What Will the Future of the Restaurant Industry Look Like?

The Coronavirus pandemic has made me wonder what the restaurant industry's "new normal" is going to look like.  If you've ever worked in a restaurant you probably know that even a successful restaurant can't survive forever with a reduced revenue stream.  A restaurant that is barely making it financially may not be able to survive for more than a few days.  They don't have unlimited cash reserves (if they even have any at all) and when things are tough financially many times the restaurant owner must inject some personal funds back into the business just to keep it going.  I was in the business for a long time and I know a lot of restaurant owners.  Only a couple of them were fortunate enough to make a lot of money from their restaurants and both of them didn't change their business models as the market changed over time, so they ended up putting all the money they had made back into the businesses to keep them afloat.  Both of those people ended up closing their restaurants and are still paying off a ton of the debt they incurred trying to keep their places open. 

As I've said in earlier posts, restaurants are not the cash machines that most people think they are.  The margin of a well-run restaurant is only about 4-7%.  To put that in perspective, a restaurant needs to sell about $1,000 worth of food and drink to make about $70 in profit.  Depending on what kind of menu items you're selling and your price range, that can mean serving 100 or more customers.  

Imagine having 100 people over to your house for and offering each of them a choice of 20 items for dinner.  Once they have eaten all your dinner rolls and let their screaming kids run through your house for half an hour, they let you know what they want and tell you exactly how they wanted it all cooked.  Now you have 15 minutes to get it all ready for them.  Oh, don't forget that it has to be perfect and just the way they imagined it would look and taste.  And by the way, because they watch the Food Channel, they are all culinary experts.  If they don't get exactly what they want, you will face the backlash on Yelp forever and no one will accept your future invitations to come over to your place for a nice, relaxing dinner ever again.  Would that be worth $70 to you?  I would probably be willing to give each of those people some cash if they would just go eat somewhere else or, better yet, go buy some groceries and put some of that Food Channel expertise to work by cooking their own dinner at their place.  Luckily, I have a small house so I guess I don't have to worry about it that much.

Ok, back the reason for my post.  Restaurants have either been closed or just doing takeout/delivery for over a month.  Our governor issued something called a "Directed Health Measure" that limited the number of people who can gather in one place at the same time to ten or less.  This effectively closed every restaurant's dining room.  Although this has been devastating to restaurant sales, I do applaud our governor for following the advice of epidemiologists and doing this.  As a side note, I work at a health care organization and I know that our governor has personally been on daily coronavirus briefings with our epidemiologists since this mess started.  He faithfully followed their advice until about 2 weeks ago when he finally caved in to pressure from the business community and the GOP and decided to allow businesses to start reopening while we are still on the upward side of our "coronavirus curve."  I think this was a bad idea since the number of new cases here is still increasing at an alarming rate every day and epidemiologists have advised him that it would probably lead to many more infections and deaths than waiting a little bit longer.

If you own and operate a restaurant, you know that you will lose your ass if you only allow 10 people in your dining room at a time.  Even with only one server, you still have a kitchen full of cooks that you have to pay just for showing up even if they only have to cook for a few people.  And you have to heat or air condition the whole place.  Plus, all that kitchen equipment costs a lot of money in gas and electric expenses.  You can't shut it off until you get an order because it take a long, long time to heat up this stuff until you can cook with it.  The equipment they have back there is not like what you have in your house.  You could run your kitchen stove for a year or more with the amount of natural gas these monsters consume in only a few hours.  It is simply too expensive to open your dining room if you can't serve your normal number of customers.

Many restaurants here have decided to do the responsible thing by ignoring the governor's order relaxing restrictions and just keeping their dining rooms closed for now.  One of the news channels here took a poll a few days ago asking regular restaurant customers if they would go to a restaurant and eat in it's dining room.  The result was that about 72% of the respondents plan to avoid dining rooms in the foreseeable future.  If I still owned a restaurant, I know that this number would be very important to me and I would be considering how I could restructure my business so that it could survive in the coming months or years. If you depend on dine-in customers to make money and 72% of them aren't coming in, you are not going to make money.  If this goes on for a long time, you stand to lose a lot of money.  It's that simple.  If 72% of your customers are afraid to come to your restaurant and you have no other way to serve them, then you are in trouble.

Luckily, customers have been fairly accepting of ordering takeout and delivery.  We all know that restaurant food is better when it's served right from the kitchen, but we're willing to adjust our expectations to get it delivered to our homes and avoid getting sick.  When I was a chef, we generally hated doing takeout orders.  If your kitchen is geared up to serve great food to people in your dining room, it's hard to change gears and provide the same quality product packed in to go containers.  With some menu items it simply can't be done.  For example, there's no way to serve a good classic Bananas Foster in styrofoam.  You can't serve a flaming ball of sugar, bananas, and ice cream in styrofoam.  Even without the fire it wouldn't be the same when the customer finally got it.  We used to occasionally get to go orders for creme brulee.  Part of that dessert is it's proper presentation.  Removing it from the baking dish and putting it in a to go container resulted in the customer receiving nothing more than what looked like a spoonful of Jello pudding for their $11.  As a side note, I would regularly just send the whole creme brulee in it's porcelain baking dish in the to go order with a request that the customer return the dish the next day.  In 2 years of doing this I would regularly find a bag containing the carefully washed baking dishes outside the back door of the restaurant when I arrived at work the next morning.  I think we only ever lost one dish doing this.

Consumers are scared to death of contracting coronavirus and they should be.  After all, who wants to spend two weeks in a hospital intensive care unit isolated from loved ones drowning in their own mucus until they eventually die?  There's no way to spin that into a positive situation.  While we have some really stupid people in this country, most people are not stupid enough to believe that a governor's order to reopen public places is going to put an end to the coronavirus.  Even if infection rates eventually drop, we are going to be scared of this for a long time and it is going to affect our willingness to be in public places with other people around.  

What I'm trying to say with all this is that now is the time for restaurants to evaluate how they're going to operate in the future because things aren't going to be the same.  Customers are scared to go to restaurants but they still want restaurant food and they're willing to make some adjustments to their expectations in order to get it.  I think restaurants should adjust their business models toward takeout/delivery instead of dine-in business.  This means changing menus to offer food that works well for takeout as well as partnering with some of the emerging delivery services that we have been regularly using during this pandemic.  Adjust staffing to levels and skill sets that make takeout/delivery easier and more profitable.  Some restaurants will see this as a great challenge, but others will see it as a new opportunity and will start to make adjustments that will enable them to survive.

Embracing Ignorance

I want to write to you about something that has been bothering me for some time now.  That something is the fact that now a lot of Americans think it is stylish to be uneducated, unaware, and generally obnoxious.  If you fall into this category of Americans, you need to decide whether to read on or go polish the mud flaps on your pickup truck instead.  If you are one of these people and are easily offended, I'd recommend working on the mud flaps instead of reading on.

Over about the last ten years it seems like I've been encountering more and more of these people.  When I was much younger we were taught to be inquisitive, embrace learning opportunities, and value knowledge.  Even knowledge we knew we'd most likely never use.  When we found that we really didn't know something that we should have known, we did a pretty good job of not letting anyone know that we didn't have that particular pearl of knowledge and then we went and learned it on the sly so we'd have it available for next time.

Today things are different.  More and more often I hear things like "I don't know nothing about that" and "Who cares as long as I have a big screen TV" and "I have a constitutional  right to...blah...blah...blah."  The whole "constitutional right" thing is a subject for another post so I'm not going to get started on it here, but just suffice it to say that's the one that makes me livid every time.  A chance encounter with an individual of this mentality during a  visit to the grocery store yesterday was what compelled me to make this particular post.  

In case you happen to be reading this at some future date, most of the world is currently being impacted to some degree by a coronavirus pandemic.  A lot of people have died from it, a lot of people are sick, and most of us are scared shitless over the whole thing.  Omaha, the city where I live, has restrictions in place that have closed restaurants, bars, and most any business where people congregate and generally just hang out near each other for any amount of time.  Financially it has been very hard on many residents and local businesses and it has been an inconvenience for most of us in some way.  

Grocery stores are impacted by the pandemic to some degree, but they are not closed.  Customers who typically shop for small amounts of groceries several times each week are trying to limit their possible exposure to the virus by going as infrequently as possible and buying enough stuff that they don't have to go back in a day or two.  We frequent several different grocery stores, but I chose this one yesterday because I had a prescription ready at the pharmacy, so I decided to just shop for groceries while I was there.  I will say that this grocery store is not my favorite because they are much more expensive and I think the company is kind of shifty. Most grocery stores lowered prices when the pandemic hit in order to help their financially-strapped customers, but these guys raised them instead hoping no one would really take notice.  In retrospect, I should have just picked up my medication and driven the six blocks to another grocery store, but I guess then I wouldn't have been compelled to get this off my chest and share it with you.

This particular grocery store had decided for some reason that the best way to combat coronavirus was to make their aisles one way.  To get to an item in a particular aisle you have to be moving the correct direction or the grocery police will immediately come to you and let you know that you are a violator.  If you happen to pass an item that you intended to buy, you can't just turn around and go back for it.  You have to continue to the end of the aisle, go up an adjacent aisle, and then make another pass though the aisle where your item is located, hopefully remembering to grab it this time.  If you think this can be confusing, you're right.  It's like when a pilot is trying to land an airliner and realizes that he's coming in too high so instead of landing anyway he gives the plane some gas, pulls up, and circles around to try it again.

Ok, back to my story.  I was going down the aisle with baking supplies and spices in order to get to the end and turn up an adjacent aisle where the item I wanted was located and I ran into a guy and his daughter coming toward me the wrong way.  He was pushing the cart down the center of the aisle with his rotund body swaying side to side in what best could be described as an over-confident swagger.  She was running behind him trying to get him to put on a medical mask and shouting about coronavirus.  He had the usual shorts that went to his ankles, untied high top basketball shoes, a sleeveless t-shirt that read "Protected by Smith and Wesson," some scraggly facial hair, and what may have been a MAGA hat but I'm not sure because he was wearing it backwards.  The grocery police were nowhere to be seen.  I would have expected them to be all over this flagrant violation of their new grocery store traffic rules.

What triggered me to actually sit down and write this post was when I heard his reply to his daughter's pleas for him to wear a mask.  He said to his young daughter "I don't need no fucking mask!  Ain't no goddamned fucking coronavirus gonna get me so shut the fuck up."  Of course this all came out at a volume level sufficient to be heard for three aisles in either direction.  As we passed each other he looked me in the eye and said "What??" with a mildly disturbing level of animosity.  My immediate urge was to grab a Pyrex baking dish off the shelf and beat him to death with it before continuing with my shopping, but I decided not to engage.  I figured he would probably remove himself from the gene pool eventually anyway, maybe by following our genius president's recent advice to drink a bunch of Lysol.  Throughout all this I did not see the grocery police even once.

To get back to the original purpose of my post, I can tell you that I see more and more of this behavior all the time.  And the thing is, people acting like this are actually proud of the fact that they aren't really even aware of what's going on around them and they have no desire to become so.  Our "stable genius" president has encouraged this type of living thoughtlessly, in complete ignorance, and without any consideration of others so now it's ok for them to act this way right out in the open instead of trying to conceal it somehow. I'm having a really hard time figuring this out.  Maybe you have the answer, but I sure don't.  The only thing I can think of right now is to just keep heavy objects away from easy reach  while at the grocery store and hope for the best.

Is it Time for Restaurant Employees to Return to Work?

This is a question every restaurant employee in Nebraska has been struggling with this weekend.  On Friday our Governor, Pete Ricketts, issued an order that allows restaurants to reopen on May 4.  I want to discuss it here, so if you're not from Nebraska or you really don't care about Nebraska restaurants or their employees, then this post isn't for you and you should move on to something more engaging like my post about pet bobcats.   

Before I start telling you what I think about this decision, I want to be honest and let you know that I currently do not work in the restaurant industry.  I did, however, spend many (30+) years in the industry as a chef and restaurant owner/operator.  I retired from it several years ago because I am older and no longer able to perform at my best in that environment.  I'm lucky enough to have another career path which has now landed me in the healthcare industry at the largest healthcare provider in Nebraska, which also happens to be one of the top organizations in the world for COVID-19 research and treatment.  My wife is still in the restaurant industry and she has been impacted by COVID-19.  I should also let you know that, although I generally don't agree with anything our Governor does, I think he has done a great job of leading our state through the COVID-19 pandemic up to this point.  Just so you know, those are the things that influence my perspective on this situation.

Nebraska restaurants have been closed by executive order for several weeks in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19 and to "flatten the curve."  (I'm not going to tell you what "flatten the curve" means because it has been explained in the news for weeks and if you don't know you can just Google it.)  This was, and still is, the guidance provided by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).  As of this morning, the CDC is still recommending that restaurants remain closed for dine-in business.  The Governor's order directly contradicts the guidance of the CDC and Nebraska's healthcare experts.

About a week ago the White House issued some guidance for reopening sectors of the economy using a phased approach.  The first phase required a two week downward trend in the number of new COVID-19 cases, sufficient available hospital capacity, and a target percentage of available ventilators on hand.  In Nebraska we have met some of these conditions, but our number of cases are still increasing.  We have still not reached our peak so we have not yet met the White House's decreasing cases criteria for Phase One reopening.  The numbers reported by the state do not match the actual numbers of diagnosed and treated COVID-19 cases, so we should regard the State of Nebraska's numbers with some doubt.

Restaurant closures due to COVID-19 have been devastating to Nebraska restaurants and their employees.  Some restaurants have responded by pivoting their business models to favor take-out and delivery, but this is no substitute for having paying customers actually in the restaurants spending money.  Many restaurants will not recover from this and it's unrealistic to say that they will.  If you are in the industry, you probably already know that most restaurants don't have the reserves to weather this event if it goes on for very long.  Believe me, I felt the pain of managing daily cash flow in my restaurants and I understand how hard this is.  I understand the impact of losing even one day's sales so what I say here is not just something I say lightly.

Governor Ricketts relaxed the requirements for filing unemployment claims so that restaurant employees impacted by the closure of their workplaces due to COVID-19 became a valid reason for receiving unemployment benefits.  This has been a great help to restaurant employees, especially when combined with federal COVID-19 assistance.  It is the difference between making ends meet and living on the street for many of them.  

If you're familiar with how unemployment insurance works from the employer's perspective, you know that the number of paid claims is one of the determining factors in a restaurant's cost of unemployment insurance.  More paid claims means a higher cost of insurance to the employer.  Governor Ricketts, through an executive order, exempted COVID-19 claims from this.  If a restaurant closes due to COVID-19 and all of that restaurant's employees file unemployment and collect it, then it doesn't affect the restaurant's insurance rates.  I applaud our Governor for his insightful decision in this regard.  This will be really important later in the post, so make a mental bookmark here.

One of the requirements for reopening would be for employees to wear masks, but there is no requirement for customers to do the same.  Obviously you can't require a customer to wear a mask when dining unless he/she is somehow able to consume food and drink through another bodily orifice, but that is a subject for a future post.  The bottom line here is that having restaurant employees wear masks protects customers from contracting COVID-19 from employees, but employees are not protected from contracting it from customers due to the nature of how this virus spreads.

In weekly COVID-19 status calls in our organization, our experts are saying that reopening businesses prematurely would likely result in an increase in COVID-19 cases and epidemiologists are advising that we don't do it yet.  It is simply not time, yet we are about to do it anyway.  Governor Ricketts has listened to these experts up to this point, so why is this the time to stop?  I'll let you form your own opinions, but I think this decision places a higher value on money and politics than on safety.  You can decide for yourself if you think money is more important than human lives.

I told you earlier to make a mental bookmark so I want to talk about that now.  The picture isn't pretty, but here it is.  Within an hour of the Governor's order to allow restaurants to reopen Friday, some restaurant employees received texts and emails from their employers  saying that their restaurants would be reopening by May 4 and if the employees didn't agree to show up for work and agree to a variable schedule they would be terminated for "job abandonment."  For unemployment claims this would effectively terminate any benefits being paid.  The employee could either return to work with a reduced schedule and lose any unemployment benefits or they would lose all benefits because they "abandoned" their jobs.  If these employers left their employees in a status of "laid off due to COVID-19" the employees would still be able to collect unemployment benefits with no financial impact to the employer.  If they change the employee's status to "job abandonment" it would have no financial advantage to the employer and would serve no purpose.  It would just be spiteful and the threat to do so would be nothing short of coercion.

Think about this for a minute.  These employers are effectively coercing their employees to return to a potentially deadly work environment or risk losing any financial safety nets the government is offering in response to COVID-19.  They are being told that returning to a work environment that could make them sick or kill them and their family is their only option.  I know what I think about this, but hopefully you can figure out that these employers are not only ethically challenged, but morally bankrupt.  

I'd like to say that these are inexperienced restaurateurs and they don't know better, but they are not.  One of the ones I know of that has done this has been around for 40 years and is proud to tell you that.  They should know better by now and if they don't then they certainly have deeper problems than how to reopen after COVID-19.

That should just about wrap up this post.  If you had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to say here, then I can sum it up by saying that it's not time to reopen restaurants in Omaha yet because our health experts tell us that.  Our Governor knows this, yet he's willing to put lives at risk doing so. Restaurants who think they can coerce their employees into coming back to an unsafe environment should be ashamed of themselves and deserve to remain closed indefinitely.

Letter to Governor Ricketts and the Press

April 25, 2020

I am writing to express my concern over Governor Ricketts’ decision yesterday to lift restrictions on restaurants and also to express my outrage at the immediate response by some restaurant owners in the Omaha area.

Governor Ricketts’ decision clearly goes against CDC guidance for opening restaurants during this pandemic.  As of this morning, the CDC web site says “In states with evidence of community transmission, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”  In addition, Nebraska Medicine epidemiologists are saying that now is not the time to relax restrictions.  It is the time to double down on our efforts to reduce the spread of coronavirus through our community.  Governor Ricketts has listened to advice from these experts throughout the pandemic and now is not the time to stop listening.

Even more disappointing than the Governor’s order was the response by some restaurants.  Within hours of the Governor’s order, some restaurant employees who were laid off as a result of COVID-19 received texts and emails form their employers stating that the restaurant would begin the process of reopening and that the employee must commit to returning to work by Monday or the employer would contest the unemployment benefits the employee has been receiving.

As a former restaurant owner/operator, I understand the financial impact a large number of unemployment claims can have on the restaurant’s unemployment insurance rates.  Governor Ricketts has already stated, however, that unemployment claims related to COVID-19 would not be included in the determination of a business’s insurance rates.  In other words, a large number of COVID-19 related claims would have no financial impact on the business. 

The bottom line here is that some restaurant owners are using Governor Ricketts’ order yesterday as leverage to coerce their employees to return to an unsafe work environment.  
These unethical operators are threatening employees with loss of benefits unless the employee returns to work before experts say it is safe to do so.  In addition, I don’t think they’ve given much thought to their own liability if an employee is coerced into returning to work in an unsafe environment and then gets sick and dies.  As a relative of a restaurant worker, if this happened to my loved one I would certainly sue that restaurant out of existence so it could never happen again.

I fully understand the impact this pandemic is having on the restaurant industry, but I think the unethical actions of some restaurant owners are putting their employees and customers at risk in favor of cash flow and we need to call them out on it.  Prioritizing money over human lives is simply unethical and morally wrong.

Sincerely,

Jeff Camp

Pet Bobcats

You probably clicked on this post thinking it was going to be a heartwarming tale about a family who found a bobcat kitten while out for a family hike and, thinking it was an abandoned house cat, decided to adopt it.  Well, it isn't about that at all.  It's about a meth addict I met recently.  There's some bobcat stuff in it too, but it's not what you probably thought it would be.

I was sitting at my computer in my home office on one of my work-from-home days and there was a loud knock at the front door.  I remember thinking that whoever was out there must not know that the doorbell next to the front door was to be used to summon the house's occupants.  The dog immediately started barking and the cats started running through the house like there was a fire somewhere.

I'll admit that I was a little more irritated than I should have been.  I was working on a difficult project for work and it really wasn't going too well.  I was hoping for a quiet day that I could use to get my shit together and organize my thoughts before working in the office for the next two days.  I was hoping to get some groundwork done for the next phase of the project and maybe work through a couple of issues we had encountered.  Because of the layout of our office it is much easier to do this type of work at home because, generally speaking, there are fewer distractions and it's easier to concentrate for longer periods of time.

At work we have what's called an "open office" where there are no cubes or private offices - just workspaces right next to one another.  The people on each side are close enough that you can reach out and tap them on the head of you want to.  If you happen to have good neighbors then this works out fine, but there is no such thing as privacy.  Your neighbors can hear every word when you're on a phone call and they can peruse your computer activity and even your current financial condition if you happen to bring up your bank's online banking site.  When they tore down our spacious and mostly private cubes and replaced them with these things everyone was mostly accepting of the change until flu season rolled around and then everyone got sick at the same time.

The real problem with the open office concept is that some employees are not as considerate as others.  We have one guy (whom we will call Dave) who uses a wireless headset on his phone and roams the entire office while on calls.  Dave will stand behind you with his hands on the back of your chair while speaking loudly into his headset.  It's rude and distracting to say the least and everyone waves him away while he's doing it, but he just keeps on coming back after a minute or two.  If you happen to be on a call of your own you're just out of luck because it's against our Violence in the Workplace policy to whack him in the face with a stapler.

Ok, back to the subject at hand.  I got up from my desk and went to the door.  When I opened it there was a man standing there with an empty clipboard and wearing one of those "Hello My Name Is" stickers on his filthy, worn out jacket.  The name written on the sticker was "MUD."  In case you're not from Omaha, "MUD" stands for Metropolitan Utilities District, our local gas and water company.  They wear dark blue jackets bearing the MUD name and logo, white collared shirts, and matching blue pants.  To my knowledge they do not use "Hello My Name Is" stickers.

This guy's face and arms were covered with open sores characteristic of meth addicts and lepers from the 17th century.  Doubting that he was a time traveler from the past and given the demographics of our neighborhood, I assumed that he was probably a meth addict.  He was unable to stand still and his body was twitching everywhere so I figured my assumption was probably correct.

Now, if a meth addict comes to your door and you open it, you may have a problem.  These guys are usually pretty desperate and they're mostly whacked out of their heads so they may think they can beat the crap out of you and come on inside to ransack your house looking for valuables.  At 5'11" and 240 lbs I'm  a pretty big guy and his withered, drug-ravaged body might have weighed 120 lbs at the most, but his meth brain may have told him to give it a go anyway.  If a meth addict like that comes at you then your best bet is to whack him with something while trying not to touch the open sores or get bitten.

Luckily, he tried a more refined approach.  He told me that he was from MUD and he needed to read our gas meter.  I immediately determined that he was lying.  In addition to his appearance, which I have already described, our house has an electronic meter that MUD reads just by driving by with their special meter reading truck.  In the ten years I have lived in this house MUD has never come inside and read our meter, yet they always seem to be able to send me a bill each month.

I decided that the key to ending this encounter without injury or help from law enforcement would be to make him decide that getting inside wouldn't be worth the trouble.  I told him that I'd let him in if he really, really, really needed to see the meter, but that my insurance company would require a release of liability because we have pet bobcats and since they didn't know him they were likely to attack for that reason.

He thought about that for a few seconds and the rate of twitching in his facial muscles increased noticeably.  He asked me if I could lock them in the basement while he was in the house and let them out after he left.  I told him that I could, but reminded him that the gas meter was also down there so he would be at even greater risk of attack if I locked them all down there with him while he was reading the meter.  He would be almost certain to run into at least one of them while he was down there.

After a few seconds he said that reading the meter would have to wait and he would report this to his supervisor for further action.  We told each other goodbye and he proceeded next door and knocked on the door of that vacant house for the next 45 minutes.

That was the bobcat part and I feel bad about not having more bobcat action in this post, so I'll give you a little more bobcat before the end of the post since you went to the trouble of clicking on it in the first place.  I apologize if it hasn't met your expectations and I promise to do better next time.  ok, so more bobcat now...

When I was in high school I knew a guy named Mike who actually did have a bobcat as a family pet.  The bobcat, who they imaginatively named Bob, lived in their house along with their five kids, two dogs, and a Siamese cat named Trixie.  He acted like any other cat and didn't seem to mind that there were noisy kids and other animals around.

I asked them several times how they came to own a real bobcat but each time they became uneasy and elusive.  After several tries I decided that I should leave it alone if I was going to continue going over to Mike's house to hang out.  Bob took part in family activities just like the other pets in the house and I never saw him exhibit any aggression toward family members, other pets, or guests.

Owning a pet bobcat had it's own set of unique challenges.  Bobcats do not use the litter box.  They had to let him outside to do his business no matter what time he wanted to go.  If Bob needed to go outside in the middle of the night he would stand at the back door and howl like a baby being tortured.  If no one went downstairs to let him out for a few minutes he would randomly select a family member and climb into bed with them to continue his howling until that unlucky person got up and let him outside.

Trips to the vet were also a challenge.  Bob was a healthy animal, but he still had to go to the vet and get his yearly checkup and vaccinations.  Now you can't just throw a bobcat into the family station wagon and haul him into the waiting room at the veterinary office.  Everything has to be arranged well in advance and the veterinarian has to be comfortable working with potentially dangerous animals.  Visits usually had to happen on a Sunday morning and were extremely expensive.  

Bob was very well behaved, but, just like a house cat, was capable of doing great damage to just about anything.  Once someone left an unopened can of tuna on the kitchen counter and Bob decided to open it with his teeth while the family was at work and school.  When Mike got home he found the mangled tuna can on the kitchen floor and half of it was missing.  Not just the tuna -- half of the can itself was missing.  They figured that Bob had swallowed it so they made an emergency visit to the vet anticipating that the can would have to be surgically removed.  The vet sedated Bob and took some x-rays but found no can.  Bob took it like a champ and never made a fuss.They later found the other half of the can under the stove.  

The only other time I remember them ever having a serious problem with Bob was when someone left the door to their guest room open and Bob decided to see what was inside four very large overstuffed goose down pillows.  Mike and I went to his house that day after school and we were the first ones to get home.  When we entered the house we found goose down scattered over every square inch of their beautiful 4000 square foot home.  After about 30 seconds inside we decided to just leave and go over to my house instead.  Mike stayed for dinner and we played Atari at my house until he was sure it was safe to go home.

That's all the bobcat I have for you.  Bob continued to live a happy relaxed life until he passed away some years later.  Mike is living in Chicago with his family and to my knowledge does not currently own a bobcat.

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.

Growing Up Around Smart People

So I was reading an article on Bloomberg tonight about the effect of growing up around smart people on our primary socialization. If you're not familiar with primary socialization, it's basically the process that all of us go through as children where we figure out the basic concepts of right and wrong and how we're going to deal with the rest of the world throughout our lives.  That's a pretty weak explanation, but I'm not an expert on this stuff so that's the best I can offer right now. If you want a better definition, just look it up and figure it out for yourself.

Anyway, the premise of the article was that, if you grew up around smart people, you would have a different way of looking at life than you would if you grew up without smart people around you. To tell you the truth, I don't know if that's true or not. But I decided to write about it anyway and tell you about my personal experiences.

My parents are smart.  Very smart.  There's no doubt about it.  They're both retired university professors.  That makes them huge repositories of information within their respective fields, but I think it also makes them something more than that.  These people can think and reason like crazy.  And not just about one thing.  You can throw something really difficult at them and they just seem to effortlessly figure it out. I'm telling you it's just nuts to see and hear them do this. Sometimes I think that if you wrote down all the problems of the world and went over to their house and made them some kick ass shrimp risotto, then they could figure everything out and give you a viable solution for everything before the dishes are done.

My parents didn't set arbitrary goals for me.  They expected me to figure that out for myself.  I particularly remember a discussion I had with my mother when I was trying to figure out where to go for college and what career path I wanted to take.  We talked about my options for awhile and the part I remember most was when she said "I really don't care what you do with your life as long as you do your best and you're happy. If you want to be a neurosurgeon that's great.  If you want to work at a gas station and pump gas, then that's great too.  As long as you do your best and you're happy.  That's all that matters.  As long as you're happy and you do your best, then we'll be proud of you."

At the time I was relieved because I felt like I really didn't have to live up to a standard of education and job performance that I had thought they expected of me.  It was a huge burden taken off my shoulders.  Well, kind of...

As I continued through life I learned a few things.  Among them was that, although my mom had said those things, what I did with my life was really up to me. Smart woman. Very smart.   All the tools were available to me, but how I decided to use them was completely up to me.  I didn't figure out what that really meant for a long time.

So, here's the deal.  My parents gave me enough latitude to figure everything out for myself, but they were always there to help me when I couldn't quite do that.  They were smart enough to do that.  I hope that I can do the same things for my kids.

So, to get back to the subject, yes, I grew up around really smart people and I think they had a huge effect on how I turned out.  Whether that's a good or bad effect probably won't be determined until after I'm gone.  Yes, I think the people I grew up around definitely affected how I turned out, for better or worse.  They were smart.  Really smart.  I hope that eventually my kids say the same thing about me.