Work Stories: Episode 23: Bacon and Eggs

Last week on Work Stories, I told you about the time that I was headed home from work, and I got to go through the scene of a car accident.  Yeah.  That happened.  Just picturing that in my mind is astonishing.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  That was last week, though.  This is this week.  I’m also a slight bit late on this one.  Oh well.  Let’s get onto the story.

One of the perks of working at the hotel was free food.  I got a lot of free meals out of that place.  I would make sandwiches, the cooks would always make me food if I was on a shift with them, and I got to eat some of the breakfast buffet food.  That was always a good perk of the job.  I like food, especially breakfast food.  Getting free breakfast food is something that I will always adore about that job, as much as I have been away from that place for four years now.

One of the shifts that they put me on a lot was one in which I would work in the dining room in the morning, and work in the parking lot through the afternoon.  It was good for the money I got from the hours, but bad because it was a lot of twelve hour shifts.  In the cases where I had this shift, I would eat my breakfast buffet food while still on the dining room shift.  There were other times when that wasn’t the case.

Sometimes my shifts were just straight parking lot shifts.  This meant that I would come in around eleven in the morning, when all of the buffet food was being taken out of the dining room in the hotel.  I would then get some of the leftovers, put them in a Styrofoam container, and take them out to the parking lot booth with me.  I would eat while working in the parking lot.

The food was delicious.  There were potatoes.  There were sausages.  There were a lot of scrambled eggs.  There was bacon.  This stuff is the cornerstone of any breakfast, and they are all I need to be delighted.  I didn’t mind eating this almost every day for three summers.  I love breakfast food.  (Aside from pancakes.  I love the taste, but I get sick after.)  Breakfast food is the best-fast food.

However, I once ran into a problem with the food.  I went up to the parking lot like I normally would.  I went about my opening duties.  I took the signs out of the booth and set them up on the road.  I got the flags and pylons and set them up at the end of the parking lot.  I set up the radio, or the iPod speakers.  I don’t remember which I was using at the time.  Then I pulled the chair out into the sun and grabbed my food.  Only, there was a problem.

When I opened up the Styrofoam container to stick my fork into the sausage, I found out I had some new friends.  There were ants crawling across the food.  This didn’t normally happen.  I tended to put the container up where it would take a long time for any bugs to get to the food.  The food is usually only there for two or three minutes.  Somehow, within that time, the ants had found the food and they dug in like I had planned to.  My meal was ruined.

I hurried across the entrance to the parking lot.  On the other side was a garbage can.  I put the container in the can and went back to my seat.  I would not be eating that morning.

I know that’s not exactly an exciting story.  Hell, it’s not really a story at all.  It’s a lot of paragraphs that are only partially connective.  But it all led to the conclusion, and that’s all that matters.  We got there.  We got to the end.  See you next week for another work story.

Until then, this case just remained interesting.