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 27th
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 27th, 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 27th
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.
