Afraid of the Food

Last night I was making dinner. The wok was hot, the oil was jumping, my chicken was burning. I held the end of the wooden spoon in one hand and backed as far from the pan as I could while stirring the chicken.

Then I stepped outside of myself for a moment and I heard Miz Dot saying, "Baby, you act like you afraid of the food!"

During most of my Sophomore year at UGA I worked in one of the dining halls. The staff in the dining halls consists of a few full time workers in key positions and lots of student workers who have shifts of several hours at a time.

Oglethorpe Dining Commons (or O-house) always had new workers spend a few days in the dish room. This is where the dirty dishes come around on a conveyor belt and you have to rinse them off in a trough of running water and then put them onto racks in the giant dishwasher.

I believe that the managers always put new people in the dish room for two reasons:

1. To let you know that no one is too good to do the dirtiest job in the dining hall.
2. Miz Johnny.

Miz Johnny was the full time staffer who ran the dish room and she was just full of love for whatever clueless college kids got sent her way. When you held a bowl wrong in the sprayer and got nasty food water on everyone in the room, other people were giving you sideways glances, but Miz Johnny just said, "That's alright, baby." She always made sure you got all your breaks and she never lost her patience.

After those first couple of days, though, you might be in a different place every day. Some days I worked on the main line, changing out the trays of food. Some days I worked in the chicken frying station (which wasn't my favorite because deep-fry baskets are heavy and that oil is HOT). Some days I was stir frying or just prepping food in the kitchen or rolling burritos for hungry classmates.

But most of the time I was in the bake shop. This is where all the pastries and rolls were prepared and baked. The bake shop was run by Miz Dot. All things considered, she was pretty patient with me, too. But she wasn't afraid to speak her mind. Have you ever tried to mix a giant mixing bowl of cake batter? It's hard. I was poking at it tentatively when she said to me, "Baby, you act like you afraid of the food!"

The most memorable moment I had working in O-house involved both Miz Johnny and Miz Dot.

All my shifts were in the morning and afternoon so I never helped close down the dining hall. This was just how my schedule happened to work out. But one day, before a school holiday, the dining hall was closing early. So I helped Miz Dot clean up all the counters in the bake shop. We cleaned the floor, made sure all the leftover food went in the freezer, things like that. We finished before most of the other areas so we stood there making small talk.

Then Miz Johnny came over. She was done cleaning up the dish room and wanted to chat with Miz Dot.

Now, I'm not sure how the conversation came around to this. I have since been told that before my time there had been an infamous O-house employee who liked to flash her nipple rings at her coworkers, so perhaps that it what Miz Dot was thinking of when she asked me, quite sincerely, "What do you think of girls get they titties and they navel pierced?"

I had no idea how to respond to this. I muttered something like, "Uhhh. It's okay?"

But things went from bad to worse, because Miz Dot pressed on with, "What about a tongue piercing? What's the significance of the tongue piercing?"

She seemed to really want to know. And who am I to stand between any fellow human being and knowledge? So I told her. But in the most euphemistic way possible. "I think it is for use in bed."

At this point Miz Johnny began to take genuine interest in the conversation. "What'd she say?"

Miz Dot answered, "She say, 'For use in bed.'"

Miz Johnny clapped her hands together and exclaimed, "Oh yeah, I bet it feel good up on that thing!"

But Miz Dot didn't have quite the same thought. She said, "Why I wanna do that to a man? I don't know where he's goin' after that."

No, I'll never forget my time at O-house