The Snow Apocalypse, Part 2

(The Snow Apocalypse, Part 2)

Time Frame: December 2010

            My freshman year at the university I was told that hoping for a snow day was a waste of time. The school hadn’t had a snow day in over twenty years. So when the sky started to darken and soft flurries began to tumble to the ground everyone expected their prayers for a day off to go unanswered. Most of us just really wanted to get out of tests or quizzes. The end of the semester was just around the corner, which meant that finals were coming up. Which, in turn, meant that all of our professors decided that it was the perfect time to give everyone tests, quizzes, and to make major papers due.

            The last thing any of us wanted to do was study. We would much rather build an igloo colony, which was quickly becoming a favored idea among the students. People had actually started making runs to Walmart to purchase shovels, buckets, and sleds. Coffee was nice and passing classes was nice but the idea of living in an igloo and going inside only to get hot food was even nicer.

            

By the third day of constant snow, we’d gathered a depth of six inches of snow. The idea of a snow day was becoming increasingly realistic. Especially as local schools started shutting down. On that third evening I was laying on my bed and staring out the window of my dorm room, watching a couple people building a snowman in the dying light outside, as my roommate sat on the sofa. She had a horror movie on and her laptop open on her lap. Her fingers were typing away at the key board as she hurried to finish a science paper she had due the next day.

I had an open British Literature book in front of me. The words of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury tales did nothing to keep my interest that evening. I knew I should have been reading it and highlighting things to talk about in class the next day, but I was more fascinated with the frost on the window and the couple building the snowman.

“Frick, have you guys been outside?” one of my and my roommate’s friends walked into our room through our open door. Snow clung to her boots, coat, and brown hair.

“Not since dinner,” my roommate stated, looking up from her laptop.

Our friend shed her wet coat and shoes, “Well don’t go back out. It’s like the freaking ice age out there.” She plopped down on the sofa. “What is this movie?”

My roommate gave her the name as blood trailed down a wall on the television and a girl screamed.

“I know it’s not going to happen, but is it really too much to ask for one snow day?” our friend wondered aloud as my roommate put aside her laptop in favor of watching the movie and chatting with our friend, who was really more her friend than mine. To be honest, she and all of our mutual friends from that year, I hardly ever talk to anymore. The last correspondence we had was when she ‘liked’ something I posted on my social media page. I can’t even recall that last time we actually talked to each other.

Regardless, they were who I hung out with my first semester at the university. It wouldn’t be until January that would meet my best friend and actually start gaining friends that I had things in common with.

As my roommate, our friend, and I chilled in our room that night our other friends slowly joined us. First it was just the girls. Four other girls besides myself and my roommate. Then, as the sky darkened and the hour shifted to one that admitted boys on the hall, the guys joined us. Until eleven that night they all watched horror movies and I tried my best to pretend that I was actually interested in the show with the creepy hauntings and the blood curling screams. I spent a lot of time with my mind wandering though.

Eventually, I silently got up, grabbed my laptop, and logged onto our school website. My English professor had a nasty habit of sending last minute directions for the next day’s class at ungodly hours of the day. I figured I should probably check my school email to see if she had anything to say.

Sure enough, when I logged in, the first message waiting for me was from said professor. I clicked on the email, opened it, and read something that I had to re-read twice before actually believing my eyes.

“Due to class being canceled tomorrow, please read the following pages for next time…”

Class was canceled? Was school canceled?

I clicked out of the email and grinned when I found another unread one waiting for me from the school, announcing that the following day would be a snow day.

“Snow day,” I weakly called out in a false happy tone that was laced with just an edge of genuine excitement. Excitement for the day without classes, fake happiness because I knew the following day would be spent with fake friends.

A loud whoop sounded from the others in my dorm room. They all checked their emails and text messages to find that what I said was true. The cheer they let out when they found out that because of the snow day the boys were allowed in the girls’ dorms (and vice versa) for an extra two hours that night.

I was not elated.

I had to stay up until one in the morning listening to the screams of the damned. It was irritating. I wanted to sleep. I was frustrated because even though we had a day off I had no one real to spend it with and no one around that wouldn’t judge me for wanting to spend the whole day in bed writing.

When I woke up at ten the next day –an ungodly hour by the standards of my roommate but a perfectly reasonable hour to be up by my own –I left the room as quickly and quietly as possible, getting a pillow thrown at me and curses flung my way in the process. All I took with me was my student ID, so I could get food from the cafeteria, and my laptop.

It was far too cold to sit outside and write, plus it was still snowing, but that didn’t stop me from grabbing a seat by the large window in the cafeteria and watching as the first igloo of the desired igloo colony was erected.

I had decided that since snow days were rare on that campus I would savor the one I got. For the record, we received a whole week off from school that year and everyone started calling it the great snow apocalypse of 2010. Every year since then, we had snow days. 2010 broke the school’s streak of no snow days.

As I sat there watching the cafeteria workers go about their jobs and the people outside building igloos, I started to write a story that I never finished. I didn’t know at the time but in that cafeteria, restocking the oranges and refilling the ice in the soda machines, were the people that would come to be my real friends. 

The Snow Apocalypse, Part 1

Time Frame: December 2010

The month was December, the day was a Friday. It was one day into what my freshman friends and I would come to call the Great Snow Apocalypse of 2010. The snow was coming down in soft flurries and the sky was darker than steel wool. Everyone was cold. Not even the dorm heaters could chase away Jack Frost’s nipping. Coco and Coffee was starting to become extensions of the students’ bodies and there were talks of forming an igloo colony. Everyone would leave their dorms looking like fashionable Eskimos and arrive for diner at the cafeteria looking like abominable snowmen.      

At that time I wasn’t working in the cafeteria. I was working at an on camps diner called Land Café (named so because of the building that housed it), so my hours were late and eating dinner with my roommate and friends was a regular occurrence. We’d all just settled in with our plates full of piping hot food and our small white mugs filled with hazelnut flavored coffee when the talk began.

Really, people had been discussing the school skate night for weeks, but that night the talk was especially omnipresent. Reason being, that night was the night. At seven o’clock everyone who was anyone would be piling into cars and driving to Kansas City to go Ice Skating at Crown Center Plaza. I wasn’t big on society or anything that involved socializing but I had a few good friends that had been talking my ear off about the event for weeks. They’d wanted me to call into work. To find someone to take my shift and go skating with them.

Their request was flawed. You see, when everyone at school is going ice skating it is impossible to find someone to take your shift. I had, for a brief amount of time, hoped that Land Café would be closed because there’d be no one on campus to serve, but those hopes were dashed when a sign –reading, “Note: Land Café will remain open despite skate night.” –was placed above where all workers clocked in. I was probably the only person not planning on going to the event. Well, me and this other girl that I was to work with that night. Or so I thought.

Later that night, as my friends all readied to leave in cute little outfits with scarves and matching gloves, and little hats with pompoms on top, I was slipping on my pink pea coat and cursing the weather for being so horrid. I was just stepping out my dorm door, popping my coat’s collar up to help protect against the blowing snow, when I got a call from my friend Ally.

Ally was two classes higher than me -making her a Junior- and was studying nursing. She was a nice girl with hair as light as moonbeams and eyes the color of ice. We met in our New Testament class, at a pizza party our professor threw for extra credit and social reasons. He was a cool professor. Outside of having to memorize the beatitudes, in Matthew 5, he was pretty laid back.

Anyway, I digress. That night, when Ally called, I was heading out my dorm door to work a shift I absolutely loathed. I hated working at the café. I’m not exaggerating either. I really detested the place. I’d been considering quitting but I didn’t really want to call my parents up and tell them that I left a paying job.

“Hey, Andy, are you sure you don’t want to come skating tonight?” Ally tried to persuade me. “It’s only $5 to get in and there’s supposed to be hot coco.”

“I have to work,” I reluctantly ground out.

“I know,” her voice was defeated. “Well, if for some reason you suddenly don’t have to, I’m not leaving campus for another half hour. Give me a call.”

Ally wasn’t about to outright suggest that I skip work and I wasn’t about to just do that. So, I ended the call and continued to trek across campus in the cold. The building the diner was in wasn’t that far away, only a two minute walk from the dorm, but it was long enough and the weather was frightful enough that by the time I reached the building my face was frozen. At that point I was actually looking forward to getting inside, even if it was just for the sake of warming up. 

When I reached for the door I expected it to be unlocked. It was supposed to be. The other girl I was to be working with had the keys and she was supposed to unlock the door when she got there every night. I pulled on the door, it didn’t budge.

I thought that maybe she was just running late, so I waited around for a good ten minutes before I tried calling her. Her phone went to voicemail…twice.

I couldn’t get into the building. I was freezing. I tried calling our head boss and she didn’t answer. I didn’t really want to go back to an empty dorm building either, so it was then that I made a choice. For the first and only time, I decided to pull something that some of my other coworkers were famous for. Despite it being frowned upon, I made a choice to skip work.

“Hey, Ally!” I spoke into the phone with a grin. If I couldn’t get into the building to work anyway I might as well spend the time doing something I wanted to. “Have you left yet?”

In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the brightest decision I’ve ever made.

“No. I’m in the parking lot by the caf. You coming?”

“Yep?”

“Did you find a cover?”

“No.”

            

“Okay! See you in a few!”

            I only had to cross a small street before I reached Ally’s car. She and a boy she’d been talking to from one of her other classes was there. She’d mentioned the guy before; said that he was cute and that she kind of wished something would develop between them. As far as I knew, though, nothing had.

           “Andy, this is Sky,” Ally introduced the dark brown haired guy. “He was supposed to be going to skate night with some friends but they ditched him. So, he’ll be riding with us.”

            “Cool,” I said and greeted the guy.

            That night, the three of us had a blast. We went ice skating, drank hot coco, ran through blue colored fountains, and hung out in a Christmas themed playground. To be honest, it was the first time since starting the university that I had felt fine.

            No anxiety or worry could touch me that night. I had one of my all too rare moments when I just threw all my cares to the wind and stuck my tongue out at them. Nothing could bring me down. Not how creepy it was being in a parking garage at night for the first time, not how I fell on my butt several times that night skating, not even thoughts about how my boss would react come morning.

            In fact, let me tell you a little secret. If anyone had shown up at the café that night, which I’m pretty sure no one did, there would have been no one there to serve them. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to go skating. That other girl I was supposed to work with was at the rink that night. She looked at me, I looked at her, and we went separate ways. We didn’t really like each other. We hadn’t since we’d first met and we still don’t to this day, but that night we had a mutual understanding. That night we didn’t want to be stuck in some corner of the Land building, waiting on no one but the air. We didn’t want to be cooking pretzels and listening to the blaring TV that was mounted to the red wall. What we wanted was to be a part of the student body. We wanted to be a part of society.

           Yes, in retrospect skipping work probably wasn’t the best idea –though I never did hear anything from my boss about it –but over all, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. You see, sometimes in life we get too caught up in the world around us. We get too caught up in our routines. Some days it feels like our only purpose is to wake up, fulfill our responsibilities, go to bed, and repeat it all over again the next day, but there’s more to life than that.

            I’ve probably said this before, but participation is not just something you do to pass a class. Participation is something you do to live.

            I was never any good at participating in class. I’ve had more than my share of teachers ride my case about needing to talk more. There was even a time that I would say that I wasn’t any good at participating in life, but things change. The university and the friends I made there changed me.

            Skating at Crown Center Plaza changed me. It was the first real experience I had with the student body that didn’t leave me second guessing myself. Outside of welcome week (freshman orientation) –which was sort of forced on me –and the pizza party my New Testament professor hosted, Skate Night was the first time I really participated in campus life.

     

       Let me tell you this. All those responsibilities you have, all those papers that won’t write themselves and all those paychecks you’re trying to earn, won’t matter in the scheme of things. I look back at my time at the university and I can really only remember a few things that I bought with my paychecks. I can only really remember a few paper topics I wrote on and a few math tests that I didn’t do particularly horrible on. What I remember most are the moments I spent participating in life.

           

Textbooks can only teach you so much. I had a professor, the only professor I was ever on bad terms with, that once said, “No matter how much an author writes about reality, and no matter how real they make it, they will still never achieve reality.” He and I didn’t agree on many things, but on that statement we can agree.

            Textbooks, novels, they’re all great sources of knowledge. They all help us learn what it means to be human and why humans do the things they do, but in order to really understand humanity you have to be a part of it.

            There’s a saying that goes, “Everybody dies but not everyone lives.” I’d encourage you all to live. To take some time and to have a rare ‘forget-it-all’ moment. All those responsibilities you have will still be there when you get back. Take a step back, throw those papers to the wind, and say, “Tomorrow, world, I am yours, but tonight…tonight I am living.”

            You never know what can happen in the span of one night. Choosing to spend it with the right people can change your entire future. That night at the skate rink, Ally met her husband. She and Sky got married two years later and they now have a set of adorable twins. They live in Alaska now. He’s in the military. She does nursing. Because of that night, because she made the choice to give him a ride to Kansas City, he ended the night by asking her out on their first date.

            

Now, I didn’t find my prince charming at that skate rink, but I found something just as important. My spirit.

The Greatest Lesson I've ever Learned

Time Frame: 2010ish-2015

As kids we are in such a rush to grow up. We have this fairy tale view of what life is going to be like. We believe in the concept of happy endings, and knights in shining armor, and perfect princesses that always win. We look at the world with rose colored glasses.

        

    As we grow older we realize that it’s not the monsters under our beds that we should fear, but the ones that dwell within our thoughts. Yes, I just quoted Batman. I happen to be a major Batman fanatic, but that’s not the point here. The point is that its fear and doubt that haunt us. Our worst enemy is ourselves.

            I never intended to write this entry. I never planned on this vignette series (or whatever you want to call it) hitting so close to home. I never thought I’d be writing about my present in a book about the past. But you know what? Even if this is only the fourth installment in Rookie Mistakes, there are rules I live my life by –a personal code I follow –and one of those rules is to always write about what scares you and, right now, what scares me most is myself.

            I don’t know where I’m going in life, but I’m coming to peace with that. It seems to me that everything I’ve experienced has been for a reason. What I went through last year prepared me for this year. What I went through three years ago is still effecting me today. Even things that happened way back when I was a child still have an impact on my life.

It’s levels. It’s building blocks. That’s what life is. Each stage we go through makes us stronger and better prepares us for the next level. There’s a song my brother likes that says, “Life is like a video game, trying hard to beat the stage.” Despite the mild vulgarity in the song, the guy who wrote it had a point. I mean, think about it. Just for a second, really think about it. When we’re born we all start out at level one. We’re rookies. We know nothing about this world. We have our instincts, but we have to rely on nurture as well as nature to get us socialized and assimilated, and all those other aspects of integrating ourselves into the way humans live.

At the time of birth we are blank slates going through a tutorial phase. As we grow we ‘level up’. We learn more things and apply them to each new stage we face. Along the way, we’re attacked. We get hit by bosses. We get knocked over by the right hook of jealousy and stabbed by the knife of gossip. We find ourselves in situations we’ve never faced before with a big old, bad guy staring death beams at us…and we look down and think that the sword in our hand –all the experience we have stored up –is nothing but a toothpick compared to the beast in front of us. Yet, we prevail. We push through and overcome. Just like in a video game.

            The thing is, recently in life, I made a choice that lead me to a new boss. That boss has many names and many faces. She likes to attack in the night and whisper all sorts of words that make my stomach churn. She invades my dreams. Haunts my thoughts. She’s constantly telling me that I’m not good enough, that I’m making nothing out of my life, that nothing I do matters, that everything is going to fall apart…the list goes on and on.

            By this point you’ve probably realized that the tone of this particular entry is not the comical light-hearted one associated with the purpose of the collection. I’m sorry for that, yet, this must be said.

            I am battling myself. I am battling the world and judgement. I am at a stage in my life that I never wished to be at again.

            I’m at the stage of reawakening. I’m once again trying to find my place and trying to build a reputation up within that place. The people I work with, both at my workplace and at my church, don’t know me. How could they? I’ve been somewhat of a ghost to them. I came around seasonally. Whenever the university was on break. But now there are no more breaks. This is my life. I live here. That doesn’t make the ghost any less important though.

            Before May, 2015, I went through a stage of life where I attended the university. I learned a lot while there. I learned that for an English major I have a really relaxed form of grammar. I learned that I gained more knowledge and wisdom from just being with my friends than I ever did from a text book. I learned that I probably chose the wrong major (I should have totally gone with Culinary Arts or Sociology). I had a math professor that surprisingly managed to teach me enough to get me through my College Algebra course (Seriously, that guy deserves like a reward or something. I gave up on a test once in his class and wrote on it that I didn’t ‘Math’…yes, I used it as a verb. I got that from my high school English teacher. He –the math professor -didn’t fail me for turning in the test mostly incomplete and with that little remark written next to a Batman I sketched. You know what he did? He let me retake it and sat down with me for a bit to explain –in detail- why the heck functions work the way they do. He should have totally just failed me. I would have been totally okay with it…but he didn’t.) However, the most important lesson I ever learned came from working at the university cafeteria.

            In the Spring of 2015, we were preparing for the biggest event on the University campus. President’s Honors. All hands were on deck. Everyone was expected to pitch in and work as long as they could to help out. One of our bosses had only been working there for a year and it was his second time hosting the event. His first time hosting it without someone showing him the ropes. He, a coworker, and I were sitting in what was known as the Fireside room….because, well, it was the room on the side of the cafeteria that had a fireplace. Inventive name, I know. Don’t judge. Remember the rule with this collection. No judging.

        

    Anyway, the three of us were tasked with folding napkins for the event. When there’s over four hundred napkins to fold in a bishop style it takes as many hands as possible So even the Cashiers helped when they had some down time. We were just sitting there, our hands going through the motions on autopilot as we made the right creases on the navy blue cloth napkins. Our mouths were conversing about the event itself.

            “You should have seen it last year,” Samantha –yeah, we’ll call her Samantha –said as she placed a successfully folded napkin in a crate to the side of us. “The chefs convinced me to try this thing that looked like caviar but it wasn’t. That stuff was nasty.”

            Arthur crack a smile. “What was it?”

            “Balsamic vinegar and something else…Jell-O, I think. It was supposed to go on the mousse.”

            “I remember that,” I agreed.

            Samantha looked at me. “And then all those chocolate cups broke, remember?”

            “And half of our salad dressing dishes had to be rewashed,” I added.

            “And that one chef got made because he and another chef were telling us to prepare the salads two different ways.”

            “And the dishwasher broke.”

            “And we didn’t have enough help until the day of the event,” Samantha shook her head. 

“Geesh, that was a fun adventure. Then again, all events are.”

            “So true,” I stated as I worked at unwrapping a package of napkins that needed folding.

            “Stop it. You’re going to jinx us by talking about all that,” Arthur complained. “Everything needs to go right this time.”

            Samantha and I shared a glance before bursting into laughter.

            “Oh, Arthur,” Samantha chided. “Everything’s not going to go right. Everything’s absolutely going to go wrong.”

            “Way to be positive,” he rolled his eyes.

            “No, she’s serious,” I added. “Everything always goes wrong, but then everything works out.”

            “It’s sort of how every event works. It’s like a rule they all follow. Everything will go wrong before it goes right.”

            Everything will go wrong before it goes right, those words that Samantha said that day have stuck with me even after I graduated. They are, in fact, the greatest lesson I’ve ever learned.

            Right now, it seems like I keep getting hit. Like I won’t defeat this boss in front of me and that the different children’s events I’m planning for the church are all going to fail, but I keep telling myself that one simple rule. Why? Because she’s right. Everything, even in life, will go wrong before it feels like anything goes right. That’s just how it goes. But no matter how much crud we face –I’m talking about all of you out there reading this –there will be something that goes right.

            My freshman year at the university I had an Introduction to Physics professor that once started class by saying, “Even the darkest corners of space are never truly dark.” He went on to explain that light was present everywhere in the universe. That true darkness basically doesn’t exist. I mean, it exists, but it doesn’t. Confusing, yeah. Anyway, while he was rambling about stars and planets, and the way the universe works, while ending every sentence with the word, ‘K’ (I’ve heard from some reliable sources that he’s actually gotten better about not doing that…the ‘K’ thing, that is.) I was thinking about how accurate the phrase is when it comes to life.

            We may think that everything’s going wrong, but that’s just because we haven’t found that light yet. Just because things aren’t going your way and you’re frustrated with the universe, that doesn’t mean it’s time to give up and shut off your game console. That boss you’re facing, whatever it may be, is temporary. There’s something wonderful just on the other side of it. So look for that light. Look for something to go right. Because, let me tell you, everything will seem to go wrong before anything goes right. 

Karma Is A...

Time frame: April 2015

            Karma is a brat. She is evil incarnated, she is hell on heels, and she is a matter of debate. I’m not one to say that karma exists. I don’t believe in destiny or fate, or basically anything that has to deal with walking a life already planned out by some divine force. I believe in this little thing called free will. Yet, I won’t deny that sometimes, just sometimes, I do believe in karma. What goes around certainly does come back around. I’m not versed enough in the belief of karma to say it exists or not, but there is something to be said about things coming back to bite you in the butt.

           My senior year at the University was coming to an end. It was my last week at the cafeteria and, on Monday the 27^th of April, I walked into the cafeteria to work my last catering shift and my last dinner Cashier shift. I still had a couple student manager shifts left, but the reality of it all was hitting me hard. As well as another student manager.

            

Rebecca and I both had the same idea that Monday. It was our last week and we wanted to make it count. We wanted it to be perfect. To go so smoothly that it would be impossible to believe. Of course, since we were trying so hard, Karma decided to mess with our plans.

            

Rebecca and I had been a mess all of the last week, not that we were willing to admit it at the time. We were starting to get emotional and with each passing day a new last time happened. It wasn’t fun. It was nostalgic, in a way. It had us thinking back to how we started and how far we had come. We found ourselves giving as much advice to our friends as possible. We must have told them a hundred times not to take the cafeteria for granted. After all, that place taught us how to live.

            Anyway, on the 27^th, I was sent to do a catering tear down with a friend of mine. Alyssa had been training for a few weeks to do catering the following year and I had been gifted the job of showing her the ropes. She’d accompanied me to various event set ups and tear downs. I’d walked her through where the catering stuff was kept and how to get the metal frames for the food down from on top of our walk-in fridges. The 27^th was supposed to be easy. We were just supposed to drive over to the nursing and athletics building, pick up the event that had ended, and drive back to get everything cleaned and put away. Yet, Karma intervened.

           The brat decided that there was one last thing Alyssa needed to know about. One last thing that I hadn’t even thought about because it didn’t happen very often. In fact, it happened to very little that when it happened this time I went blank on how to solve the problem.

            We had loaded the golf cart we’d driven over to the building with all of the event supplies. The trays of fruit and cheese were stacked on top of each other. The coffee urns were in crates so they wouldn’t fall over when we drove over potholes. The cookie and vegetable trays were placed secure between the crates so they wouldn’t fly out of the cart. Everything was set. I hoped in the passenger side and gave Alyssa the keys. She put the keys in the ignition, shifted the cart into reverse, and when the shrill little beep emitted to let people know we were backing up, she pressed on the gas.

        

    The cart didn’t move.

            We shut off the cart and tried again. Again it didn’t move. We switched seats so I was driving and I messed around with the key, but it didn’t help.

     

       A former fellow employee was sitting nearby with his girlfriend and he came over to help, but not even he could fix the cart. Alyssa looked at me and said, “We broke the cart. We’re going to die.”

            In the back of my mind I had this nagging feeling that I was forgetting something, but I couldn’t place my finger on what it was. Eventually we had no choice but to walk back to work and tell our boss about the cart. Neither of us wanted to tell him, we knew if the cart was broken it’d come out of our paychecks and we’d have to push the dang thing all the way across campus, but we sucked it up and knocked on his office door.

            He let us in with a friendly smile and sheepishly we explained our situation to him. He and Joe, the head chief, laughed when we were finished.

           “Did you try to button in the back?” Joe smirked at me.

            I could feel color fill my face and I instantly wanted to face palm. Of course. The button. That’s what I had been forgetting. There was a little switch in the back of the cart, inconveniently placed where it would get bumped from time to time by event stuff. We must have bumped it when we were loading the cart.

            “There’s a button?” Alyssa asked.

            “There’s a button,” I confirmed and we made the trek back to the cart. When we got there I reached into the back, pushed aside the fruit trays and flipped a small silver switch that you’d miss if didn’t know where it was.

            “This switch is like an emergency shut off,” I explained to Alyssa. “If bumped, it won’t let the cart move.”

            “I’ve driven this cart all month and I didn’t even notice that was there,” Alyssa stated, staring at the switch I’d flicked into the proper position.

            “No one ever does. It’s easy to miss…and apparently easy to forget about.” I wanted to kick myself for forgetting about the dumb little switch, but I really only had a few moments to feel stupid because we needed to get the catering stuff back to the cafeteria so it could be washed and put away.  I couldn’t believe I had made such a rookie mistake.

           It only took Alyssa and I a half hour, with the help of the dish boys, to get the catering stuff washed and put away. Then, with only an hour remaining until dinner shift we both decided we’d just stay at the cafeteria. We were sipping on sodas and checking Facebook on our phones when Rebecca slumped into a chair beside us.

            

“You okay?” I asked.

            “No. I need your help.”

            I got up, no questions asked, and followed Rebecca over to one of the wells on the nacho bar, where the cheese and beans were kept warm. I found myself looking into a well of orange water.

  

          Rebecca looked defeated when she dropped her head to the glass sneeze guard over the nacho bar and said, “I made a rookie mistake. I spilled the cheese.”

            Sure enough, beside the well was a pan of freshly made nacho cheese and an empty pan that had crusted, burnt cheese lining it’s walls.

            “I’ll go get the ice,” I stated.

  

          “I’ll get the shop vac,” she added.

            We left to get the necessary tools to clean up her mess when the next karmatic thing occurred. She’d been wrestling with the shop vac cord, muttering about how she couldn’t understand how she could change the cheese a thousand times without error and end up spilling it her last week at work. I was scooping ice from our ice machine into a bucket so we could cool down the well before vacuuming up the cheesy water inside it.

            Everything seemed to be going well on my end. Nothing had happened to me since the golf cart switch. Maybe I had gotten too confident. Maybe Karma just liked messing with us because we’d gotten away with not making any rookie mistakes in so long. Whatever the reason, some unknown force decided to convince the clip holding the ice machine door open that life wasn’t worth it anymore.

            The clip gave out, dropping the door directly on the top of my head. I let out an, “Ouch!” as the thing slammed into me, giving me an instant headache.

            “Are you okay?” Rebecca asked.

            “Rookie mistake!” the assistant chief called out.

            “This is so not our day,” Rebecca rolled her eyes. I could tell she was already 110% done with the day and dinner shift hadn’t even started yet.  

            After that, everything seemed like smooth sailing. We’d learned how to move on from rookie mistakes years ago. They weren’t big deals and it was expected that our fellow employees would point them out and mock us over them. It was sort of proof that we were part of the cafeteria family. So, it didn’t bug us when the assistant chef promptly told everyone as they gathered for dinner before shift about the cheese, the ice, and the golf cart. Rebecca and I had laughed and smiled along with the story. Adding in little remarks like, “I was over do for a mistake anyway,” “Karma’s just getting us back for calling all of you out on your rookie mistakes,” and “It could have been worse.” We even got in a few jabs of our own, “At least we didn’t flood the kitchen with a water fight.”

            “Hey!” Nate, the assistant chief, shot back. “A little flood was worth the fun.”

            We talked casually for the next thirty minutes, Rebecca interrupting everyone’s conversations every now and then to tell people where they were positioned to work that night. Fifteen minutes before we had to clock in and Rebecca was talking with me, Nate, and a few of our other friends about our goals then compared to our goals when we started working at the cafeteria. She’d meant to say one thing, but she ended up saying another and it came out sounding like, “Find love and food serve.”

            Nate and I burst out laughing as she got a sour expression on her face.

            “So apparently I no longer know how to speak English,” she stated.

            “Find love and food serve sounds like the title to some cheesy romance novel,” I laughed.

            “Oh! Yes!” Nate grinned. “And the Amish woman is the main character!”

            And we laughed and laughed…but the Amish woman is another story all together. 

In Which an Ice Cream Cone Reminds Me of Fresh Meat

Time Frame: September 2014/January 2011

September 2, 2014. That’s the date that it really sunk in. I was a college senior. I had been so excited about reaching my final year and elated when I found out that I finally had enough credit hours to be given that glorious rank. So what if it had taken me an extra year to get to that point? I made it. I had finally reached the end, the last lap, and I wasn’t going to slow down. With full speed ahead I was determined to cross that finish line, defeat that last boss, write that last paper, receive that last grade, and claim victory by walking across a stage in front of a large group of people to receive a piece of paper that, with simple words, told of my victory. But, in order to get that oh so valuable piece of paper I had to first complete my final mission as a college student...senior year.

      

      My name is Andy Martin. I’m 5’2, I weigh 114 pounds, I can never remember what blood type I am, and I have a tendency to forget to eat when I’m doing things I deem important, like writing. An English major with no idea of where she’s going, unwillingness to quit where she is, and proud of where she’s come from. That’s me.

            At the age of 18 I graduated from a small high school and relocated from my home town –Grand Island, Nebraska –to the much bigger city of Olathe, Kansas. I won’t lie and say that I wasn’t nervous, that I wasn’t scared, or that I didn’t think about dropping out and working at a local food joint back at home for the rest of my life, but I also won’t tell you that I regret that change. Going to the university was one of the best choices I ever made.

            Let me tell you, every college has its down falls. There’s no place on earth that is perfect, but, for what it’s worth, you get out of your life what you put into it. Participation isn’t just something you do to pass a class, it’s something that one must do in order to have a fulfilling life.

            Flannery O’Connor once said that, “Nothing needs to happen in a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their creative life.” O’Connor may have been right. By the time a person reaches the wonderful age of 20 they’ve gone through more than enough to teach the world a thing or two. Think about it, one of the most adventure and lesson filled times of one’s life is high school. Just between the ages of 14 and 18 one learns some of life’s greatest lessons and experiences enough to write volumes full of wacky adventures. However, there is something to be said about those years after 20.

            At 18, I started working at the cafeteria on my University’s campus. At 22, I had made my way up through its ranks to reach the coveted rank of Student Manager. The second week of my senior year, on the second day in September, I ran my second shift as Student Manager, and when I went in to work that night the last thing on my mind was my freshman year. In fact, I can tell you exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking about those plays I still had to read, that article that was waiting for me to write a response paper to, that presentation I needed to start preparing for, that quiz I was going to be taking the next day and had yet to study for, and how much I really didn’t want to be at work that night.

            I never, in a million years, could have predicted how that night had gone. I had just finished Student Manager Training and still had no idea of what exactly I was supposed to be doing. I didn’t even understand why they had picked me. Why had my bosses emailed me over summer break and requested that I consider taking a student manager position?  

            I’ve never considered myself as a leader. I’ve never really been a follower either. I paved my own way, kept my voice soft, and said all I needed to say through ink. Writing was my outlet. It was the only way I ever felt capable of expressing exactly what I wanted and needed to say. Whenever I spoke I spent so much time fumbling and stumbling over my own tongue that most of what I said tended to loss the impact it could have had if spoken clearly. It wasn’t that I had a speech problem. I didn’t stutter, I knew how to articulate, My tongue knew the exact places to touch in my mouth to create the words I wished to speak, but I had a bit of a social anxiety problem. When I wasn’t talking to close friends, or about writing, I got quite and my words started to sound like a scratched CD, my heart rate increased, my thoughts flew from what I wanted to say to what those around me were potentially thinking of me. Which is kind of odd considering that as the older I got the less I cared about other people’s opinions of me. I grew to know who I was and to be comfortable in my own skin, which was the exact opposite who I was back in high school.

            Still, even though I knew who I was and I knew that I was capable of putting up a brave mask to convince the world that I knew what I was doing even when I didn’t, I didn’t understand why in the galaxy my bosses would pick me to be one of the three student managers. At first I thought it was just because I was a senior, because I really couldn’t think of any other reason. I mean, yes they seemed to like me, and yes they always said that I was a great worker, and yes they constantly reminded me that I was reliable, but I couldn’t wrap my head around their reasoning. I was plagued with fears that I would do a horrible job, that my co-workers (who had also been my friends, my roommates, my hall mates, and my classmates) wouldn’t respect me. I quickly found out that they had more respect for me than I thought. In fact, that second night of holding the Student Manager position, almost each and every one of my co-workers told me how happy they were for me that I got that position and how they thought I’d do a great job.

            About halfway through my shift that second night in September, I was standing there between two serving lines –my bosses to my left speaking in hushed whispers and my friends hurrying around to wipe down counters and refill dishes – and surveying the scene before me. To say I felt out of place would be an understatement. I wore the same black chef coat as every other worker, had the same blue rag thrown over my shoulder, but I wasn’t moving. I wasn’t actually doing anything but watching and that felt wrong. From the time I was a Freshman, up until that point, I had been trained in every student position working that night. I had been trained to keep moving. No standing around. No having lengthy conversations with people. No texting. If you weren’t busy, you found a way to appear busy. That was the way things worked…until that moment.

            I felt like I should be wiping down counters, or checking the coffee and soda levels. I felt like I should be cutting tomatoes, refilling ice-cream, or seeing how many pans of rice was still in the warmer…but that wasn’t my job anymore. My job was to tell people that was their job. And that felt weird. So after asking my roommate –Stella – to clean up a few pieces of meat that had fallen from the carving board, and requesting that the guy working in the same area as her refill the rice, I resorted to awkwardly standing between the two serving lines.

            I stood there for a couple minutes when I noticed one of my bosses, a tall slim guy with a balding head approach the ice cream machine. I didn’t think anything of it for Aaron would often check the machine to make sure it was still working. He pulled a long metal tube from its stand beside the purring metal box before heading my way. I knew what he was going to ask even before his slack, shirt, and tie clad form reached me.

            “Hey, And,” he was grinning, swinging the metal tube around like it wasn’t half the size of a bazooka. “Want to see if anyone could fill this up?”

            I hummed, debating on who I could ask to do such a small but important task.

            “Or, if you really want to, you could do it,” Aaron suggested, the lines around his smile grew. He was barley middle aged and that smile of his made him resemble a devious little boy. It was pure joy and it brought to mind a time when I had witnessed him laugh after telling someone to walk across the room and pick up a napkin he had spotted underneath a booth. He had said, at that time, with the exact smile he was currently wearing, “I just love telling people what to do.” He was such a good natured boss though that most people just did what he said without complaint. After all, you couldn’t have an attitude with somewhat that actually cared about how stressed you were or worked with you to figure out a schedule that would fit your needs with classes and the want of a social life.

            “I’ll do it,” I took the metal tube from my grinning boss who I knew was still smiling as I walked away.

            I didn’t have to go far to refill the metal tube. After all, it was meant to distribute ice cream cones and the cones were located on a shelf right by the door that lead to a large storage room. It took me all of six steps to get to the door and even though I had to stand on my tiptoes to get the tall box of cones down from its shelf, it was still easy. It was then though, as I was at a metal table across from the shelf –which was named Faye’s table after the woman who toiled over it during the day to prepare all the salad bar options and sacked lunches we provided  -that I froze in my work.

            I was reaching into the long box with latex covered hands, pulling cones from it and easily slipping them into the metal tube. I didn’t miss. The first cone fell straight through the tube and stopped halfway through the hole it would eventually leave from, just like it was supposed to. As I dropped one cone in after another, each one slid right into place and suddenly it hit me. I was doing the exact same task, perfectly, my senior year that I had an absolutely disastrous encounter with my freshman year.

            My first week as a cafeteria worker, my little fresh meat brain was still trying to get a handle on college life. I had been at the school for a semester, but it was all so different than what I was use to and work was relatively new to me. I had held jobs before, but only a couple and they were nothing like working at the cafeteria. It was sometime during my first week working there, I can’t recall the exact day, that I had been asked to refill the ice cream cones.  

            Being the insecure, unsure little freshie that I was, I had meekly approached the duel metal tubes that stood next to the ice cream machine which I couldn’t even fathom how I’d refill. Hesitantly I grabbed one of the tubes.

            “They just slide right off,” the head chef at the time, Roger, had told me. “Just pull it off and 

take it to Faye’s table. The cones are on the shelf across from it.”

            Yeah right, they just slide right off. It took me nearly five minutes to get the metal tubes free from their hooks. I tried pulling, I tried lifting up, I tried pushing down, I tried sliding them off of whatever device was securing them, but nothing worked. For five minutes I messed around with the tubes, everyone seeing but no one bothering to come up and actually show me how it was done. Then, finally, with a soft, fearful voice I turned to the person who was supposedly responsible for my training –I say supposedly because he really wasn’t a very good trainer –and ask, “Um, T-Taylor, could you show me how to…” I gestured towards the ice cream cone holders.

            With a sigh and a roll of his eyes, the afro haired, ghost pale boy walked over and removed the tubes by simply sliding them up. Something I was sure I had tried. At that point I was more than sure those ice cream cone holders were biased. I wanted to sink into the shadows as he handed me the tubes with a snicker. I was so embarrassed and heat was flooding my face. I rushed to Faye’s table as quickly as I could.

            Things only got worse once I was at the shiny, pristine stainless steel table. I sat the tubes down and took a couple deep breaths to slow my heart rate. I just wanted that night to be over with. I hated how much I kept messing up. There had been other incidents that day –that week –that left me feeling like a failure at work.

            Turning to grab the cones, my stomach only churned more. How was I, a short petite girl, supposed to reach the box of cones that was half my size and located on the top shelf of a rather large shelving unit? Not only was it located on the top but it was pushed clear to the back of the shelf. There was no way I could reach it without falling. Still, I looked around, saw no one and used the skills I learned from doing dishes around the house as a kid. I scaled the shelf easily enough, got the box, and almost gave a cheer of victory when I landed with a soft thud on the tiled floor. No one had seen my stunt and that made me even happier.

            I felt that I had finally done something right that night. That little hope that flared in me put a skip in my step as I twirled to face Faye’s table. I had gotten the cones and all I had left to do was put them in their tubes and put the tubes back by the ice cream machine. Not too hard, right? Wrong!

            Somehow, and I still don’t know quite how I accomplished this, I managed to break half of the cones. The first few broke when I was trying to get them to fall partially through the hole at the bottom of the tubes, the others…well…I’m not sure what led to their murder. I just know that I slaughtered over a dozen cones trying to get them into the tubes and, if that wasn’t bad enough, after I had gotten the tubes full I dropped them. Which broke every single cone I had managed to get safely inside.

            After refilling the ice cream cone tubes, came my next challenge. Re-hooking them back up by the ice cream machine was a nightmare, and just like they had done when I was trying to get the tubes off the hooks my coworkers just stared at me. Not even Taylor had come to my aid and I had to eventually retreat to the kitchen and embarrassingly –almost forty minutes after he asked me to refill the cones –ask the head chef to show me how to put the cone tubes back.

            Thankfully, that never happened again after that time. The cone incident was a rookie mistake and, thankfully, I learned that I wasn’t the only fresh meat who had ever done such.

            I laughed a little as I left Faye’s table behind. My senior self couldn’t help but smile at my freshman one. I was so foolish then. So naïve. I messed up on so much and now I was a student manager. I really had come a long ways. It was weird to think that I was senior.

            As I slid the cone tubes into place as easily as if I had never once failed at doing so I realized that I wasn’t that scared little freshman anymore. I wasn’t terrified of the cafeteria or my bosses. I wasn’t worried about screwing up and I no longer pointlessly murdered ice cream cones. I was a senior.

I. was. A. Senior. I had finally made it. And, as I turned away from that ice cream machine to look out at my friends as they worked, I felt myself fill with pride. And I realized that’s why they picked me. That’s why my bosses had chosen me for the third Student Manager position. Not because I was a senior, but because I was experienced.