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Christmas Goosed

26 Dec

December 26, 2013

Christmas is over and thank god, ’cause that was a nightmare. Friends, family? Bah! Humbug! Well, at least this year I was spared the horror of the Christmas lunch at work. (My new office had the decency to just trudge along in the usual manner.)

January 3, 2012

By the time you read this it will be well into January and you’ll be tired of Christmas stories but I hope you forgive just one more.

A few days before Christmas the Company I Am employed by, which must remain confidential for reasons I cannot reveal, threw a Christmas lunch for all of its employees. Of course, this being the era of political correctness, it wasn’t called a Christmas lunch.

As much as I hate PC, and as much as I think it is often taken to a ridiculous degree, in small doses it isn’t such a horrible thing. Seeing as how Christmas fell smack in the middle of Hanukkah this year, it would not have bothered me if this were called a Holiday Lunch. It would acknowledge both holidays. The problem is, PC is usually used not to include anyone, but to exclude everyone. Case in point: Here in NYC, Mayor Michael “I am your mother” Bloomberg decided that in order to avoid offending some people, the Staten Island ferry terminal cannot display a Christmas tree or any holiday decorations, despite it hosting some wonderful displays the past few years. So the upshot is, while in the past a very few cranks might have been offended by the sight of a Christmas tree, thanks to PC, now everyone is offended by the lack of holiday cheer. Rather than acknowledge all holidays, it acknowledged no holidays. So I guess political correctness really did work- everyone was equally pissed off.

This is not a fake, he actually did this at some press event. What a tool.

In that spirit, my company did not call it a Holiday lunch, they called it a Kickoff lunch. Kickoff to what? It was never explained. Logically, it could only be a kickoff to Christmas, although the invitation I was emailed showed a picture of a woman (in silhouette) doing what appeared to be the limbo, but it was hard to tell in silhouette.

At this point you might be wondering if there was to be any fun at the Kickoff lunch.

There was not.

That was clear from the invitation, in which we were told that the lunch would not be held in the building’s giant cafeteria but on whatever floor of the building in which you worked. While I have friends who work on the 5th floor, since I work on 13 there would be no mingling. Furthermore, each floor was divided into sections, with each section being assigned a time and place to pick up their lunch. It was a very regimented lunch.

You might also note that I wrote “pick up” lunch, not “eat” lunch. This is because the food was set up in a small meeting room and we were expected to get it and leave, eating the food at our desks. For the record, I took my food down to the cafeteria where I hoped to meet a good friend with whom I always have lunch. The problem was, she was designated to eat 45 minutes earlier than I was and I missed her, meaning I ate my Christmas- sorry, Kickoff lunch, alone. Bah. Humbug.

This day’s lunch was the worst lunch I ever had since I started at The Company, and that includes the very first lunch in which I ate outside in the park and almost got pooped on by a bird.

But the food? Surely the food was good? After all, The Company has a giant, catering-style cafeteria, and the resources to bring in food from anywhere. The food must have been fantastic, right? It was a great lunch, wasn’t it?

We had our choice of pre-wrapped sandwiches which would not have looked out-of-place at a 7-11 or one of the fancier gas stations. There was roast beef with an odd sauce whose name I cannot quite recall but was French-sounding and tasted like vinegar, a turkey sandwich with tomato-pesto sauce, and a roasted vegetable sandwich. I took the roast beef. As bad as those choices sound, I later found out that my friend was thrilled to see the veggie sandwich because she has a strict diet and cannot eat the other two sandwiches.

We had a choice of chips, or so they said. When I got there I saw there was only one kind of chip available. I guess the choice was chips or no chips. I took the chips. There was a choice of fruit. On the table were about two dozen bananas and a single apple. I passed. There was a cookie (no choice) which I spit out when I later ate it. It wasn’t even a cookie, it was a very thin cake covered in the sweetest icing you can imagine. If you took pure sugar and spread it in a half-inch layer over a piece of pound cake you would not even come close to this thing. It was sweet enough to kill a diabetic from thirty paces.

We were also given a bottle of water.

Getting the lunch was a torture in itself. In addition to being given a specific eating period we were also given a ticket. One ticket, one lunch. I guess they were worried about not having enough food if people started taking seconds. You’ve just read about the menu. Would you want seconds?

At our specified time my section was ordered- yes, that is the correct word- to get our lunch. I dropped my ticket in a bag sitting in the lap of a woman whose job it was to make sure I had a ticket. I tried to have some witty banter with her- “you must be the most important woman on this floor”- and was rewarded with a stony stare. I went inside. 

Our emailed invitation also included instructions on what we were to choose, but they went a little nuts in the actual room. For example, red arrows were laid out on the table leading from the sandwiches to the chips, which were less than two feet away, to the fruit, less than two feet away, to the cookies, right next to the fruit, to the bottles of water, unmissable near the exit door. And next to each section, printed directions/warnings to take just one of each category.

In retrospect, I’m very glad this was not a Christmas Lunch after all because there was zero Christmas spirit in me that day.

I guess the takeaway is big company + political correctness = no fun for anyone.

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Grandma’s Semi-Sorta-Swedish-like Meatballs

4 Dec

December 4, 2013

Grandma on my father’s side was an interesting character. I never knew what she was thinking. I assume she loved me only because I had no real evidence to the contrary. When I was around 13, I used her phone to call a friend of mine and she said “now you owe me a dime.” I wasn’t sure if she was serious or not, and to this day I may still owe her that dime. There were times when she would remind me that I owed her the dime, and another time when I tried to give it to her and she got upset with me.

Grandma was not a good cook. At best, her food could be described as edible, bland, and tasteless. At worst it was burnt and raw (at the same time) and awful. One year, when the whole family was gathered for the holidays, she made meatballs. They were, I think, some sort of Swedish meatballs. They were little grey lumps about an inch across submerged in an awful brownish-grey sauce. I assume they were beef, but they didn’t look appetizing like, say, a Kobe steak. If gray has a taste, this was it. In later years I came to discover that they looked a lot like Ikea meatballs, just greyer. Of course, Ikea (home of the build-it-yourself bookcase with three missing Swedish pieces) was found to put horsemeat in their meatballs. Even given that Ikea made them with a cut of meat most Americans will never taste, Grandma still did not come up to Ikea’s culinary standards.

Like these, but much, much greyer.

Like these, but much, much greyer.

We all hated them. Looking down the dinner table, I saw at least two or three nearly untouched meatballs on everyone’s plate. And we all only had two or three to begin with. After the first no one wanted a second. Looking back, it is a good thing we didn’t have a dog. All of us sneaking the dog our meatballs under the table might have killed him.

At some point during the meal, Grandma asked how the food was. Everyone answered with the usual lies, (“everything is great” was mine) but for some reason my brother (and being two years younger than I was no excuse for this), in a fit of love, or politeness, or maybe out of a mental disorder brought on by gastric distress from grey meatballs, declared, right at the dinner table in full earshot of all his horrified relatives, that he loved the meatballs. “Love them!”  You could hear a pin drop. The looks of shock and disbelief that were etched on my cousin’s faces sitting across from me will never, ever leave me. I hear that people who survived serious danger, when others died, like soldiers in combat, have the same thing. But Grandma beamed. She loved the compliment. And because my brother loved them, every single year she made her “delicious” Swedish meatballs just for him. We hated them! And we weren’t too happy with my brother either. From that day forward we were forced to forever eat her meatballs. What usually happened was that my brother would eat most of the meatballs and everyone else would make some excuse like “I filled up on rice,” or “I had Swedish meatballs for lunch” or “I ate three when you were in the kitchen.” I’d force down one or two because as the years went by, although the meatballs didn’t get better, I built up a tolerance for them, like you would if you took a small amount of arsenic every day. The meatball recipe died with my grandmother, immediately making her death look like a suspicious homicide.

SwedishChef

Just this past week I was telling the story to my brother’s new wife. As the story went on, a look of disbelief grew and grew on my brother’s face. It turns out that for all these years he thought we all loved the meatballs. For real! He was almost as shocked as I was when I found out that he wasn’t really simply complimenting Grandma, he really, really did, love the meatballs.

That’s family for ya.

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