Hello, and welcome back to Off The Menu, where we explore the craziest stories about food from my email inbox. This week, we have the very last issue of Off The Menu. If you’re sad about that, well, maybe you should’ve submitted more stories so I didn’t run out. As always, these are real stories from real readers.
Kevin Carlyle:
My family and I often rent a holiday apartment in a certain area, not even really a town as much as a couple of different apartment complexes and one street with half a dozen restaurants and a bar. Every restaurant on that street is blow-your-mind amazing, and the bar is sleazy as all fuck but hey, it’s the only bar. If we weren’t spending our evening in one of the nearby Actual Towns, we could usually be found getting one or two drinks at the house of sleaze and briefly using the WiFi, just barely tolerating the boggle-eyed stares from the prehistoric men at the bar or the extremely suspect anecdotes told by that increasingly drunk Irish woman who just seemed to live in the corner.
On this evening, the WiFi was playing up and my mum particularly wanted to check something. She spoke to the bar landlord who shrugged and told her to ask the guy from the adjoining Thai place to give her the password for their WiFi, as it was usually more reliable. We were sitting out on the patio which was right next to the Thai place’s outdoor tables, so it was a simple thing to ask the owner next time he was outside. My mum did so, and was presented with a worn little strip of paper, upon which was the hand-written password. I counted, and this password was 21 characters long and consisted of upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. The handwriting was not clear, and between the zero/O ambiguity and various Cs that could be Ls and lower case Ls or maybe upper case Is, there were probably hundreds of possible combinations. Mum diligently tapped away for ten, fifteen minutes before admitting defeat and calling the owner back again. He had a few turns himself but with little success. “It’s okay,” he said confidently. “I’ll get Lin. You’ll see, she can always make it work.”
Lin was the waitress, who we normally knew to be very friendly. When she approached us to begin her task, however, she was completely unsmiling. She tied back her hair. She rolled up her sleeves. This was very serious business. She sat down, studied the slip of paper and got to work on my mum’s tablet. She typed, and typed, and typed. She looked at the paper again. She held it this way and that, looking at it sometimes upside down, sometimes from beneath. She typed again. Many, many minutes passed. Occasionally, a customer would try to joke with her about it, and she would simply raise a silencing hand without ever looking up from the screen. Finally, sweat glistening on her forehead and, it seemed, every occupant of both patios on the edge of their seat – she was in. We laughed and applauded, and she was smiling again as she passed the tablet back to my mum, who had long since begun to feel that her internet errand was not proportionate to this spectacle but feared the silencing hand if she had tried to back out. The owner came out and congratulated us on finally gaining access and, laughing, I asked: “Why don’t you change that password?” His answer:
“Because we’ve had it for years and everyone knows it.”
Artie Swenson:
I work retail in a big-box store that has a fresh grocery section. As I am cashiering one day, a customer comes through my lane with a decently large amount of food and one equally large canvas bag. I accept the challenge and bag the items correctly and efficiently (I enjoy these situations, it’s like playing 3D Tetris).
One of the last items to ring and bag is Ecosmart bug killer spray. By this time, the canvas bag is almost full with single-wrapped foods like bread, eggs and grapes so I automatically put the bug spray into a plastic bag by itself. I wish I could have seen the look on my own face when the customer tells me “Thats ok, the spray is all-natural! You can put it in the same bag.”
I think my reaction was closest to the “Are You Serious face” meme. I finally stammered out a “Are you sure?” and let them take it out of the plastic bag and put it next to all that food. “Yes its all natural!” I’m flabbergasted as the terms “poison”, “all-natural” and “food-safe” jockey for position in my mind. The customer pays and leaves.
Looking back on it, I am reminded of the words of Inigo Montoya “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Talia Samberg:
So this happened while I was working as an office assistant at a large synagogue. We held a lot of weddings, memorial services, bat mitzvah’s, Shabbat dinners for local Jewish organizations, etc. — even with folks who belonged to other local congregations.
One Saturday we were hosting another organization’s special Shabbat dinner with us. They had ordered their dinner from a local caterer that we had never worked with before – but they had the appropriate certifications and a good online reputation.
Mid-day the organization called, saying that the caterer had arrived but wasn’t sure how to get into the building and drop off the food. This was totally fine and common – the entrance we used to bring the food up to the story kitchen wasn’t readily visible from the front of the building. I come up to the front of the building on the phone with the caterer and the trouble begins. I tell her I can’t see her, but start giving her directions for how to drive to the side of the building, where there is a ramp and a friendly office assistant to show her where the kitchen is located.
She starts getting upset almost immediately – shouting at me that she is right in front of the building (she is, in a black unmarked minivan which was an excellent choice from a marketing standpoint I’m sure), that she can’t pull over to the side of the building (patently untrue), that she is going to be late getting to her next job, and that she is a caterer not a delivery woman and is just doing this job as a favor (a phrase which I will soon grow exceedingly tired of hearing).
At that point I could tell that arguing with this lady wasn’t going to get me what I needed, which was multiple aluminum trays of tasty kosher dishes. We’re really not supposed to let people in through the front doors of the synagogue for security reasons, but this was a caterer pushed to the brink, and a shabbat dinner starting in 4 hours. So I come down the stairs at the front of the building, and tell her that it’s fine and I’ll help her bring the food up through the front of the building, show her where the kitchen is, etc.
The same litany redux – she is running late to her next job, and she is a caterer not a delivery woman, she’s only doing this as a favor. Well – this is a problem. There are way too many (unsecured trays) in the back of that van for me to take up in one go, which I explain to her, so helping me will help her get out of here sooner.
She starts taking the trays out and placing them on the sidewalk continuing to rant about how she doesn’t have time for this, is a caterer not a delivery woman, is just doing this as a favor (to fucking whom I never asked but desperately wanted to know). I scramble, grabbing trays out of her hands and stack them on a public bench close by (not great, but better than a public sidewalk) while she grumbles about why there aren’t any strong men around to help me.
My supervisor finally comes out, informs the mad caterer that we certainly didn’t want her as our delivery woman any more than she wanted to deliver these meals, and helps me bring them up to the kitchen as the mad caterer of Massachusetts pointedly peels out of her parking spot.
We finally finish bringing everything up to the kitchen and start looking for labels so that we can refrigerate appropriately (meat and dairy dishes in separate sections of the fridge, etc.). The dishes were not labelled kosher. Regardless of their contents (which might very well have been kosher) if they are not labelled we could not accept them. Multiple vegetarian pizzas were speedily ordered from a local kosher restaurant at 4PM on a Friday, and Shabbat dinner was saved but I still wonder sometimes about the mad caterer of Massachusetts and who the fuck she had been doing that favor for.
If you’d like to stay up to date with OTM news, my Twitter handle is @EyePatchGuy.