1/6/92: Pound the prairie pavement, It's a losin' proposition, quittin' school and goin' to work and never goin' fishin'

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in December of 1991. At that point in time, if you were a guy or gal who had no ambition, you could decline to look for a good job by saying you were "slacking" or "floundering" or "had no ambition."  Even though it was really just a case of old-fashioned, deep-seated laziness, you could pretend you were doing it because you didn't want to sell out to corporate America.  Or because you were figuring things out.  Or because you were an artist. There were as many excuses for putting your career on hold and taking a dead-end job* as there were dead-end jobs to be taken.

It was a glorious time to be a natural-born loafer like myself. Lethargy was nothing to be ashamed of back then, even when the people around you were out pounding the pavement. While most of my friends spent their last semester in school running from interview to interview, I watched a lot of Bob Newhart and laid awake at night trying to figure out how I was going to get access to the school recreation facility after my student status expired.  Then graduation came and went, and in one of the wisest moves they ever made, my parents cut me off financially.

It was decision time: I could pursue a career in my chosen field (journalism), or I could extend my goldbrick collegiate lifestyle by taking a dead-end, Jim Anchower-type job.

I don't remember how much thought went into it.  I must have wrestled with it for awhile.  In a journal I have from that period, I wrote down the name Tom Oates and his phone number.  He was the Sports Editor for the Wisconsin State Journal.  I had a friend from class who worked there, a super nice kid (who, unfortunately, preferred hockey to basketball) named John Lesniak, and he set me up with a phone interview .  There was even a time written down when I was supposed to call: 10:30 Monday morning.  I'm looking at it right now. I don't think I ever made that call.  Also jotted down in that book, just a couple of pages later, is the name Verna Richardson, a phone number, and the word "HOSP."

My good friend Greg Maron had come out to Wisconsin for law school.  But the difference in tuition between an in-stater and an out-of-stater like Greg was astronomical. And to become a resident of the state of Wisconsin, you had to live and work there for a year without attending classes.  So Greg deferred his enrollment and took a job in the University Hospital Food Service Department, slinging the hash of life.  And when I needed a job to pay rent, he recommended me to the powers that were. After a five minute chat with Verna or somebody else on the phone, I was hired as an LTE (Limited Term Employee), and told to report to work the next day.

As an LTE, I was entitled to 1000 hours of work before they had to let me go by state law.  I worked every one of those 1000 hours.  1000 on the button.

On Day One, I showed up in my required whites and sat and filled out my paperwork. After I listened to a brief overview of what the job would entail, they told me to grab a paper hat and train on the entree station.  It was time for Trayline.

Our department, Patient Meal Services (PMS was our official abbreviation), was responsible for delivering food to every patient in the hospital.  The food was cooked two thirds of the way through by the cooking crew (I never saw them once), and then stored in walk-in fridges until it was time to serve it. 

After the initial cook-through, the next step the food took on the way to the patients was the Trayline.  It consisted of a conveyor belt that was lined on both sides by workstations responsible for all the various meal components.  One person would man the entree station, another the starch station (that eventually became my station), another did beverages, another did vegetables, and another did desserts (actually, I think that desserts and beverages were combined into one station).  At the front of the line stood The Starter. He held in his hands the menu for every patient in the hospital, with their choices circled. He was supposed to attach a menu to a little metal stand and set it on the belt.  Then he'd take a tray, put a paper placemat on it, put the appropriate silverware and salt and pepper packet (there were about four different packets according to patients' needs: low salt, no sugar, no pepper for those with weakened immune systems, etc.), and send it on down the line behind the corresponding menu.

The rest of us who occupied our stations would have to recognize what kind of a menu it was (again, low salt, low fat, low sugar, NFFV-No Fresh Fruit or Vegetables, low fat AND low salt, clear liquids, etc.)  and serve up a helping of whatever menu choices the patient had circled.  In the format which was required.  Meaning the starch guy was responsible for four different kinds of mashed potatoes and four different types of gravy, and he had to choose the right combination based on the patients dietary needs. It was even more complicated than it sounds.

On that first day, I trained with a dude named Carmine on the entree station.  He wasn't a bad guy.  He was from New Jersey and he had really long hair and he rode a motorcycle.  On this first day, the main entree was lasagna.  I remember it quite well.  After about ten minutes of observing Carmine, he threw me to the wolves.  That conveyor belt moves fast, kids.  The person across the line from me was a guy named Mark, an underachieving intellectual type who had been working there for about ten years.  The benefits were good and he didn't want to give them up.  But he wasn't particularly satisfied with his lot in life, either, and he would occasionally explode with bursts of anger. Like on my first day.

If you fell behind, you were supposed to yell out "Hold the line!" and then the guy at the very end of the line (The Checker -- responsible for making sure each tray is correctly stocked) would press a button and the belt would stop.  Then you would frantically catch up on whatever trays you had missed.  And I fell behind early and often on this first day.  I was whizzing lasagna down the line and asking people to put it on trays that had already slid past me. I was hustling like crazy to keep up.  I was a blur. An inefficient blur, but a blur nonetheless.  It was completely reminiscent of "I Love Lucy." I would do anything to avoid saying "Hold the line!"  It would be admitting defeat, and you don't admit defeat on Day One.   So Mark, sensing my struggle, was grabbing trays to prevent them from getting past me and reading off the items I needed to put on: "Fat Free Lasagna, no sauce." "Regular Lasagna, no sauce," etc. He was getting PISSED. I haven't mentioned that the sooner Trayline got done, the sooner we'd all go on break, and the longer the break would be as a result. So teamwork was essential.

And I wasn't holding up my end. Trays and menu holders were stacking up and clanging into each other. 

Finally, Mark yelled out, "HOLD THE LINE!!!!!!!!!"

Then he ran back, grabbed the first tray that I had let slip by, and swept all the trays back to my station with one furious wave of his arm.  Stuff was falling on the floor and getting all banged around, and the room went completely quiet.  It looked like he might take a swing at me.  He yelled at me about my hesitance to say "Hold the line." He read off all the items I was missing.  Then the line started up again and we continued in silence.

It was only three hours into my first day, and I already wanted to go back to school.

* Dead-end job is defined for these purposes as any job that does not advance your dreams or fatten your wallet, but is also relatively stress-free.