Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To

The new tradition of occasionally rewarding debit card use with little free rewards is growing...largely because we continue to have useless stuff to get rid of. Apparently they did it again yesterday while I was off serving at the elementary school. Prize of the day: paper cars.

No, really. Apparently it was some sort of promotional swag given to us by one of our pizza suppliers. It consisted of large stacks of perforated 3x5 cards which, when punched out and folded in a few places, made crappy paper toy cars with the Tony's Pizza logo on them. Whee!

There was still a fairly large stack of them sitting by my register today, which I neither actively promoted nor withheld. If any kid asked for one, or said "Hey, I wish I'd gotten one of those yesterday," I handed one over. Or two, or three. Have fun, kids, create your own Tony's Pizza convoy!

But I wasn't asked very often, and the matter drifted to the back of my mind, thus leading to possibly the most confusing conversation I've had with a student.

One of my favorite kids (yes, I have favorite kids. Don't tell them.) came up to me, an owlish bespectacled gamer kid who liked to occasionally chat with me over the newest Guitar Hero or Xbox 360 games. He asked me if he could have a new card.

"Sure," I said. "But it costs three dollars."

Blink. Blink. Then he giggled. "Good one. Really, though, can I have one?"

"Of course. But you have to bring in three dollars."

He continued to look at me with an uncomfortable smirk, a half-smile that said she must be kidding, but when will she drop it? He reached out uncertainly and gave me a playful punch on the arm. "No, really. I dropped mine yesterday, and someone stepped on it and it broke into pieces."

I was utterly baffled. This was usually a pretty smart kid who knew the drill. What wasn't he getting? And also, your debit card is that fragile? "Look, I don't make the rules. I'm sorry, but you know if you lose your card, you need to bring me three dollars so that I can order a new one for you."

Understanding spread over his face. "Car," he said. "Those little cars she was giving out yesterday. Can I have another one?"

Ooooohhhhh! Go me. Embarrassed, I reached behind me and handed him a couple of punch-out cars. "Sorry man. You know I wasn't here yesterday!" I laughed.

Three dollars, for a car in danger of falling to pieces if stepped on? Silly lunchlady.

Of Peewees and Peas

When I was originally hired, you may recall that I had to spend a little time learning various jobs that I may have to cover, including elementary school duty. I was honestly beginning to think it would never come up, until yesteray. Rosie called in sick...and I was asked to cover. This is a job I only helped with, following her around and doing as instructed, and only three or four times nine months ago.

Fortunately, it went pretty well. Muscle memory kicked in past my initial self-doubt, and I successfully drove the big truck in the rain, backed it up and unloaded it in the proper area, and set up for the elementary school children. Who, apparently, are really not fond of change.

Once kids started to pour in, they sized me up and surmised that I was Not Rosie. Which made me persona non grata in their book, and I was eyed with a wary look that suggested perhaps I might have poisoned Rosie. Or the food.

The pace of the serving was hard to gauge. For the first line, I set up plenty of trays in advance, remembering how quickly they began to disappear once the children arrived. However, the kindergarten set arrived a few minutes late and were surprisingly few in number...meaning most of them got trays of pizza and peas that had been sitting and getting cold. So I eased up on the advance preparation a little, only to be deluged by the fourth graders. Within two minutes of their arrival I was out of food and barely filling trays as they were snatched up one at a time.

For the most part it went smoothly, although I did get into a strange and unnecessary disagreement with a third grader. When she approached the counter, she didn't like what she saw.

"I don't like peas," she told me. "I want a tray with no peas on it."

And I want a dream date with Masi Oka, kid. It's school policy that we have to serve a nutritionally balanced lunch. "I'm sorry," I said. "All the trays come with peas on them."

"I don't like peas," she sniffed at me, as though I simply hadn't heard the first time. "Can you make me a tray with no peas on it?" Nope, sorry.

As she got increasingly agitated over the issue and kids began to maneuver around the traffic jam she created, I pushed a tray toward her decisively. "Look," I murmured. "No one's actually going to make you eat these peas. Ignore them."

And she gave me a Look, one I'd never seen on such a small face. It was an utterly withering look, an Oh-No-You-Didn't look, and after a gentle nudge to her friend I was getting it in stereo. Then she grudgingly left with pizza, milk, fruit cup...and peas.

So I arrived back tired and humbled. Tired, because I'd loaded and driven a food truck, packed and unpacked, served alone, and come back with enough time left to join in the dishwashing and clearing up at my own school. Humbled, because Rosie does this every day, except that she does so after coming in at 6:30am and cooking until lunchtime, and she's my grandmother's age.

This morning, when I told Rosie how the little ones had taken to me in her absence, her eyes absolutely twinkled. "Oh yeah," she said. "They're my babies."

And she can have them.

4 out of 5 Felons Prefer It

Sorry folks, it's been a slow week, and I've been lazy. I do not, however, want to end the weekend without an anecdote, and this one's had me giggling since last night.

As it so happens, my husband, my roommate and I developed a strong craving for ice cream last night. As it also happens, we live just five or six houses down from a United Dairy Farmers (for those of you who do not live in the Midwest, think '7-11 Meets Baskin Robbins'. Great place, but annoying sometimes when you're trying to pay for gas and a fountain drink and have to wait 15 minutes because the clerk is working the ice cream shop for other customers). Though it was very cold outside and we were three very lazy adults, we had a house full of small people that we can give orders to. Woo!

We called over the resident teenager, Christopher, and gave him money to make the trip for us, with the assurance that he could buy for everyone. As we all began to give him our individual pint orders, complete with second choices in case certain flavors were unavailable, the boy wisely decided to start writing a list. The boy is a smart kid generally....but an abysmal speller. We razzed him a bit as he wrote, and he took it with good humor.

When his list was completed, I took it and scanned it over to make sure everyone's order was correct. What I discovered on the list had everyone in the room in fits of laughter, including Christopher.

My roommate's first choice for ice cream was Mint Chocolit Chip. Okay.

His second choice....was Chokies and Crime.

The Cookie Grumbles

When I arrived at work today, the special treat du jour was a fresh-from-the-oven Otis Spunkmeyer cookie, one with every full student lunch purchased. Tried one - they were absolutely delightful. Warm and soft, with the chocolate chips still just a little melty.

As luck would have it, I had to serve today, and the cookies were quite popular. And why not? The cookies were essentially free; they did not count as one of the two side dish choices. Out of several hundred children, I had perhaps three or four turn down their cookie.

Then, as the shift wound to a close, I ran out of cookies - with ten children left in the line.

These ten children looked broken-hearted. "We're the LAST kids," one of them said to me. "Can we get anything special?"

And I looked. All I could find were leftovers from our most recent debit card reward giveaway - a practice started last April by my previous supervisor to encourage children to remember their cards, but which has largely become a way to give away stuff we need to get rid of. This last time it was a box of individually wrapped cinnamon grahams nearing expiration. Their unhappiness was understandably unassauged by the substitute offer...and even so I only had six.

I was at an impasse. These ten had done nothing to deserve being sent away empty-handed, and though I'd heard Rosie would be returning from the elementary school momentarily with her leftover cookies, I didn't want to leave them waiting in line indefinitely as their short lunch break ticked away. As the grumbling increased, I told the kids "Let me check one last time" and disappeared into the kitchen without much hope, wondering with vague bemusement whether I was going to have a mini-riot on my hands. And suddenly there she was, still apple-cheeked from the bitter cold outside, bringing in empty serving trays, boxes of Uncrustables...and the very last tray of cookies.

As I returned to my serving station with cookies in hand, the kids actually cheered. It felt a little theatrical, like a cheesy commercial. You could almost see the camera just over my shoulder, catching a little of my profile and my two arms outstretched with the tray of moist delicious chocolate-chip cookies, and just beyond that point of view the cheering faces of the children as my profile passed through the doorway and into the brightly-lit lunchroom.

So there you have it folks, I got a standing ovation today for cookies. And I didn't even bake them!

Word to the Wise

If you are my roommate's 14-year-old son, and you have had your computer taken away for misuse and poor grades...do not enter my private office area (the one you've been told to stay out of, the one with the sign that says "No"), and use my private computer to access your MySpace profile.

Alternatively, if you are said 14-year-old and you do use my personal private computer in my personal private office area to access your MySpace profile, have the good sense to log yourself out and cover your tracks.

I knew someone had been in my office over the last week or so, as my monitor was occasionally turned off at the actual switch rather than allowed to power down on its own after 10 minutes as I tend to do. I didn't think too much about it until I attempted to log on to MySpace earlier today to contact a friend whose e-mail address I had forgotten. I'm not a big fan of MySpace, but it does have its uses.

Surprising - I was apparently already logged in. More surprising - "my" mailbox was full of recently read and replied to messages from emo teenage girls in black makeup, girls whose motto space contained nuggets of wisdom like "the world sux and im wating for it to end".

It didn't take me long to surmise what had happened. And it didn't take long for my annoyance to turn to amusement.

I have now set the screensaver to return to my password-protected Welcome screen after I've walked away for longer than three minutes.

And said emo boy now listens to Celine Dion, does Reiki healing, raises miniature Poodles, and idolizes President Bush.

Game, set, match.

My Goose is Tooked!

Missing: Cement Lawn Goose
Age: 14
Name: Jenny
Last Seen Wearing: Santa suit

Folks, today is a momentous day, as yet another chapter of my youth comes to an oddly appropriate close. And so today I shall tell you the epic tale of Jenny, the Decapitated-Recapitated Goose...also known in days of yore as The Hot Goose.

Her saga begins years ago, in the women's dormitory where I was attending college. A couple of girls in the dorm two rooms down from me got quite sozzled one night, and in an evening of debauched shenanigans came home with one of those delightfully kitschy cement lawn geese, which they had stolen from someone's front yard. How a couple of 95-pound underage drunk girls successfully made off with a 65 pound chunk of tacky yard art without attracting attention is beyond me, but it must have been quite a sight. It sat in their dorm room for the rest of the school year; then as the semester wound down and they faced the impossibility of carrying such a trinket home by airplane, they gave it to my boyfriend. Who in turn...gave it to his mom as a gift.

His mother was more touched by her son's gift that we ever anticipated. She put it in her front lawn and even bought it clothes. A bikini for summer. A little raincoat and umbrella in April. A Halloween costume, and even a Santa suit. I couldn't help but giggle every time I saw her doting on what my boyfriend and I had privately dubbed the Hot Goose.

Years later, I happened to be living two houses down from her and I saw the goose in her trash, headless. It had simply grown so old it crumbled, I guess. But I was loath to see that odd little trifle of my college days disappear just yet, so I took it home and fashioned it a pretty passable head from papier mache, and once it was dried and matched to the body with a few layers of glossy white she looked great. I tied a green ribbon around her neck and redubbed her Jenny, an homage to the silly campfire story of childhood. When I told my ex's mother that I had taken and repaired the goose, she was thoroughly amused...and a few days later I came home to find a shopping bag next to Jenny filled with all her outfits.

I now live in a house very close to a college campus (not the same one), surrounded by student neighbors. Jenny has continued to grace my porch for a few years now. The kids got a big kick out of her, and looked forward to pulling out the bag at the start of each new season to find her a new outfit to wear.

This morning, my husband and I were leaving the house when he turned to me and said, "Umm...I think our hot goose is hot again." I turned to look, and sure enough she was gone, Santa suit and all. Taken - in all likelihood - by drunk college students.

Maybe I should have been upset, but all I could do was laugh until my ribs ached. A silly and irreplaceable bit of sentimental frippery she was, but what a fitting close to our history together.

Farewell, Jenny, and godspeed you on your future adventures.