Field Trip—Cashiering

I sprained my elbow in my self-defense class a couple days ago. It was inconveniently my left elbow. Inconvenient because I am left handed.

At first, I thought, "Oh no! I can't work!" Let me tell ya, serving missionaries involves a dang lot of arm moving and lifting/carrying things. And my arm wasn't happy if I even straightened it all the way.

Then, I cleverly remembered the cashier position on the shift. You get to sit in a chair and occasionally move your fingers! Hooray!

Sack line. A million degrees in there, but only 50 or so missionaries came through during lunch.

So I came into work early and got trained really fast before my shift, and then I began my adventures as the MTC Cafeteria cashier.

Cashiers get to wear their hair down. That was different.

Yesterday, I was cashier in the sack line, where missionaries can come in and get to-go meals. It was super chill. I didn't do anything.

Then, this morning, I was main cashier. Four consoles under my command. Sort of reminded me of the computer system in Jurassic Park (but then again, everything reminds me of Jurassic Park).

Everyone told me I'd have problems with missionaries who try to bring their backpacks in the cafeteria when they're not allowed to, but I thought they were all super nice about it. Then again, I was deliriously tired this morning and probably didn't make that much sense myself.

My handwriting on the doors!!

So yeah, I'm pretty much guaranteed a cashier position until my arm heals.

The cashier's job after the doors close is to fill up all the napkin holders. Today, a missionary apparently got creative with the napkins while they were eating...

At first I was like, "What the heck is that?"

How sweet.

That's all for now! Stay cool. Thanks for reading.

Camilla

I Wish I Could Do a Psychological Study

My parents pointed out I never actually posted on this blog after the first couple of times.

(Yeah, yeah. I've been busy.)

But I just woke up from a nap, so while I'm working on getting my head screwed on right so I can function again, I thought I would take the time to make a little blog post. So don't judge me on spelling or grammar errors, okay?

So anyway, the topic of this week's post is this: If wish I could do a psychological study. I wish I could grab people as they put their dirty trays and dishes on the line and ask them, "Excuse me, but what exactly were you thinking when you did this strange thing to your food?" I am convinced that there must be personality traits in common among the people who do certain things to their food when they're done eating.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love the missionaries, and I myself was guilty of many of these things when I ate at the Cannon Center. But when you're on the other side of the spinning conveyor belt and you're scraping things off plates, you see some things that just make you go, "Huh?"

Some examples.

The Ones Who Don't Eat Their Food.

This is the most common problem I see. Half-eaten (or completely untouched) food comes through all the time, and there's nothing we can do but drop it into the foul-smelling sluice of beige running water to be whisked away into the Pulper (at least the BYU plants get those calories in the end). Sometimes, it completely makes sense—that lunch meat sandwich doesn't seem that appetizing to me either. But sometimes, they just got too much food and can't eat it all, and so it gets wasted. The saddest thing I've seen was a perfect, beautiful wrap that came through completely untouched. It was made with love. But we sent it to the Pulper without its intended recipient having taken a single bite. It was sad.

But the saddest of all is a frequent occurrence that I call—

The Tragedy of the Perfect Uneaten Chocolate Chip Cookie.

Now, I admit that I'm not a big fan of a lot of BYU's desserts, but I cannot get enough of their chocolate chip cookies. They are big and delicious and soft and the chips are somehow always just a little bit melty. When we get free desserts and work, I take one of those almost every time. So it's really sad to me that I see perfect, beautiful, completely uneaten chocolate chip cookies coming in all the time without a single bite taken out of them. I swear to you, every other tray has at least one perfect cookie that someone didn't want to eat. Sometimes, there's a little stack of two or three. All perfect, all completely uneaten. And there's nothing I can do but send them to the Pulper. Sometimes I take one and crush it slowly in my hand with my green food-covered glove before I drop it into the water because of the sheer injustice of it all.

Perfect, completely uneaten hamburgers come through all the time too, but I don't care as much about them.

Honestly, I don't understand how these people have one of those cookies in their possession and manage not to eat it, but I guess some people don't feel as strongly about their cookies as I do.

A related phenomenon—

The Ones Who Destroy Their Food.

Maybe it's because they feel bad that they haven't eaten the food they picked up, but sometimes a tray of food comes in where everything is just shredded. There's a pile of cookie bits in the corner (where they destroyed their perfect uneaten cookie instead of just leaving it there), the orange chicken and rice is crushed between two plates, and the half-filled soup bowl is filled with napkins. It's just one of those things that makes you wonder, "Why?"

Which brings me to—

The Crazies.

Okay, I'll admit it. This was me in the Cannon Center. I was that kid that all the dishroom employees hated. These are the trays that are just crazy. There are a million dishes on the tray, silverware is poking out all over the place, and there are just crumpled up napkins everywhere. The tray just looks hectic. And when you're trying to sort the silverware in the metal bin, the trash in the trash can, and the biodegradable food in the pulper, getting one of these trays guarantees a moment of frantic panic where you try to sort everything into its proper place while the tray is moving away from you on the conveyor belt.

The Healthy Ones.

I'm pretty sure these are sister missionaries, but I often see an apple core with neatly sliced off sides next to a little bowl that still has a bit of peanut butter in it. Apple slices in peanut butter! Props to them for being clever!

Now, these next ones are sort of clever...

The Fry Sauce Nuts.

For those of you who don't know, here in Utah we have this thing called fry sauce. It's basically ketchup mixed with mayonnaise, and it's wonderful. But for whatever reason, the MTC cafeteria doesn't serve straight-up fry sauce! The missionaries have to make it themselves. And instead of making it in reasonably-sized portions, a lot of missionaries fill an entire soup bowl with ketchup and mayonnaise and mix it all together. The first day I worked in the dishroom, I seriously thought it had to be some kind of pudding or soup, because there was no way that so many people had made such ridiculously large quantities of fry sauce. But lo and behold, it was fry sauce after all.

(Some people make fry sauce out of barbecue sauce instead of ketchup. I wonder how it tastes?)

The One-of-a-Kinds.

This one is my favorite. It doesn't happen very often, but every now and then, something completely unique comes through. The only one I've seen myself so far was when five or so trays all came through, each of them containing nothing but stacks and stacks of cereal bowls (my guess is fifteen apiece). I'm pretty sure they tried to clean out the Fruit Loops. And I sincerely hope they succeeded.

One of my supervisors also told me that there used to be apples that came through all the time with a bunch of forks sticking out of them. I am both sad and happy that missionaries don't do this anymore.

The Grateful. :)

Actually, I lied. This one is my favorite.

Sometimes, we get notes. Sometimes it's on a napkin, sometimes it's written with ketchup in plates, but there's nothing greater than the missionaries thanking us and telling us how much they appreciate what we do. Because yeah, it can be a hard job, and a lot of the time I feel like they don't notice or care. So it's nice to know that they do. :)

One of these days, if I feel brave enough to take my phone out of my pocket amidst the chaos of spraying water and half-eaten food, I'll try to take a picture of one.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading. I know I can be a bit snarky, and I know I complain about the missionaries, but they're just kids away from home, about to embark on a great work. And well...somebody's got to feed them. :)

Love,

Camilla

Field Trip: Syrup

Like I said, I spend most of my time at work serving food rather than working in the dishroom. Hence, I will sometimes make little updates tagged "Field Trip", describing the other things I do (the idea is that I'm taking you on a field trip outside the dishroom, see?).

Today at breakfast, we served a breakfast version of the corndog—a sausage dipped in blueberry pancake batter on a stick. It sounds weird, and frankly, it is weird. (Though I give props to whoever was clever enough to come up with the idea.)

Each plate is served with a little syrup packet. The cheap kind that's basically straight-up high fructose corn syrup with maybe a bit of flavoring thrown in.

You're not fooling anyone, Heinz.

It amuses me greatly that it doesn't even claim to be maple syrup anymore, despite that maple leaf. Instead, it's..."breakfast syrup".

Oooh, what a world we live in.

Silverware

Today I worked the silverware machine.

This picture from Google is the closest approximation I could find to the one we have at the MTC.

Silverware was a good job. Better than some I've had (more on that in the future).

This is how it works:

The people on pit (the ones who are interacting with the trays) drop the silverware in a container of water with a big square strainer-type thing in it.

When that's full, we run it through the silverware machine once.

Then we dump the silverware on the counter and sort it into little cups.

Then we run it through again.

Then we dump them into bins and the people on salads/dessert/silverware come and pick them up.

The most philosophical part was sorting the silverware. You pick either knives, forks, or spoons and dig through the pile to grab them all. While the forks are poking you the whole time.

At first, I liked picking out the knives. They just seemed so friendly because they're nice and smooth and don't jut out obnoxiously at the end, like spoons and forks do. But the problem is that knives are heavy. Your wrists start hurting after you have a handful of 'em in each fist.

So later, I liked going for the spoons. They hardly weigh anything and the handles fit nicely in your hand because of the way they're shaped. But there weren't many of them.

So by the end of the shift, I went for the forks, despite the fact that they poke you all the time, because there were just so dang many. It was easier pick them out because really, forks were the majority, and besides, picking up the knives and spoons afterwards was more enjoyable when there weren't forks to poke you.

As I pondered these preferences, I learned a couple of important things.

1) I personify everything. Not just my laptop ("Toppy") or my little red car. Each type of utensil had a personality, I tell ya. For example, I'm pretty sure that spoons are women. And that forks are jerks.

2) Everyone and everything has merit. At first I didn't like the forks. In the end, they were the ones I picked out first. Give people a chance, even if they don't seem like "your" type of person. Everyone has a place. Everyone has merit.

À bientôt,

Camilla

An Introduction

Hello, friends!

My name's Camilla. I'm a BYU student working in the MTC cafeteria for the summer.

Charming.

Most of the time, I work the line shift, meaning that I serve food to the missionaries (or do a variety of other behind-the-scene tasks. That salad bar's not gonna refill itself, you know).

But on Saturdays, I work in the dishroom. Conveyer belts, noisy machines shooting steam, "The Pulper", you name it.

There's something about doing repetitive menial tasks that turns the brain to thinking. And let me tell you, the four hours I spend in the dishroom every Saturday are the four most philosophical hours of my week.

That is, until the mind-numbing repetition gets to me and I become a brain-dead zombie.

But before that happens, I am the dishroom philosopher. And so, my dear friends, I thought that I would share with you the lessons I learn in the dishroom every week.

À bientôt!

Camilla