Confirming The Random Insanity of Life
Looking back, I think there should have been some sort of announcement made. Ideally, a full-page ad would have been taken out in the newspaper a week or so beforehand. At the very least, they could’ve had someone standing by the employee’s entrance, a carnival barker type, to give us some warning:
“Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up! Come one, come all, and experience our incredible, stupendous, tremendous Vagina-Go-Crazy Weekend! Where YOU, as a man, will have a better than average chance of spending your workday in close contact with at least one woman who has gone completely off her fucking rocker!”
Given sufficient warning, I could’ve called in sick, Commencement Weekend be damned. But no, management had to go and think about their hotel guests and their graduation banquets and blah-blah-blah.
It started on Saturday morning, but the seed for it was planted when the new schedule went up on Wednesday. Jen, who is normally off on the weekends was now working this weekend, and she was not happy. The indignity, to be expected to work a weekend! Well, come Saturday, she was at her usual station, which means she set up her cutting board and her work spread out like an algae bloom across two full-sized prep tables. Woe betide the poor fool who dares move it, for he will surely wither under her hairy eyeball, even if all he does is turn the plastic wrap around to use it. Of course, this is her normal way of working, but there seemed a new intensity that morning.
From such tiny black seeds spring the fetid sunflowers of misery. Within two hours, there was a core of instability forming in the kitchen, coalescing around Jen and Mary, another woman who was being drawn into it. It’s been speculated that the hotel was built atop an ancient Indian village, and that a burial mound was dug up beneath the kitchen in the exact spot where our prep tables are. The existence of negative spiritual energy is the best explanation I can think of for Jen's constant angry bad moods, and is further supported by the fact that, when she’s not there, anyone who works in that space is also affected.
The thunderheads were swirling upwards to form the eyewall of our nascent shitstorm. A cooler door is closed–BAM! A cart is shoved out of the way–BOOM! What started out as these two griping to one another about pretty much anything slowly escalated to sniping, snarling, and complaining that increased in volume and venom until the chef closed his office door and Cheryl, the buffet attendant, got so sick of it that she finally threw in the towel and succumbed to the lunacy.
I decided to go have a cigarette. Just as I was finishing, the phone rang. It was the chef. “You need to get back up here now. Mary needs you” he said before quickly hanging up. Now, since I’m her supervisor, and not the other way around, I was a little put off by this, but I was on my way anyway. When I got there, the chef was still in his office, resolutely not looking up from his paperwork. I asked what was wrong; he shook his head and mumbled “I don’t know. Something about the salad.” I’d passed a platter of salad sitting on the table as I’d come into the office, and now I turned to examine it. Nothing wrong that I could see, and that’s when Mary pointed it out. It wasn’t that the wrong ingredients were used to make the salad, mind you, it was the way the salad was assembled that was the problem. For instead of tossing all the toppings in the vinaigrette and putting them on the salad greens, Mohamed had tossed only the croutons in dressing, then placed them on top of the completed salad. This poor Iranian guy was now on the other side of the kitchen to be away from Mary, who had just upbraided him for doing this salad wrong. When I said(as had the executive chef and the banquet chef before me) that this wasn’t a problem, she threw up her arms and sniffed, “I guess I don’t know how to make the salad, then!” as she left the office and strode away.
I thought to myself, “No, what you don’t know how to do is let irrelevant things slide.” It put me in mind of the scene in Rain Man, when Dustin Hoffman is flipping out on the front porch of a house because he can’t watch The People’s Court at the time he’s used to watching it. In this one salad, her world was coming unraveled; I could almost hear her saying “Oh boy! Oh boy! Definitely time for Wapner!”
At this point, the first day of Vagina-Go-Crazy Weekend became an infectious agent. If Cheryl could have locked herself in the buffet room, she might have been able to fight it, but Jen would periodically go out to check the chafing dishes of food and snap at her before storming back to the kitchen to cry in her sternest martyr voice, “Would someone please carry chicken out behind me? I’ve only got two hands!” And since it was always Mary who carried it(gee, with an effervescent personality like that, I can’t understand why men weren’t falling over themselves to help Jen), there was no escape for Cheryl, and soon, she was as nutty as a shithouse rat. Then the Director of Catering came down with it, too, as she flew into the kitchen and made her way to the office, where she berated the chef because “the menu said there were supposed to be breakfast breads out there, not breakfast pastries!” as if she’d walked among the guests in the banquet room and overheard one after another exclaim, “I was really hoping for breakfast breads this morning. This bear claw is just leaving me wanting.” I was sure that, any minute now, the rest of us were going to go stark raving mad, too, but the chef rejected my suggestion of putting Prozac in the coffee. Even Felicia and Susan, the two women working on the restaurant line, were starting to show signs of the disease, but they miraculously managed to leave work more or less intact.
However, by the time I arrived for work on Sunday, all women were fully symptomatic. I could see it in Susan’s dejected, perspiration-covered face as I walked to the kitchen. The dynamic had changed: Mary and Cheryl were sick of Jen’s pernicious Sunday-morning-at-work mood, and were keeping themselves busy in the buffet area. But they had to come back to the kitchen to replenish the buffet, so when one or the other would come(and both of them still being afflicted), they would only come so far before stopping in their tracks and barking at no one in particular “Chicken!” or “I need fish!” then turning around and hurrying away. I walked up behind Mohamed and whispered in his ear “Don’t speak to them, or make eye contact. They’ll take it as a challenge and kill you.” The two of us set up our stations at the far end of the kitchen, and there we stayed, leaving the crazy people to themselves, while the chef would, on occasion, come out and stir things up by smiling at Jen and asking if there was anything he could do to help before going back to the office and closing the door. I told him more than once that he should consider changing his name to Dick. We so rarely saw the banquet chef that I began to wonder if he hadn’t met some horrible end. I imagined his body would be found stuffed into a bag of dirty linen, beaten to death with a serving tray, his eyes gouged out with a set of car keys.
Thus was my weekend spent: keep your head down, don’t make any sudden moves or loud noises, don’t even speak to them, and maybe you can get out of this alive. Every man in the kitchen was hit by this estrogen and bitterness fueled nightmare, set adrift in a maelstrom of frustrated feminine madness without so much as a shot of whiskey and a “Brace for impact!” on our way up the loading dock. When something like this happens, there ought to be signs in the heavens, a massive comet splitting the moon in two or something. It makes me question the idea that we evolved from lower life forms; animals have a sense for these things. The unfairness of it, the callous disregard for the most basic decency, will haunt me for a long time.
As I left for home, I considered myself fortunate. Not only that I’d survived Vagina-Go-Crazy Weekend, but that, as a gay man, I don’t have to deal with carping, moody drama queens...