Chef LaVerne's Dishwater Soup

Throughout our lives we encounter people who make a lasting impression on us, either positive or negative.  Later in life we just can't seem to forget these individuals, either because of something they did to enrich us or because of the damage they did.  Laverne was one of those people in my life and I think of him often.

Let me start by saying that LaVerne was one of those individuals who enriched me.  He was in my life for about a year and I haven't seen him or heard from him since, but his influences live on to this day.  That's not to say all of those influences are good, but the important ones are.

For some reason during the 1970's I decided that my destiny was to become a professional chef and eventually open my own restaurant.  My parents, while totally surprised, were supportive and encouraged me to continue down that path.  I'd had a thoroughly unimpressive two years at a very good liberal arts university with the intent of eventually becoming a surgeon.  

After many beer-induced late night sessions with my peers, I came to realize that I just don't like to be around sick people all the time and that a career in medicine would probably be counterproductive to both me and any patients who crossed my path.  While the thought of cutting people open, repairing or removing something, and then stitching them shut again while they're asleep doesn't bother me, the thought of hanging out with them in recovery and dropping by their rooms every day to check on their progress was not at all appealing.  I decided to give my potential patients a break and become a chef instead.  It's a lot less structured, the stakes aren't as high, and you still get to use knives all the time.

So now back to LaVerne.  I was working as a line cook in a big prime rib house when I met LaVerne.  He was Canadian and was assigned to our restaurant in Omaha for training.  Our location was considered the flagship restaurant of the whole chain because our sales were very high and our operational procedures were excellent.  While this may seem like an incredible feat of skill and precision, a prime rib house in Omaha is bound to be successful unless you do something really crazy like not offering ranch dressing or maybe trying to skimp on portion size.  LaVerne was assigned to us for 6 months followed by a month in Canada and then followed another 3 months running the whole kitchen back in Omaha.

LaVerne was very personable, had a witty sense of humor, and learned our kitchen operations easily.  It didn't take us long to realize that he had two skills that none of the other trainees had:  He could cook and he could drink beer, simultaneously if necessary.  When I say that LaVerne could cook, that's perhaps the biggest understatement you'll hear this week.  LaVerne had been Executive Chef at some really high end places throughout Canada, New York, and Los Angeles.  His skills went far beyond simply dumping a few au jus packets into boiling water and simmering it for a few minutes, which was about where the rest of us were at that point in our culinary journeys.

LaVerne could also drink beer.  He could drink a lot of beer very quickly and with a gusto gained only through years of dedicated practice.  In fact, when he joined us after work at the bar across the parking lot he would usually order a pitcher of beer for his first drink.  No glass, just the pitcher.  By the time we ordered our second draw, LaVerne was well into his second pitcher.  As you might imagine, those evenings were always destined to end badly.

If you're unfamiliar with what an Executive Chef does, I'll clue you in.  The Executive Chef is the King of the Kitchen.  He/she is responsible for every plate that goes out to the dining room whether he/she prepared it or one of the other kitchen employees prepared it.  He/she is responsible for hiring, firing, promoting, demoting, disciplining, and mentoring kitchen staff members.  He/she is also responsible for making sure that the food that the restaurant serves is of the highest quality and lowest cost.  It's a big job, but he/she has some help.

Every Executive Chef will have at least one Sous Chef.  The Sous Chef is the Executive Chef's right hand man and lives for the sole purpose of making sure the Executive Chef's orders are carried out perfectly every time.  He/she is the Executive Chef's evil henchman and spends the entirety of every shift right in the face of every cook.  The Executive Chef is respected due to his/her rank and skills, but the Sous Chef is feared because Sous Chefs are generally just downright mean.  The Sous Chef will usually make your shift miserable as this is their true calling.  The good news is that all Sous Chefs aspire to be in an Executive Chef position and will probably not have much longevity in their position.  If you like your job, you can generally just wait it out and the current Sous Chef will leave for greener pastures within a few months.  As a side note, I've found that female Sous Chefs are exceptionally mean and cruel.  I suppose they have to show that a female can thrive in a mostly male-dominated environment as well as demonstrate that they have the cooking skills to become an Executive Chef at some point.

With all that out of the way we can move on to the dishwater incident.  One day we were all standing at the end of the cook's line sampling the soup made by one of the other trainees.  It was uninspiring.  LaVerne offered a few suggestions to make it palatable, but they were rejected by the other trainee.  The other trainee, Bob, went all in and said he made the best soups anywhere in the country and that he was famous for it so LaVerne should just shut up because there's no way he could do any better.  LaVerne countered by stating that he could make the dishwater from the pot sink taste better than Bob's soup.  

The game was on.  Bob countered by betting LaVerne all the beer he could drink in a night  that LaVerne couldn't make a passable soup from dishwater, much less one that tasted really good.  Normally this would have been a safe bet, but not in this case.  LaVerne enthusiastically accepted the challenge and disappeared into the prep area to create his masterpiece.  For the next hour we didn't see him except for his trips to the walk-in to find ingredients and occasional trips to the pot sink to scoop up a few more gallons of dirty dishwater.

Now, if you've ever seen the pot sink in a busy restaurant kitchen you know how disgusting it can be.  The pot sink is where cooks deposit dirty items either too large to fit into the dish machine or so dirty that the dish machine, with it's boiling hot water and highly concentrated detergent, have no chance of ever washing the item clean even after being run through many times.  These items must be scrubbed by hand using a special soap and a steel scrubbing pad.  By steel scrubbing pad I'm not talking about the soap-infused steel wool you buy at the grocery store.  I'm talking about very thin strips of sharpened and hardened steel woven into a tangled baseball-sized ball of death.  If you were to use one of these beauties on your forearm you would reach bone in two or three strokes.

The pot sink also uses a detergent so strong that it will eat through anything.  Absolutely anything.  If you burn something, I mean really burn it into black charcoal to the point it actually becomes part of the pan, this soap can probably clean it.  If for some reason you leave a burnt pan soaking in it overnight, you're troubles are over because the pot will probably be completely dissolved and you won't have to worry about it anymore.  

The superheated water in the pot sink is not changed very often during a busy shift.  These sinks hold about 40 gallons of water so it takes some time to fill them.  Busy dishwashers don't really want to take the time to refill a sink in the middle of a busy shift lest they miss a smoke break, so they rely on the steel scrubber to make up for the reduced cleaning effectiveness of a sink full of cold dish water with bits of food and grease floating in it.  This was LaVerne's soup water.

After about 45 minutes LaVerne emerged from the prep area and declared that the soup was ready and it was really good.  We all gathered around the soup kettle to take a look.  We stood there in silence and just absorbed it's beauty and fragrance.  The vegetables were artfully cut in a way only a master could execute.  It had perfectly trimmed and cubed chunks of yesterday's prime rib in it and ribbons of what I still believe were handmade pasta.  We didn't have fresh herbs at this restaurant, so we could see a variety of previously dehydrated spices and pea sized chunks of carefully roasted garlic.  It was, quite simply, the best looking and smelling soup any of us had ever seen.  Everyone tasted the smallest amount of soup possible and the taste was phenomenal.  We also tasted the soup of the day that Bob had made earlier and declared that LaVerne's creation was the clear winner.

Bob was not satisfied and insisted that we find an impartial judge from outside of the kitchen.  The cooks who tested both soups had a definite affinity for LaVerne due to his beer-drinking prowess and Bob knew he was at a significant disadvantage.  We gathered again at the soup pot to discuss the potential candidates.  The service staff was immediately disqualified because LaVerne had recently screwed most, if not all, of them.  The dishwashers were disqualified due to their perceived affinity for dishwater.  The steward was disqualified mostly because he was a mean, hateful man who wore a bad toupee.  The bookkeeper was disqualified because she was a kind-hearted lady who would do anything necessary to make another human's life better and the thought of watching her consume dishwater was just unthinkable to all of us.  That left just the managers.

Our restaurant had a general manager, two assistant managers, and three trainee managers.  We quickly eliminated the trainees because everyone knew they were too stupid to find their way out of a paper bag and no one really thought they would be able to find their mouths to insert a spoonful of soup.  One of the assistant managers had the personality of a box of rocks and a new baby at home so we eliminated him.  The other assistant manager was a conniving, two-faced sadistic asshole and we knew that we would pay dearly if he ever found out that the soup he tasted contained dishwater.  The penalty would even be more severe if he selected LaVerne's soup as the winner and later found out about it's ingredients.  The obvious choice was the general manager, Dave.  

Dave was a very skillful restaurant manager with an easygoing personality.  He also had a love for really good food, which we thought would be a valuable asset in this case.  Dave was in the middle of a very nasty, unexpected divorce.  He rarely let the drama of his personal life into the restaurant, but sometimes just enough leaked through to make us all feel sorry for him.  Dave had been served divorce papers at the host station in the restaurant during a very busy Friday lunch.  It was completely unexpected on his part and he took it hard.  He returned home that night to find his belongings in the driveway and the locks changed on the doors.  He immediately moved into a roach-infested one room apartment above a tattoo parlor named Tino's.  The only thing that kept Dave going was his job and the prospect of having custody of his young daughter each weekend.  

The only thing that kept Dave from being beaten to death in his new neighborhood was the fact that Dave was a big man.  Dave was not fat.  He was just big and most of him was muscle.  He was as big as any NFL football player and wore an imposing 70's-style porn mustache.  I once saw him hand carry four full beer kegs from the kitchen walk-in across our 300 seat dining room to the bar.  He didn't even break a sweat and if you had handed him a couple of fifty pound bags of onions to take up there with him he would have gladly accepted them and delivered them successfully to their destination.  We also liked the fact that Dave called beers "weasels."  If you asked him what he was going to do on his day off he would say that he was going to do some laundry and then "have a few weasels."
We quickly enlisted Dave to judge the soup competition.  He happily agreed and ventured back to the soup kettle a short time later.  We handed him a relatively clean soup spoon along with a cup of Bob's soup.  It was some sort of chowder or bisque, or at least an attempt at something similar.  Dave quickly got past the gray color and proceeded to eat the whole cup of soup before pronouncing it "pretty good."  Seeing how much of Bob's soup Dave had consumed, we started to get worried.  No one really knew the effects on the human body of consuming a whole cup of soup made from dishwater, but we knew it probably wouldn't be good.  One of the line cooks hesitantly offered him a coup of LaVerne's soup.  By this time LaVerne had mostly lost interest and wandered out to the salad bar to hit on some young women who were grazing there.

Dave took a spoonful of soup and swirled it around in his mouth for a few seconds before swallowing it.  He got a strange look on his face and looked down at the almost full cup of soup in his hand.  In a split second he raised the cup to his mouth and drank the remaining soup in two big gulps.  We all stood there breathlessly waiting for it to come back up with a vengeance, but it didn't.  In fact, Dave proceeded to scrape the sides of the soup cup with his spoon until he had extracted every last drop.  Had he not been wearing an expensive suit I'm sure he would have licked the cup clean.  He confidently declared that it was the best soup he'd ever had and asked if we had enough for him to take a quart home with him that night to share with his daughter the next day.  We were quick to block his view of the soup kettle and told him that there was only a small amount left.  We had a winner.

But we weren't out of the woods yet.  We knew it would not be long before the soup started to wreak havoc on Dave's digestive tract.  We waited and waited and waited for the inevitable.  In the meantime we informed LaVerne of his victory and carefully disposed of the remaining soup in the grease barrel next to the dumpster under the cover of darkness.  We located the dishwasher who had been working at the pot sink and dragged him into the employee locker room.  If he told anyone that LaVerne had repeatedly come to the pot sink for gallons of dirty dishwater we knew we would face severe consequences, both in terms of our employment status and, more importantly, in the loss of Dave's trust forever.  We told him that his silence regarding the whole matter was essential.  After negotiating a settlement in the form of a reasonable quantity of drugs and alcohol we successfully bought his silence.

The evening went on without incident and Dave appeared to be fine.  At the end of the night Dave appeared at the cook's line with an empty quart container that had once contained some kind of synthetic sour cream and was told that the soup had all been used.  The cook who delivered the news said that he was a little suspicious and said he thought that we had used Bob's soup as the soup of the day.  He was told that they must have run out at some point and the soup kettle must have been refilled with LaVerne's creation.  He was still suspicious but apparently decided not to do any further investigation and asked that we make some extra for him next time.  The cook agreed to pass on his request and he walked away still not quite convinced but seemingly satisfied with the answer he was given.

The evening went downhill from there.  We finished our cleanup and retired to the bar across the parking lot to watch Bob settle his debt with LaVerne.  For the next three hours LaVerne took full advantage of the situation and eventually stumbled off to his rental car after the bar closed.  The next day he showed up to work with eyes the color of Satan's and still reeking of cheap draft beer.  He told us that he had stopped by a Village Inn on his way home for something to eat and that it hadn't gone well, but he had eventually made it home without any loss of life and had even found a couple of Village Inn pies in his refrigerator and a Village Inn waitress in his bed when he finally woke up.  After devouring one pie and smoking a couple of unfiltered cigarettes he headed in to work as usual.  Dave had the day off, but he never said anything about the ill effects he may have suffered from the soup and we certainly weren't going to ask him about it.

So, to wrap things up, there were a couple of lessons to be learned here.  First, we learned that what we did was fundamentally wrong.  What had started out as a joke had eventually escalated into something that could have really made someone sick.  Whenever you hear about some kitchen staff member somewhere spitting in a customer's food or putting something in it that doesn't belong there, you can rest assured that it wasn't any of us.  After the remorse we felt for serving dishwater soup to a trusted friend, I'm sure none of us ever did anything like it again throughout the remainder of our long careers as cooks and chefs.

Secondly, never underestimate the culinary ability of a drunken Canadian chef.  There is nothing they can't (or won't) do to meet a challenge, especially after a few weasels.

The "No Guy"

I work as an IT engineer at a relatively large healthcare organization -- about 8,000 employees.  We have our own full time "No Guy" on staff.  His official job title is Provisioning Analyst, but we just call him the No Guy.  His job function is to provision new user accounts and add or remove access permissions on existing ones.  This post explains how those things don't actually happen very often.

When we work with vendors to install, maintain, or troubleshoot one of their products, we often have to give them remote access to some of our systems.  There is a very specific process to request this type of access and it's never the same two times in a row.  The only way to really do this is to request access the same way as the last time you did it and see what happens.  

Now you might think that if you use the wrong request method then your request would be returned to you, but you would be wrong.  If you use the wrong method of requesting access then your request would simply be ignored.  Eventually you would probably inquire as to the status of your request and you would receive a copy of an email notification that was, in all likelihood, sent to an email group of which you were not a member.  Of course the copied email would be accompanied with a stern warning to make sure and use the correct request method and that Mr. No Guy wouldn't be responsible for the results if you didn't.

So what happens if you used the correct request method?  Nothing.  Nothing happens.  Again, you would eventually inquire about the status of your request.  This time you would simply get "I'm working on it."  If you ask for an ETA you get two things.  First you get "No ETA."  You would think that statement would be accompanied by an "I'm super backed up right now so it's going to take a few more days" or maybe "I know you're waiting so I'll try to get to it today" or maybe even a "I'm waiting on approval from legal."  what you actually get is a blank stare completely devoid of emotion or any expression whatsoever.  It's the same look you get when you catch your dog taking a dump on the living room carpet and he's trying to make you think he doesn't know anything about it.

Eventually when you can't wait any longer you have to go to your Manager, who goes to his/her Director, who goes to his/her Vice President, who goes to the Vice President of Information Security.  From there the request rolls down through several more layers of management until it lands back at No Guy.  He will then immediately complete your request and notify someone not even remotely involved in the whole process that it has been completed.  That person will receive the login name in a cryptic email.  The password, of course, will be sent to a different person chosen at random.

More often than not you will later find that the account was provisioned incorrectly and the vendor has access to everything except what was requested.  If this happens then you have to repeat the whole process, but it will take much longer since trouble tickets are handled at a lower priority than new access requests.  During this time No Guy will be pointing to everyone else as the potential reason that the account doesn't work.  It was a bad request, the network guys didn't do something right, it's user error, the server doesn't accept RDP requests, the firewall is configured incorrectly, the phase of the moon is wrong, the pollen index was too high, there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll, alien invasion, election corruption, the planets were not in proper alignment, anti-vaccination protesters, white noise, the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  The list goes on and on.  And on.

The No Guy is only one example of the "No Culture" in our organization.  There are many, many others.  In fact, we have people who have made entire careers out of figuring out new and imaginative ways to avoid doing any actual work.  The whole thing has been so institutionalized that if you get a request for something that you're supposed to do and you just complete it in a timely manner, then you are not considered a team player.  I'll leave it to you to figure that one out.