Squid salad, anyone?

Well if you were expecting something profound right away, boy were you wrong! The salad bar just gets too interesting to not share the stories with you. First let me say that this was day one of nine days in a row that I’ll be working—meaning that I’ll be working right up until the Art Festival. I only have festival weekend off because I told Deb I would be in the park at mom’s booth all weekend. And since this is our biggest holiday weekend of the year, I’m sure I’ll be gathering a lot of funny stories that I’ll be too tired to share with you all over the next week. So just in case, you get today’s happenings to tide you over.

Today I was scheduled to work the pizza shift. Only now that Peggy is back, we’ve gotten ahead on the pizzas and there wasn’t much for me to do. So Deb volunteered me to help Renee clean out our cases. First I had to pile all our product from the bottom two shelves of the case into carts and wheel them back into the produce cooler. Then Renee took the shelves apart and sent me back to spray them down with the hose in the back room. That was actually kind of fun, though I got my pants pretty wet from the knees down and all the steam fogged up my glasses so I could hardly see what I was doing. While I was back there I got to watch the produce boys tossing watermelons and teasing their manager. What made the task most complicated was the fact that Renee kept getting called away for different things, and I didn’t know what to do without her there. But eventually we got it all back together, and she even praised me for being such a fast worker. Honestly, I don’t see how I did things any better or faster than any other employee would be. But I guess we’ll add one more to the list of managers I’m impressing. You know, it’s almost too bad I don’t intend to stay at Hy-Vee—I could do pretty well here apparently.

Okay, so after the case cleaning adventure, I took a quick break and returned to working on the fruit pizzas. Before long Deb comes running in with something on a tray that makes Lynette run and hide in the corner. It was a squid. A whole squid, suckers and all, which she had gotten from the Chinese workers. Apparently they eat the things whole on break. It was actually pretty small, and I wanted to get a better look at it, but Deb was having too much fun growing everyone out with it. She dug it out of the trash later to show another manager, and he ran away down the hall at the sight of it. Now, I wouldn’t want to eat it either, but it seems rude to me that everyone was making such a big deal over the fact that they were eating squid.

Well, that’s all for now. I think I’ll go watch Jeopardy.

-Kim