As the Burger Turns part 9

6:45 a.m. on Sunday, July the 5th, 2020, after celebrating yesterday 's annual scare the shit out of your animals day.

Disclaimer: The title of this post is the start of my soap opera for old people called "As the Burger Turns"  Anyway, to make this clear right from the start, everything in this post is created from my own recollections, which may be faulty because I am old, or because I choose to lie about it, take your pick. At any rate, everything I post here belongs to me, the good the bad and the ugly, and is a product of my highly developed imagination. If I use a situation that you know about and it was actually different, then shaddup! , just read it and don't ruin a good story with a correction about some trivial things called facts. It's a story, stories are based on what people think and everybody knows that people lie.

My next-door neighbors must have spent $1000 dollars on Fireworks this year or he hired a professional company to come over and set them off. They were the loudest I think I have ever heard and It seemed like it never stopped. It drives my animals totally crazy, puts this feral looking fear in their eyes, makes them find new, exciting, and novel places to hide like behind the toilet, under a bed, inside a closet on the shelf, you know all the normal places you can find a 100-pound + dog crammed into. The 3 little ones all want to jump up into your arms and then shake like the dickens. My Jack Russell named Fred shakes so fast and vibrates so bad that I think at some point he will just sort of fade out the existence of this dimension as he fades into another, as his cellular vibrations start to match the atomic vibrations of the molecules around him. It's crazy.

Our littlest dog, Olive, in the hight of this insanity last night, was shaking so fast and hard and was so scared that she jumped up into my wife's arms and promptly had a Grand Mal seizure. That is scary and so sad because you want them to stop seizing, but what can you do? I tried punching her in the face, and that didn't seem to work (I'm just kidding, I didn't punch the dog.) My brother made the point that there are Vets all over this country that are affected the same way, except she said I can't jump up into her lap. She is so whiny sometimes, something about how my weight might break a bone, or injure her legs, wha wha.

What a Crybaby. I only outweigh her by a tiny measly 175 pounds.

All of my animals (6 dogs altogether, 4 are ours and 2 belong to my daughter), are annoyed and very scared of very loud noises, Car backfires, gunshots, A door slamming anything like that will set them off. If you have never had 6 dogs go completely batshit crazy (for a full on barking session for 3 or 4 minutes), on you and all of them start barking all at once, with at least 2 of them being 95+ pounds with large lungs which makes them very loud and very noisy, well, you just haven't lived. The third large one is part Husky also, so he not only wants to bark, but he HAS TO HOWL too.

Oh, the Joy.

You can be in a quiet room, watching TV with the words on to keep from waking the other occupants of the house, something will make a noise and BARK CITY ERUPTS right next to your ears. It scares the living crap out of you. It pisses me off too, and of course, what do I do? Why of course, I yell at the dogs to shut up. Very loudly I yell at them to stop barking. And what do the dogs do? Well of course they do what dogs are trained to do, they look at you and say "Cool, Dad is going to bark WITH US", and they bark louder. It is smashing fun. I would recommend it to everyone who doesn't need to sleep or who hasn't already damaged their hearing with loud music to give it a try. It is tailor-made fun for anyone with PTSD, as either you have it, or it will give it to you.

Sometimes it is sort of surreal. I envision talking to the loudest dogs sometimes and then doing my R. Lee Ermey as DI Dog impression. Picture this scenario. The dogs start barking, the drill Instructor dog runs up and says "What the hell are you barking at Private!" , "Sir, the cat sir." , "Holy dogshit", he says "Only idiots and car chasers bark at cats they can't get to, and I don't see too many cars". "What's your name scumbag", "Sir, Bark sir", "Your full name Fatboy!","Sir, Barkington B. Barkthomew, sir".

And so forth, you get the idea. I keep threatening to go and get some of those remote-controlled shock collars to get the barking under control and my daughter said it would be pointless because my dogs are so weird and stressed out sometimes that you would probably catch them behind the couch with the remote saying "Do Me, Do Me!!", shocking each other for fun. Sonsabitches.

So anyway, yesterday I was talking about when I first went to work at Steak `n Shake and I spoke of Sheryl. What a co-inky dink, I sent her a message about it so she would see what I wrote and she read the post. I then went and looked up some things about SnS and found these menus and uniform pictures in a post that Sheryl had made on Facebook. The one on the upper left is actually a sign from the Madison Avenue store I worked at, although by the time I went to work there that sign was long gone. When I went to manager the store at 4105 E. Washington at Sherman Drive, they still had this sign at the back border of their parking lot.

 

The uniform the girl in the picture is wearing is the exact same one that females employees wore in the 70s unless they were objected to on religious grounds and then they wore a black skirt and a white blouse. We were a classy bunch back then. I think that kind of skirt is called a "Culotte" or something like that. See this explanation Culottes wiki. Males wore a slack that had that same black and white check pattern and a short-sleeved white oxford shirt to go with it. I think for a time we wore red bow ties and then eventually we switched to black ones. Everyone eventually switched to black socks and shoes too, as I don't specifically remember any of the girls getting to wear calf-high go-go boots at any point in time. Don't I wish?

When I first started to work there the menu looked exactly like this one. I still remember we had to remember the slogan "Specializing in selected foods with a desire to please the most discriminating", Slogans like "We Protect your Health" and "Using only USDA inspected Ground beef " was on the running lights behind the light bulbs. Once a month we got out the ladder and changed a couple of hundred light bulbs. What fun that was.

I used to make fun of the Togo service we had that was called  "Tak-Hom-a-Sak", we used to call it "Bring-Bak-a-Sak" or "Drag Home a Bag" or sometimes it was  "Bring-Bak-a-Sak" because there was always some numbnuts working that didn't know how to check a Togo order or the proper way to package items. Maybe SnS should have offered me a bunch of money and an NDA so I couldn't write humorous but bad stuff about their sorry current 2020 selves either.

Hey guys? We can talk,  It's not too late!!

Working grill at an SnS in the 70s was very fast-paced and fairly hard to do but if you mastered the process, then it could be a blast. There were only 9 sandwiches total and 5 of them were made with steakburger patties and the other 4 were not really sold all that often. I would say that at least 90% of the cooking was the 5 primary burger based sandwiches. There were about three main things you had to solidly learn as well as a bunch of tiny things that made it easier before you were trusted to be the GrillBoy.

First, you had to learn the proper way to spear the meat "puck" from the meat pan with your fork including where to hold the fork, and then the proper way to sear and form the patty to the grill. Once you had that mastered, you had to learn the best way to "cut" the patty from the grill top with making it into a "murder-burger", as it was seared to the grill top and is nothing like you see at any other restaurant where they cook at a lower temperature for a longer time from a frozen meat patty (Think Wendys).

We called it a murder burger (and gave you massive crap and made fun of you without pity) if you screwed it up and tore the burger in half or into pieces while trying to cut it from the grill top. If you made burgers like that you probably became a dishwasher or had to work fountain a lot. So anyway, you overcame that difficulty at first by gluing those murdered ones back together with cheese. HA! The last thing you had to master was the ability to remember what had been called off to you by the servers.  Once you had those main things, then and only then could you learn the "fancy" stuff, like playing the grill like the drums (me), cutting three steaks off at a time (me) or flipping the meat, spat, fork or all three (again, me).  When I was younger and had the ability I could make the grill sing! Friday was called "Friday Night Live!" because I usually had a crowd of kids or teens at the counter watching me work while ai showed off for them.

It was fun and made me popular at work, but never helped me to score. HA!
I was the same doofus I ever was at school.

Remember yesterday I talked about the analog voice prompt process that controlled the flow of food into and out of the production line? Servers and the window operator "called" tickets out as they came in, using a simple language and because we had a very limited number of SKU's to remember. Because you could have 6 or 8 people calling tickets, nobody else was allowed to talk except the dressing table operator (we were all "operators", and where you worked was called a station), communicating with his/her grill operator.

You sometimes developed a very strong bond with each other because of this constant discussion with each other. I know of at least 8-10 couples including me that eventually became man and wife after they were DT and Grill person. It was not unusual for the grill person to be a female either, and SnS was very progressive in this aspect. We had one girl named Becky who was left-handed and she could work the grill better than anyone else, except me of  course. She was a wizard at the Dressing table too and I couldn't compete there. I sucked at that station and never really got any better either. I think it was a mental block.

Here is the best DT Operator I ever saw. 

This is Sheryl in the middle.

I could never snow her, not once.

(LtoR) Bill, Denzil, Sheryl, and George
Mgmt at 2935 S. Madison circa 1974

So after you developed the skill to make sandwiches fast enough and could fry in what was called a 3 set rotation, and had learned the skill of using the right amount of grill salt (8 parts salt to 1 part pepper) and learned how to toast your buns correctly (Not a person there now working there, knows how to toast bread or buns anymore), then you had to demonstrate that you could keep up on the busiest nights while remembering what was said by the callers in the right order. Sometimes if you got lost or put in the "weeds" or got "slammed" you had to have your dressing table call sets to you.

Back then while using the original gas grills, a set was defined as 6 patties of meat cooking at once, a 3 set rotation was cooking from left to right across the cooktop, cooking in the right spaces, and keeping the grill scraped clean in the process. Some DT operators preferred to call sets because they could control what you sent to them and they could then work tickets out of order if they had to. In that system, the DT was the god as they had the final say about what got cooked and when.

You would call for "off set" and in return would hear something like "Off set, cheese two", which meant in a total of six steakburgers in the set, send 4 steakburgers and two cheeseburgers. Anything not specifically mentioned was assumed to be a single steakburger. Also when I first started the double was called a Super Steakburger, so you also might hear variations of something like "Off set, Super Steak, Super Cheese, cheese one", which meant two doubles one with cheese, and one steakburger with cheese and the other is assumed to be a single steakburger" because you didn't have to do anything to it, it just wasn't called, it was assumed. Once you learned the shorthand it was very informative, very compact, and pretty efficient if it was used correctly.

Somewhere in the early 1980s they changed to an electric grill top which was made a little differently, didn't have a scrape tray in the front and back, it just has one in the back, and it also has room for 8 steakburgers in each set instead of six. It is just my opinion however I think changing the grill style and grill top in response to the price of natural gas in the 80s was one of the biggest mistakes they ever made. It had a lot of detrimental aspects to it including; being generally harder to work, was more surface to clean, made short grill operators more susceptible to burns, it didn't stay as hot and took longer to recover, wouldn't stay calibrated, allowed people to cook too many steakburgers at once, was harder to clean under, and had too many non-cleanable parts. I've seen dozens of fires associated with these grills and all because you just cannot keep them as clean as easily as the gas grills.

It is my considered opinion that the electric grill top introduced the "Murder Burger" as a menu choice when it was combined with the introduction of the touch screen system and the loss of training knowledge associated with the skills necessary to keep a sharp square-ended spatula and how to keep the grill top clean by scraping the residue from it cleanly. I'm not even really trying to be funny really, I gave that a lot of thought over the years and in every store, I managed I probably spent more time teaching people to do things that were not addressed in any of the training systems that no one except me (and other older managers who knew the older system)  thought were useful skills for your crew to have.

The second biggest mistake was the advent of the touch screen as the controller of the food product delivery process. In my opinion, it should have stayed with the DT operator, as the boss of what gets made when.

Now the communication skills are no longer there and it shows.

Sitting at the table doing schedules

Brian Lawless and Maike circa 2017
Brian was my assistant for many years and one of the
best people I ever worked with.

BigMike today, retired and don't have to shave no more.

I'll have more tomorrow. My back hurts.
BigMike