Crying My Eyes Out and Tripping Down Memory Lane

So supper tonight is french onion soup, and I'm sitting here with raccoon circles and stinging eyes having just sliced up a big ol' pile of the main ingredient. And it reminds me of the very first day of my very first real job.

(Babysitting is kind of a job, I guess, but it's a bit too ad hoc and the pay is a bit too sliding scalish to be a real job.)

A&W.

Yep, I was a burger slinger long before I became Mistress of the Semicolon.

I got the job when I was 15 (barely legal) because my grandmother was neighbours with one of the owners. Which is essentially the only way to get a job in Steinbach. I was told to come in at 5:00 and wear black shoes.

And that was pretty much the sum total of my orientation. I got there, was issued a uniform, and spent the rest of the evening observing and bumbling my way through non-potentially-lethal tasks.

I filled condiments. I put liners in the baskets (remember the baskets?). I swept the floor. I washed dishes.

And I made onion rings.

Now, this is probably giving away all sorts of trade secrets here, but the onion rings were actually a 2-day process. You're probably imagining taking a raw onion ring, dipping it in liquid, and then shaking on some batter which, when fried, turns into all sorts of yummy goodness. And you're half right!

The other half?

The Onion King.

See, the dayshift got the cool job - actually battering the onion rings. The nightshift? We got to make the actual rings. Which meant taking a hee-yooj bag of onions, cutting off the ends, peeling them, and then slicing them (which is where the Onion King comes in - kind of like a monstrous egg slicer into which you place a raw onion, push the handle down, and out comes rings).

Then came the worst part. Separating the rings, and removing the membranes. You know, the paper thin, sticky skin stuck to every single square inch of an onion ring. The batter doesn't stick to the membrane, see.

So every night - cut, peel, slice, membrane, cut, peel, slice, membrane - it took about an hour to get the requisite number for the next day. Longer if it was close to the weekend.

And we cried. Ohhhhh, how we cried. We'd stand there with tears streaming down our faces, trying to see through the fog to make sure our knives were cutting only onions and not fingers.

I had a bit luckier than my usual coworkers. Back in the day I wore contact lenses, and somehow that provided a bit of armour 'gainst the noxious fumes.

Of course, since my body's fallen apart since I had babies I've gotten older and my eyes have dried out, I can't wear lenses anymore, so I stand by my cutting board, making soup, and crying just like in the good ol' days.

Ah, those good ol' days - when all you had to do was show up on time and wear black shoes.