Food review: the Vendeteria (sic)

I sometimes write reviews of local dining establishments near where I work, in downtown Columbus.  This was the first review.

Where: The Marconi Building Vendeteria, on the first floor of the building I work in.

FOR A QUICK HELPING OF “FOOD” Let me preface this by saying that “vendeteria” is a completely made-up word, a neologism if you will, that is obviously a mashup of “vendor” and “cafeteria”. Interestingly, if you go to dictionary.com and type this word, it wonders if you mean “Endarteria”, which is the innermost lining of the artery; or “Vendetta”, which is any prolonged and bitter feud, rivalry or contention. If you have a vendetta against your arteries, I suppose you could find enough unhealthy choices downstairs to wage a prolonged assault on them. But on the other hand, there are plenty of places within walking distance of here where you can do far worse damage, with way more better deliciousness. Lunch selections are currently limited to prewrapped sandwiches and salads; small cups with fruit or cottage cheese or crudites or what-have-you; bagged chips; cookies; and of course the standard assortment of vending machine goodies. They can’t offer hotdogs or pizza or chili or other equally vendeterious food right now due to building code issues. For your convenience there are stickers on the wrappers telling you what day of the week the sandwich/salad was assembled. (Note: it does not specify which week, so it always pays to check anyway for brown lettuce or soggy bread).

Ambience: Some of my coworkers frequent this place out of convenience and habit. It is usually a fun and enlightening time, as long as everyone follows the Rules of Lunch Club.

 Rules of Lunch Club:

1 – The first rule of Lunch Club is, you do not talk about work at Lunch Club, unless you’re being extremely sarcastic or bitter. 
2 – The second rule of Lunch Club is, you DO NOT talk about work at Lunch Club, unless you’re being extremely sarcastic or bitter. 
3 – If there is an occurrence of smelly food in the microwave, lunch is over.  Seriously: what is up with that cabbage dish, and I am looking at you, that one dude…
4 – The more participants the better.
5 – One topic of discussion at a time.
6 – No topic is taboo; however this does not supersede rules #1 and #2.
7 – The discussions will go on as long as they have to.
8 – If anyone goes to HR, you will need to learn the rules of Fight Club.

Sports Center on the TV. Oh, and there is usually a high decibel running commentary on a variety of topics from the staff. The attendant is nice, but she does not have what you’d call an “inside voice”. If you have been there, you know what I mean.

Dress Code: Business casual.

Price Range: Reasonable.

To Try: whatever you’re hungry for. I have noticed that the hungrier you are, the more delicious (<-haha, j.k.) palatable tolerable the food is. This supports my theory that the first person who ever looked at an oyster (or a pineapple!) and thought to him or herself “wow, this here looks like a tasty morsel”, must have been STARVING!

Peanut Noir

Today at work I attended a webex (shared screen) and teleconference meeting with about 90 other people.  The meeting was almost aggressively content-free, and irrelevant to my job or the tools I need to do it.  But it counts toward my development plan, so I was all like whatever and clickety click there I was.  To pass the time, I browsed metafilter.com and from there found a link to a very dark and funny mashup between Frank Miller and Charles Schulz.  Well, here:  http://www.cinematical.com/photos/frank-millers-charlie-brown/1419750/

That loosely inspired the following, but I took it in a little bit different direction (I love productive meetings):

Peanut noir

The silhouette of the small kid with the big round head trudges with resigned determination up the mudslide to the pitchers mound. The rain, the endless rain, pelts the players, but no one has called the game, and no one ever will.  The kid wears a yellow shirt with a black jagged slash like lightning across his scrawny chest.  He eyes the thumbsucking blanket-hugger in the on-deck circle, and thinks about how that kid is sweet on his sister, and he grinds his teeth and thinks melancholy thoughts.  He thinks about the years of therapy, the endless pile of nickels spent on psychiatric bills with the shrieking harridan of a shrink.  He thinks about the years of having his foot get just…that…close… to the sweet spot on the oblate spheroid, only to have that god damn football get yanked away at the last minute.  Every single time, it gets yanked away at the last minute, and he ends up on his ass, feeling like a total chump.  He thinks about the dozens and hundreds of kites tangled up on power lines and trees, with the kite strings macrame’d into an asphyxiating stranglehold around his skinny neck.  He thinks about the years of being a patsy, a dupe, a schlemiel, a scapegoat.  His eyes are narrow slits as he prepares for his wind up.  Maybe this time, things will be different, he thinks.

Overhead, the players hear the drone and sputter and cough of a single faltering plane engine. It is losing fuel and altitude as the pilot returns from another of his endless missions.  That beagle again, with his tattered red scarf and leather brainbucket and shot-up flying doghouse and a hornet’s nest in his cranium, is flying another sortie over the ball field.  He is the lone remaining conscript from some deranged militia, fighting a battle in a war that has been over for almost a century, chasing a phantom enemy through the hollow skies.  No one else can see his arch-nemesis, but no one disputes that the bullet holes in his doghouse are real.  The little bird he meets on furlough is the only thing standing between him and a section eight discharge.

The round-headed kid winds up for his delivery.  He eyeballs the runner on first, a filthy dirt-covered messy little slob, who tags up.  The tinny plinking notes of a broken down piano play a forlorn passage from a long-dead composer, the sound wafting out over the infield.  No Hammond B-3 or mighty Wurlitzer blasting out the strains of “Charge” or “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” for this motley dead-end group of washed-up has-beens and never-weres.  Just the sad-sack strains of yet another Harry Connick wanna-be, sitting crosslegged at his little garage-sale piano, trying to stifle the sting out of his broken dreams of being signed by a big record label, passing the days picking up a little chump change out at the ballpark. “Buck a shot for pop tunes, and a fin for guided tours…”

The pitch floats in a lazy parabolic arc toward home plate, a little high and inside.  Just where the little thumbsucking blanket hugger likes it.  How far has he gotten with my sister, wonders the round-headed kid.   The bat connects and the ball takes off…

…His teammates are long gone, returned to their dreary dismal lives, working on homework for that crazy teacher whose voice sounds like a muted flugelhorn.   The round-headed kid stands there yet, in the rain.  He stands on the mud-slicked pitcher’s mound, his back to home plate, facing the spot at the edge of the field where the ball bounced and then rolled into the woods. He chokes back a tear and sighs, and thinks to himself “there is always football season…maybe this time, things will be different”.

I worked at a foundry…

 Siebolt’s face was in either a grin or a grimace–you couldn’t ever tell which, due to the ill-fitting choppers that clacked in his mouth–as he raked red-hot pieces of iron and dirt from the bed of the sweatbox.  The oilburner in the ceiling of the furnace was turned down but the maw of the box glowed bright yellow-orange and cast Siebolt’s shadow demonically against the block wall behind him.  The well of D-furnace, Siebolt’s sweatbox, filled up much quicker than those of the other three furnaces, sometimes once per shift, and the molten aluminum was swilling and splashing up into the bed. The bed of the sweatbox was just below chest-high, and was angled to allow molten aluminum to drain into a large cylindrical well  that rested on the ground.  Raw materials were thrown onto the bed and heated to melting, and after the aluminum drained down into the well, the remaining dirt and iron and steel and slag were raked out of the bed into small hoppers.
     Clarence, who disliked his name and would answer only to “Jim”, was shift manager.  He was running a sample from A-furnace, after which he would tap and drain the sweatbox.  Running a sample entailed reaching a long iron dipper into the well, filling it with aluminum, and pouring it into a small mold.  When solid, the molded aluminum disk would be shot with a metallurgical spectrograph, which would reveal the percentages of other metals present and tell us how close we were to the desired alloy.
     Siebolt’s ingots were always a cloudy gray bastard alloy, too high in iron and dirt and too low in manganese, magnesium and silicon to be of any commercial use.  Their only purpose was to stock the “heels” of the other furnaces after they were tapped out.  Several 1,500-pound stacks of sweatbox ingots were always on hand for just this purpose.  Clarence–no one ever called him anything but Clarence after his “be scary to new guys” schtick stopped working–pressed the green button on the hanging switchbox, and the gears that drove the ingot-mold conveyor belt groaned and whirred into slow movement.  The belt was about 100 feet long and contained some 300 concrete ingot molds, each of which Clarence checked for signs of cracking at the mount bolts. 
     The furnaces each backed up to the long pit containing the ingot-mold conveyor At the furnace end.  At the back of each furnace was a tap hole that was plugged by a cone-shaped sandcore, which could withstand the heat but could easily be chiseled out when it was time to tap the furnace.  Clarence used a hammer and chisel to pound and dig a hole through the sandcore.  Molten aluminum, opaque as milk but bright silverish orange and well above the 1800-degree Farenheit freezing point, trickled out of the tap hole.  It ran down concrete-lined open iron channels through a geared starwheel that would distribute it evenly and directly to the molds, not allowing any to escape between the molds into the pit below.  Clarence picked at the hole until the volume and flow of metal was to his liking.  Froggy, a local boy with just enough brainstem activity left over from breathing and dressing himself to get by in the world, had drawn the assignment of skimming the final bits of dirt and slag from ingots before they froze solid at the other end of the conveyor.  Nobody could explain to Froggy that sweatbox ingots went right back into the furnace, were full of dirt anyway, and didn’t need skimming, but there he was in his Skinner-box world doing what he was trained to do.  He also controlled the speed of the conveyor, making sure the molds didn’t overflow or underfill.  A steady trickle of water from overhead pipes cooled the ingots somewhat (sometimes cracking the concrete molds when the hotter alloys were tapped) as they moved toward the stacking end.
    Harbaugh was the other young guy on the 3 – 11, and he and I stacked first, as Siebold was getting old and was excused from stacking.  Harbaugh pried the now-solid ingots from the molds with a chisel tip, using a hammer on the chisel for sticky ingots.  The ingots, solid but still hot enough to cause bad burns and  melt rubber bootsoles, landed on a rack, where I picked them up with a short straightbladed shovel and flipped them onto the stack.  The stacking frame was two small parallel 3-ft i-beams on the floor and two sheet iron walls, about 3 feet high.  One wall was welded along the length of one beam, and the other wall formed a corner with the first, perpendicular to the beams.   The 20-pound ingots were shaped in a trapezoidal cross section such that they could be stacked in rows of 8, every other one upside down.  The first row would lay north-south, the second east-west, and so on up to 10 or 12 rows. I finished my stack and Harbaugh hollered “Towmotor!” - his south  central Pennsylvania take on what to call a forklift came out more like “towmoor”.  The normal pavlovian response was for Davey, the co-owner’s lazy slug of an offspring, to amble on out from the break room, fire up the forklift and haul the stack away.  If Davey was on break or making the scene with a magazine somewhere, it would be up to us.  Timing was critical, since the conveyor relentlessly kept serving up ingots on the rack.  Harbaugh said “fucker ain’t coming” and hopped up in the seat and put the forklift in gear.  Davey rounded the corner and  said “the fuck offa there” – always trying to join in the standard blue collar repartee, thinking he was “one of the guys” and always falling just a couple light years short.  Harbaugh laid a big hocker on the seat as he hopped down and Davey, oblivious,  hunkered down into the seat.  I said, “think it’s OK to get these things out of our way, for crying the fuck out loud?” and Davey flipped me off.  Then it was my turn to pry and Harbaugh’s to stack. 6 stacks later (about 4 tons) we finished out our 3 man stacking rotation and D-furnace was tapped out.  The bigger furnaces held up to 48,000 pounds of metal, taking 2 – 3 shifts to fill and almost an entire shift to tap.  Froggy slowed the conveyor and Clarence plugged the taphole with a sandcore to stop the last trickle of aluminum.    
     Back up in the break room Roy, Sammy, and Pap Crites sat smoking or chewing. Siebolt, a walking zombie, had left for an 8-hour shift driving a truck at a “grit mill”, which I think was a quarry.  Harbaugh was off somewhere making Davey’s life even more miserable than his maker had conspired for him.  Pap Crites was more of an honorary employee than anything else, his useful years well behind him.  He generally held forth as the keeper of foundryman’s lore in the breakroom, and liked to propound on the state of the planet and pretty much let everyone know exactly where they were full of shit, regardless of the topic at hand.  He had years before somehow gotten his legs pinned and crushed under the starwheel on the ingot mold conveyor.  A year later he returned to the breakroom but rarely to work.  The owner and manager no doubt figured paying for his presence was cheaper than a workers comp settlement; and he much would rather have been with his people than laying around at home.
     Roy and Sammy were the ones who had conspired to give me my nickname. Roy was an aging country feller with a gigantic pot gut, stringy short little legs which could only muster a shuffling gait on good days, and a huge appetite for beer.  He had big bassett hound eyes and always wore a grimy ball cap tilted way back on his head.  He always had trouble remembering names, and started calling me “Slim”.  Sam was a 6′5″ Jamaican with a constant and brilliant smile – made even more so on bonus week when he got his large gold front tooth out of hock – who had been a migrant worker and ended up here as he worked on his GED, or as he called it in that syncopated reggae lilt, “my graddiat deploomer from high school”.  My nickname was something that I can’t quite phonetically spell, but imagine a giant smiley Jamaican imitating a boozy hilljack saying the word “Slim” and you’re close: slee-um.
     Roy blew up A-furnace one evening.  It was a recycling foundry, and the furnaces were stocked with all kinds of raw materials: building siding, military plate armor, lathe turnings, 2000-pound bales of crushed beer cans or used license plates, industrial cast aluminum engine blocks or cylinders… anything that was aluminum would go in the well of the furnace.  Oilburners would heat it to melting back in the enclosed heel.  The furnacetender would throw shovelfulls of flux (like sand) or mag flux (like flour) and work it back and forth with long iron hoes.  Compressed air blown through iron tubes would roil and stir the mixture and the flux would float the dirt and slag in a glowing mess to the top.  We used longhandled iron skimmers to scoop the lava-like slag into small hoppers, using the edge of the furnace well as a fulcrum.  Once the surface of the silver-orange pond of molten slop was clean we would lean over it with long iron rakes and dredge the bottom, pulling up baling wire, piston rings, and assorted other iron or steel or stainless steel flotsam that was unacceptable over certain tolerances, depending on the alloy.  This debris would later be weighed, dumped into wood-slatted crates usually labelled “staynels stell” or “irne”, and shipped off to other foundries that dealt with those kinds of metal.  Anyway, about Roy and his big explosion: His job was to drive a forklift carrying big hoppers of raw materials up to the well of the furnace and dump them in, making sure he did it slowly enough so as not to splash hot liquid metal out of the well and not to freeze up the furnace.  One winter evening the hefty little jackpine savage took his forklift and picked up a hopper that had been sitting outside.  The drainholes in the bottom had clogged and unknown to Roy or anybody else, there was a 1 by 3 by 3 foot chunk of solid ice in the bottom, under the ton of lathe turnings. Lathe turnings didn’t freeze up the furnace or splash, so usually Roy just dumped them right in.   This time though, the iceberg hit the molten metal and pretty much vaporized in that single instant, creating the loudest percussive sound I have ever heard.   Ka-WHUMPH!!! accompanied a burst of steam, followed immediately by an immense explosion.  The ice made a splash like the one real husky kid at the swimming pool that can always soak the lifeguard with his cannonball, only the mist that hung in the air from this splash was a hellish concoction of molten metal, slag, steam and smoke.  Years of accumulated dust and grit were jarred loose from every surface in the room, and hung in the air like a dark viscous cloud.  The redhot glow of the furnaces through this miasma made me think of Mt. St. Helens or Pompeii, or Hell.  At first I couldn’t hear anything exept my ears ringing and could only take in the scene in a spooky silence.  The hood and ductwork over the furnace that led to the filter room were torn apart; a gaping jagged hole was blown in the corrugated ceiling 25 feet above; dust, cardboard and anything else flammable in a 30 foot radius around the furnace was  burning; and a 2100-degree aluminum slick spread out from the well.  Then noticed Sam, outside the back bay door, helplessly leaning against the wall, clutching his gut. 
     I ran over to Sam first, and saw that he was shaking.  He wasn’t hurt though, he was just laughing his ass off.  “Dot fucker, he ron like Jesse Owen”, pronouncing it “Ho-wen”, he giggled, pointing to Roy, who with his stumpy little legs and hyperdeveloped beer muscles, had indeed cleared the large bay door and staging yard, crossed the parking lot and was quickly attaining the fence.  By the time the rest of the shift made the run from the breakroom to  the furnaceroom, every one of those old boys on the furnaces was standing with his back to the holocaust and was facing Roy, who backed up against the fence and stared wide-eyed at the mess he had narrowly avoided, muttering “ohhh shee-it…gawdawful dammit!”  Clarence glowered from under the wide brim of his crusher, and then shifted the soggy cheroot, Clint Eastwood-style, to the other side of his mouf without touching it.  “You boys clean this shit up. Roy, you been trainin for the ‘lympics? Haw, haw…”  “No, just havin a god damn heart attack is all.”
     Froggy, in the background, was  recapping the situation for the latecomers, gesturing wildly. “Well the luminum went up like that there, and we knowed she was gonna blow, and sure nough the furnace hood buckled like that there, an Roy lit out like that there, an’…”  Harbaugh interrupted, his arm around Froggy’s shoulder, “Froggy, why don’t you just try shettin the fuck up a while?”
     The sirens got louder.  The volunteer fire station 3/4 of a mile down the road had not been called but they had heard the blast.  After they checked out the damage they left, and on their way out I heard one of them mutter, “these fuckers screwed up a hell of a pinochle meld”.

…

If you are ever in Gettysburg, PA, head south out of town on Rt. 15.  You will drive through a couple of miles of a scenic and haunting stretch of road, right smack through the middle of where Pickett’s charge took place during the Civil War.  Just south of the battlefield there is (or was) a conference center on the left; and just south of that there are two gravel drives that are chained and padlocked.  These lead to the former site of Gettysburg Foundry Specialties, which was in operation until the mid 1980’s or so.  It is now an EPA Superfund cleanup site.

Point/Counterpoint

So finally, here is my Operation Feed point-counterpoint:
Point:  Operation Feed sucks!

(excerpted from a rant I wrote a couple years ago, regarding the setup of a bunch of carnival-like team-building crap to usher in the op feed campaign):
This morning the “Good Morning Associates” guy blasted something on the p.a.  about the aroma of popcorn signifying the onslaught of Operation Feed activities.  Sure enough, a peek out the front windows confirms that the embarrassment (at least for anyone with a moderate sense of irony) has begun.  The tricycle street sprint summer nationals course is set up, as is a large inflatable Jupiter Jump-like apparatus that has been “tagged” on the side with a pictograph of a cloying cartoon elephant, as are all the other various accoutrements of such an extravagantly moronic endeavor.  Let’s think about Operation Feed for a moment, shall we?  Getting past the most egregious symbol of ironic stupidity, the pie toss—our ex-mayor, acting on behalf of the corporate legal staff, throwing comestibles *prepared just for the occasion* into the faces of other gainfully employed (and presumably not homeless nor hungry) coworkers—and moving right on to the subtler examples of cluelessness I witnessed this morning: a heavyset woman, with whom I shared an elevator, huffing with the exertion of trundling her corpulent self from clear over at the cafeteria, was toting two cafeteria to-go plates (one laden with belgian waffles, the other with a goddamn rasher of bacon and two small tubs overflowing with butter and syrup) and a 20 ounce bottle of soda.   The “congestive heart failure platter” was on special this morning, I see.   Tomorrow’s blue plate is the “Bury the needle on the god damn sphygmomanometer, why dontcha, Special”.   And then there were the two immense phocine people slaunched over a bench in the atrium, sitting splay-legged and helplessly recumbent amid a bunch of popcorn that had spilled out onto their clothes and the floor as they plunged their flaccid flippers into the bags and slammed handfuls of the deep-fried, chemical-saturated grain into their gaping maws.  As I glanced over they were each sucking the last trace of rancid salty gelatinous grease from a chubby finger, emitting squishy popping sounds not unlike those you hear when stirring a bowl of macaroni and cheese.  Yum.  You missed a kernel.  Make sure you get your daily quota of FDA Yellow #5 there.  Operation Feed apparently means you Feed your own gut-slung body with enough food for a third-world family of 12 to subsist on, then maybe you get one of those fat-sucking Operations when even the big-boy pants feel a little snug.   Some skinny kid from Franklinton with hunger pangs and dull eyes thanks you from the bottom of his heart.

Take a deep breath…

Counterpoint:  Operation Feed rocks.
I have volunteered at the Food Bank several times and have seen first hand what an impressive and remarkable operation it is. Even those volunteers whose primary motive is just to duck out of work for a couple of hours, end up doing a lot of heavy lifting.  Our company provides 34% of the meals and one out of every 4 volunteers for the Mid Ohio Food Bank, and is responsible for about 620,000 meals per year to hungry people in 6 counties.  So even though we do this partly by stuffing our own faces, taking the slim profit margins from food sales, and donating it to the Food Bank, that is pretty damned impressive.  So there.

Also–the department I work in has an Operation Feed pantry that is, to make up a statistic and a category on the spot, in the top .0000001% of all Operation Feed pantries in the western hemisphere.  I have seen the others.  A conference room table holding a pathetic array of granola bars next to a Dixie cup half full of loose change is not an op feed pantry, Marketing Department!  And you, over in HR?  What the hell is up with warm diet Fresca?  Get out of my sight!  In contrast, we have an entire kitchenette-like enclave that is literally brimming, chock full, of snackety and drinkety goodness.  We are in a new building two city blocks from the either one of the cafeterias where I work, so people flock from other floors in our building to marvel at the sheer magnitude of choices available.  We are even considering a full time pantry monitor to keep the gawkers and looky-loos from impeding the traffic flow and fucking with the feng shui.  The previous sentence is not in the least bit true.  But we do provide this veritable cornucopia of gastronomically delectable comestibles by making periodic trips–during work hours!–to haul the stuff back from Sam’s Club, by the pallet-load.  And that means mid-day road trips with Patti, Jason, Jamie and/or Conrad (depending on who’s available and whatnot), who are among the finest and most fun coworkers you could want to spend the time with …  So put that in your pipe and smoke it, hunger!

I get butterflies…

One of the managers at work sandbagged me 20 minutes before the last department meeting, and asked if I would give an update on Operation Feed for our department.  These meetings are held in the auditorium where I work, with a remote feed from a conference room in our Des Moines subsidiary.  Yeah, our department takes up two states, such is the span and breadth of its awesomeness.  The meeting would be a bigger deal than it usually is, but at least half the department usually develops an urgent need to work from home that day.  I think the reason for this is that the meeting notice always includes the word “mandatory” in the subject line, and we are nothing if not a bunch of rebellious fucks.

I have been one of the department reps for Operation Feed since the previous one of these meetings, when one of the managers–call him Brownie–asked for volunteers.  I have always had mixed feelings about Operation Feed as manifested in a large corporate environment, which I will go into down the page.  Note for the record, that I am not against feeding people who are hungry.  I am going out on a limb to assert that people should, in fact, eat.  I know that is a controversial stand, but damn it, lines have to be drawn somewhere. 

So Brownie starts off by saying “Well, Patti’s not here today, and Jamie can’t do it, so…”  I got it Brownie; I’m third banana on this totem pecking pole order, or whatever.  I know I mixed that up a little.  (The truth is probably that because I sit farther away from Brownie than those two do, he just got to me last; but I don’t want that to inconveniently impede the narrative).   Patti’s the other volunteer representative, and would of course be the natural choice to ask, to get up on short notice and speak extemporaneously.  Poised and articulate, smart, likable, and very experienced at public speaking.  She also has a tendency to be a hilarious goofball.  She was off work that day, doing some awesome stuff with her family.  Jamie (who helps collect money for the jeans day fundraising portion of the operation) has a very laid back nature, from which he issues an assertive denial–by simply saying “no, man”– to Brownie’s request, and that is that.  Very cool.  Not a whole lot of people can just “no, man” a standard request in that fashion, let alone have that be that afterwards, with such certainty.

So I have sort of a thing about public speaking, especially the kind that is requested 20 minutes before it is to occur.  I can do it, and have done it, and it usually goes well, but on the inside beforehand I always feel kind of like a dog on the freeway, during the special rush hour for cat lovers.  So for the first part of the meeting I am sinking low into my seat in the auditorium, thinking shit like “damn it I hope I don’t get up there and start blurting out inappropriate shit” and then that of course triggers some long-forgotten, heinous memory from the dark years to come bubbling up out of the La Brea tar pits of my memory, to which I am all like “god damn it, especially not that”…  I know, I am a drama queen on the inside.  But on the outside I am just a quiet attendee sinking into his chair.  And then I hear “…update on Operation Feed”, and I am up on the stage.

And for at least 45-50 seconds [In reality, approximately 2-3 seconds, 4 max. -ed.]  I just completely lose my ability to speak. I turn around to look at the Powerpoint slide projected behind me, and then back around to the auditorium, and there is still nothing, and I have a brief moment of panic [No one even fucking noticed this.  It was seriously not that--Jeez, what an exaggerating puss. -ed.].

First I faux-bitch out Brownie for not having my powerpoint slide included in the deck, followed by a sarcastic “oh, that’s right.  There isn’t one.  We only found out about this 45 minutes ago”.  And then I start some autopiloted rambling monologue about how Operation feed has sort of militaristic overtones, with its “Operation” in the title and in-house volunteers holding the rank of “Captain” and “Lieutenant”, and that I was under the distinct impression that we would have at least been issued uniforms and a service weapon by now, which I emphasize with an open-armed “what the fuck?” gesture to Brownie, off to the side of the stage.    I feel like I am entering the manic phase of a bipolar disorder as I describe our role as “keeping the food pantry stocked” and then immediately lament the fact that I can’t go around at gunpoint ordering people to buy their snacks there, but that they should anyway.  To my relief, I look over and the guy whose meeting it is, the boss of all the managers, is just cracking up.  As are many of the other attendees. Ok, the demented raving of op feed lunatic guy is winning their hearts and minds.  I mention the signup sheet where people can request specific food items, and openly confess my lack of familiarity with some of the items people have already written on the request list (such as “beer on a stick.  No, really.  I have never even heard of this…”), then move on to the request for ”gonja” [sic]).  I said something about first of all, get a doctor to prescribe it for medical usage and we’ll see what we can do; and “second, it is spelled g-a-n-j-a… so remember, folks: spellchecker is your friend!”  Like the whole moral of my story was to spell your illicit substances correctly so we can better serve your snacking needs.  I am such a dork, but at least they were laughing.

Black belt, my ass

A while back I stumbled across an interesting article on one of the intranet portals where I work.  It had the headline “Business Black Belts breaking down silos”.  I was looking for a link to information about my online W-2, and I almost wish I had not been so easily sidetracked.  Otherwise, I would have been left with my original, perfectly self-amusing impression:  a mental image of a circa-1970’s Bruce Lee movie fight scene, slightly altered to include a bunch of tough-looking badasses wearing business suits, surrounding the protaganist while loitering in threatening poses, each waiting his turn to get his ass kicked, while our man defends his family farm’s outbuildings from certain destruction.  (I know I could have gone another way, and inferred missile silos, but first impressions are what they are).  Curiosity piqued, I clicked into the article and read it.  It started,
“Seventeen Home Office associates now meet the highest standards for Black Belt testing, but you’ll never see them break boards or smash bricks. Armed with the knowledge, discipline and inner strength of a Black Belt in the martial arts, they’ll use their skills in a much different way – to reduce operations costs and improve service quality. These associates are Six Sigma Black Belts and they’re experts in a business management philosophy called Six Sigma. If you haven’t heard of Six Sigma, it’s a program to optimize system design and performance for virtually error-free business performance. With tools in hand, these Black Belts are on the offensive to eliminate defects through methods that emphasize understanding, measurement and processes improvement. These associates help manage a wide range of projects that will ultimately improve the development and delivery of products and services at xxxxxxxxxx. ”

First of all, wait just a cotton-fuckin’ second here.  I have a problem with anything calling itself a martial art that doesn’t include breaking shit or beating the crap out of people.  Even the dance forms carry at least a hint of menace.  What the seventeen people have mastered is not the ability to kill, maim, deflect attacks, throw razor-sharp stars into an opponent’s jugular, or even deliver a Maxwell Smart-style karate chop to the collarbone–no, what they have mastered is a “management philosophy”.  Let me state that again, while you pause just a second for that to sink in:  a “management philosophy”. It sounds like any vapid little douchetard or leg-humping weiner dog could could take this class, and not end up with even rudimentary self-defense skills.  In fact, I would bet that only a small handful of the seventeen could mount an adequate defense  against even such faux-tough guys as David Carridine, or Ralph Macchio, or Steven Seagal.

As for the rigorous training,
“The journey to achieve Black Belt status is not easy. The process includes five weeks of classroom instruction, four half-day exams and completion of at least one project that produces quantifiable return on investment. While the minimum acceptable test score is 75 percent, [these] associates have achieved an average score of 87 percent on all the exams.  Exams behind them, these associates are ready to think smart, drive results and enable operational excellence. ”

Ok, hold on a second…WTF?!?  The 17 Grasshoppers never had to snatch the fly out of the blind Shaolin Master’s hand before being allowed to move the urn of burning charcoal (which leaves a permanent dragon scar on their forearms, by the way); nor drill for weeks in Mr. Miyagi’s garden (“Wax on!  Wax off!”) as the elderly sensei belabored them about the thighs with his cane, leading up to a climactic and tense fight where they get a broken ankle but then hand the bullies their asses anyway; nor be demoted from Navy Seal to lowly ship’s cook before redeeming themselves and saving the ship from terrorists bent on world destruction.  In fact, I am having trouble imagining a scenario where a practitioner of this martial art would be called on to administer a roundhouse kick to the face of an opponent, causing said opponent to fly backwards across a–a what, a conference room?–and land on a table, snapping it to splinters.  Here is what they had to do, instead:  they had to attain a C average in a series of classes.  Now, I will grant that they prolly had to study real hard, and they should get credit for that, but if on the basis of their training they consider their hands lethal weapons, and subsequently begin taking nighttime strolls around the rougher parts of town looking for trouble they can quell, they will be sorry.   Being “…on the offensive to eliminate defects through methods that emphasize understanding, measurement and processes improvement” just won’t get you very far in a knife fight.

Finally:  I read the article twice, and there was not one damn thing in there about silos, either.  Context notwithstanding, if initial alliteration is what they were after, along with some kind of tie-in to our country’s agrarian heritage, the obvious headline would have used “barns” instead of silos, wouldn’t it?  I mean, wouldn’t it?