot" full up to the three handle bolts with water from the bendy dishwashing hose with the funky spray nozzle. Turn up the heat to 11. I usually use the front burner (there are two burners asside from the grill faces which sort of count). Sometimes someone will show up and order eggs while I'm cooking grits though, so rather than reach around the big-assed grits pot to get to my eggs burning behind them, I'll just switch the boiling water to the back burner. The thing about grits is, you have to pay them a lot of attention. Not so much while you're boiling their water as when you first add the grits to the boiling grits pot of water. I usually stir them pretty continuously with a big whisk for the first minute or two of their re-hydrated, boiling existence. If the grits aren't moving around in the boiling water enough then they will do two things: 1. settle at the bottom of the pot and 2. stick together and form the biggest, nastiest white pusy (thanks Boyko) lumps you've ever seen. And nobody likes lumpy grits. The main problem with lumpy grits asside from their resemblence to cancer tissue or a conglomeration of white blood cells is the fact that the lumps are overcooked on the outside and not-at-all-cooked on the inside--kind of like the planet Mercury.

So, let's say I have to cook a Fiesta Omlette while my grits water is coming to a boil. For y'all interested parties out there, this is the paragraph which will unhinge the mystery door obscuring the secret of Waffle House's foamy eggs! Read on...! So, let's say I have to cook a Fiesta Omlette. First I think... dang I forgot what goes in a Fiesta omlette. The Magic Marking system calls for a salad dressing packet which give no clues whatsoever, so I consult a menu or a waitress. Turns out, the yummy fiesta omlette contains no less than five ingredients not including the foamy eggs:

chunked ham
2 slices of cheese
diced tomatoes
diced onions
jalapeños

one could say that the fiesta omlette is smothered, double-covered, chunked, diced, and peppered... yum! So, I through a bit of each of those ingredients (except the cheese which comes last) on the grill to cook... drop two slices of white toast in the toaster and head over to my egg station where I grab two eggs from the basket in the fridge (or on top of the hood depending on how busy we are and how conveniently located the eggs need to be) and break them into a grits bowl. I should mention here again that the "grits bowl," while often holding grits, holds many other things (including chili from time to time). The cool thing about cracking your eggs in a shallow-ish bowl is that if you happen to get a piece of shell in there, you can see it and spoon it out before it ends up getting cooked which is just nasty. The way I see it, getting egg shell in someone's food is one of the cardinal sins of waffle house grill operation. I'll have to come up with some other cardinal sins later... and maybe some ordinal sins too while I'm at it... or maybe I'll just order the cardinal sins once I come up with them. I know, I'm purposefullly keeping you foamy egg fanatics in suspense here... I swear the final veil will drop soon. Speaking of which, I'd like to take this opportunity to recommend the Tom Robbins book, Skinny Legs and All to my viewing audience and everyone else. Robbins is an amazing writer, and if you're at all interesting in the oft-complex relationship between the food service industry and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (as I am) you will come to deeply appreciate this book. But as Levar Burton has said (to cue the Reading Rainbow theme song), "Don't take my word for it..." So, here's what makes the eggs so dang foamy, Boyko. You know those milkshake mixers that they have at Dairy Queen and Tastee Freeze and pretty much any ice cream place worth it's salt? The two omlette eggs go in that thing while I heat up three small ladle-fulls of Lo-Melt Vegetable Shortening in an omlette pan. When the time is right, the milkshaken eggs (these eggs are BEYOND scrambled, ladies and gentlemen, I mean there are all these teeny tiny air bubbles in the eggs) are poured with grace and ease into the hot Lo-Melt. The milkshaken eggs have by this time transcended the realm of the embryo--yolk and chalaza are more fully one than nature ever intended. The mixture is palest orange-yellow when it hits the omlette pan, it's sizzling destiny. From there the good stuff goes in: all the ham, onions, tomatoes, and peppers, like a Veggie-Tales skit gone horribly awry. I flip the mixture around a bit until it's a nice and done on both sides, and foamy as the deadly chops of a rabid schnauzer. Then I lay the two slices of cheese diagonal-wise, crossing the center of my omlette and fold it from the pan onto the big platter so it looks like a big breakfast smiley face drooling cheese. The toast is buttered (or, I should say, margerined), sliced into right triangles with a small margin of error depending on how hot the toast is, and arranged about the middle of the platter so as to seperate the drooling omlette from the grits which I spoon from the steel pot in the steam table between the big grill and the egg burners. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we do the fiesta omlette thing. If that's the end of order I'll holler, "PICK UP!" or "FIESTA OMLETTE!" or "[waitress name]!"

That concludes this installment of "A 2nd Shift in the LIfe..." I hope y'all'll (goddamn I love a good double contraction!) join me next time where the waffles are fresh, the eggs are foamy and the waitresses often have most of their teeth. But don't take my word for it!

Thursday, June 16, 2005

Have you made this mistake yet?

www.GRITSandEGGS.com

I can't decide if this is a website about hiphop or cars. Either way it's a helluva lot cooler than my lame-ass blog. I ought to take some cues from what I'm deeming my "cousin website" gritsandeggs.com. Maybe I could get somebody to "pimp my ride." Think of it, a Subaru Outback painted bright yellow with a giant Waffle House decal, tinted windows and a playstation in the dashboard. Maybe they could install a waffle iron in the trunk for when I'm crusin' Patton Ave. and I get hungry for some delicious oldschool pecan-sprinkled brunch-style pastry cake. Booya!

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Holy Crap: a 2nd Shift in the Life of a Waffle House Grill Op. (Part The First)

Holy crap! A lot of people that work at the Waffle House have been in jail before.

I slept until about noon today so I was quite energetic and probably annoying as hell to my co-workers bouncing around from sink to grill to fridge to soda fountain. I'll be working an additional shift this week on Friday. That ought to be fun. (Psyche!)

Here's a short description of my daily second shift routine:

I generally try to arrive 20 minutes early. I'll clock in before I start doing anything. I won't start doing anything until I clock in. There's always work to be done right off the bat. And Waffle House rules pretty much require folks to arrive at least 10 minutes early to their shift if at all possible. Steve Skinner, my boss will generally already have between 3 and 6 cartons of dehydrated hashbrowns laying out ready for me to re-hydrate. So I'll do that. Steve also generally leaves between 3 and 5 packages of waffle-mix (pretty much just flour and sugar) out for me to mix. The waffle recipie is:

Mix 4 eggs
1/2 gallon Pet Half-n-Half
with 1 package waffle mix
mmm mm good!

it's best to use a whisk to mix the ingredients together. Also, you'll want to beat the eggs into the half-n-half first and then simultaneously mix the waffle mix into the wet ingredients.

So, by the time I get finished with this stuff, I generally have to go out and cook some food for a minute or two. Then again, on slower days, nobody comes in. It's time to get the chili started:

3 sausage patties
3 quarter pound hamburger patties
mmm mm good! -- brown 'em in a big grits pot -- don't drain the dang grease or you'll rot in chili purgatory with no flavor!

fill the grits pot au mashed up meat with about six glasses of water, boil it
add one can of campbell's tomato juice (hot dang! it's almost a vegetable!)
add the packet of chili powder and dried beans
add 3 "heaping" bowls full of diced onions

also, don't skimp on the dang onions! (It says not to on the dried beans/ chili powder packet)

stir till it's good and happy

put it on the 2 foot grill to simmer at 250ish degrees for the rest of the seven-hour shift.

Hell yes.

Probably will have to cook a cheeseburger or an order of eggs or something minor here in a minute. Second shift is really slow. But I don't give a dang because I'm not a waiter! Yeehaw! Jeepers. That was kind of insensitive towards waiters and waitresses. Oh well. I think I broke down the salary thing somewhere in one of my first few entries. I'm making US$6.80 per hour now, compared to something like US$5.50 per hour (plus tips) that the waitresses make. Actually I ought to double-check that waitress number.

OH! the "Anonymous" comment which set me on the dang warpath last time was actually from a friend of mine at Duke. He was apparently in a really pissy mood due to a nasty grade on an organic chemistry exam. I can't say that I agree with his politics; but I'm honestly really glad that I'm not in summer school this year. I'd rather spend 3 hours making grits and grilling burgers than 3 hours taking an organic chemistry exam any day. You think cooking $200 dollars worth of food in an hour by yourself is stressful? Try taking an organic chemistry exam in a cramped lecture hall with 30 classmates, all equally frazzled, on for size.

So, that's it for right now. Tune in next time for the shocking conclusion to a 2nd Shift in the Life of a Waffle House Grill Op. Time to go find some craft beer.