The Omnivorous Fish

I was reading Shuna’s blog today, and if you don’t follow it, you should. She’s a baker, patissiere, cook, writer, food and all around genius. Anyway, following links, I found this post that talks about the humanity of being an intelligent, sensitive person in a less than supportive environment. One of the things that keeps me going back to Eggbeater over and over again is her plainspoken narration of working in an environment where you’re often surrounded by overeducated people who are unable to come to grips with the fact that they have a blue collar job.

I understand this phenomenon well. I apprenticed to a chef briefly and worked in restaurants. I am now a stagehand, which is just as bad. I work alongside people, in an hourly paid, per-diem job that have master’s degrees from Yale. I’m not exaggerating. There is a multitude of them. They think they work in the arts, but in reality they pick up dirty cable and lighting instruments and pack them in and out of boxes and push said boxes on and off of trucks. I went to college for about an hour, and I tell them what to do.

Anyway, with any job where you’re part of a team, it’s largely the personalities that make it interesting. Restaurants and theaters have a lot in common: they are shit jobs that usually don’t pay very well where you do backbreaking work for minimal appreciation during hours that most people spend at home. For whatever reason, this environment draws more characters than say, the avergae CPA’s office. And, as unpleasant as it can be, it does leave one with a plethora of interesting memories, some awful, some hysterical. Very often, they go hand in hand. Case in point, Shuna’s negative experience reverberated in my memory with a bakery of Christmas Past, where I basically grew up. That memory, however, sent my head to another, much more funny memory that I’ll share.

The bakery was air-conditioned, so we had what’s called a proof box, which is basically an anti-refrigerator. It is a closed room that is heated with steam; thus we had a boiler. One day, one of the steam lines sprung a leak, and whenever the system’s pressure went up, a jet of visible steam shot out at ankle level from the boiler (right next to the bench where we worked- very safe) and drifted upwards. The red light from the exit sign beyond was vaguely visible, and almost shot through the steam, like a stage light. So, the next time the steam hit, I trudged directly into it, air guitaring and singing “Jumpin Jack Flash” to raise hell.

In retrospect, it’s not really all that funny (despite the fact that we all nearly pissed ourselves at the time), but at 4AM when you got up for school at 6 the previous day and have been at the bakery since 11, what’s funny can be relative.