The snow made it more of an adventure yesterday. It was still dark when I left the house to make sure I wasn't late.
I'm adjusting to the commute. Time was when I didn't even consider the distance to work when I bought a house. I went from living in Waldo sixteen years ago to living in the Old Northeast off Independence and Van Brunt, and I made that move while I had a job in Waldo.
But after a year of commuting to my last job, it was time to spend less time getting to know gas station attendants. I moved closer to the job, bought a house barely over two miles away from the office.
Then, alas. It was the best job I've ever had, but the one before it was that at one time. Now my job is to make the new gig the best job ever. And I believe it can be, because I don't look at it as something external to me. Sure, there's stuff that matters about who and where you work, but there's a hell of a lot more that's what you bring to it.
I am, by the way, enjoying working at a full service printer. I worked on a job yesterday that's getting printed on paper called Red Pepper. It's a linen stock, with a nice heft and texture, and a rich red color. After sixteen years of printing on nothing but white stock, this is cool. My last job was an ad specialties manufacturer, and everything either went one matte stock and got laminated or went on the one bond stock we used for scratch pads. It was a shop geared to doing a volume in small runs, so they couldn't have press operators grabbing the wrong stock. Or even stopping between jobs to grab different paper. Before that, everything I did was basically newsprint or one of it's mildly less flimsy siblings.
I guess if you relate to print, this is working in a candy store.
I like the people, too. After working in a cubicle farm with over a hundred employees, an actual family business is quite a change. People say 'good morning' and seem to mean it. Greet each other by name. It's strange but pleasant.
I'm also digging my 24 inch monitor. I'm even digging the G5. I've worked on both, but the primary machines in my last job were the PCs. With very few exceptions, every artist had a PC, and you took your oddball Quark collects and whatnot to a Mac, saved it out and got your ass back in Bill Gates' neighborhood as quickly as possible. Which is fine, I don't think PCs are inferior devices, and work on anything forty to seventy hours a week for a decade and it'll seem like home. But I have to admit, I've gone over to the Dark Side at this point.
And working in Waldo again is nice. I ate at Max's Autodiner yesterday. Not that I really have an eat-out budget, but I held out as long as I could.
It's now Max's Burgers and Gyros, and it's owned by an olive-skinned man who might be Greek. Or maybe he's Iraqi and selling Gyros makes everyone think he's Greek.
The original owner passed, I'm sad to hear. I remember when John Storm opened the joint, dedicated to clogging the arteries and growing the relaxed fit clothing industry.
John asked me one time if I noticed that he'd switched mayonnaise. I hadn't, but he assured me he'd found one that was even richer than the Helman's he'd been using. More grams of fat per serving was reason to switch.
When he opened, a Maxburger was, I think, $1.50, maybe $1.75. He had about a dozen sandwiches, including a Philly that was the bomb. But the Philly was the first to go. It took a skillet, which took the grill space of four or five burgers, and when someone ordered a dozen of them to take back to the office, it shut the grill down at lunch.
The price of his burgers also started to creep upward. When I suggested that instead of dropping the cheese steak he could get more space, he said, "I don't want a bigger kitchen. My last restaurant had 35 employees and I don't need the stress." He focused on getting the most trade out of a microscopic kitchen, four stools and a fair-weather dining patio. And he prospered, as the price of a Maxburger with cheese neared $4.00.
I also told John once that his portions were excessive. I eat a single with cheese and a regular tator tot for lunch and I don't have to eat until I molt and get a new skin. "In my business," he said, "if someone goes away hungry, you're screwed. The food cost of large portions isn't significant."
When John added a triple burger (remember, I can only do a single, and he does offer a double, the Big Maxburger), I thought he was daft. I told him a human couldn't physically consume that much. It's like the Old 96er in that John Candy movie. I asked him, how many of those do you sell? "Hardly any," he said. "Maybe one a week, but I sell a hell of a lot more doubles now, because that's the 'medium' size." Now sweat if someone realizes they're about to blow up like Mr. Creosote, he's got the extra buck-fifty out of them.
I know, it's America at it's worst, but I love the place. As a heart attack survivor, I'm aware I can't be frequenting such establishments, but if a burger is worth it, Max's is.
And I'm not really proud of this, but I designed his logo (though where it now says 'Burgers and Gyros' it said 'Autodiner.') The logo was a slap-down affair in my days pasting up shopper boards. I've never liked it, but John absolutely loved it. Had it painted on the big red wall he used to have wrapping around his closet-sized office, put on his sign, his menus, etc.
I dont' know how many free burgers I got because he thought that logo was the shit. I miss that guy.
I'm glad to report that your triglycerides will still goe higher than a freed balloon at Max's, and it's still as worth it as a burger joint is going to get. I love burgers, especially from obscure sources, and I have to rate Max's as the best on earth. And that's with Red Top in Colorado Springs, Ty's in Tulsa, Whataburger (Tulsa and Omaha), Wanda's Drive In in Merriam, Blueberry Hill in St. Louis, the Gardner Deli (which is a burger stand, not a deli really), and the sadly defunct Dairy Ring in Baldwin, Kansas factored in.
Man, wish I could eat there again tomorrow.
Oh, as a sort of postcript, I got to drink a couple beers on my old boss. Not my last boss, before that, the one from last time I worked in this neighborhood. He's moved on to bigger and better things as well, and it was a gas to hang with him again. I might have learned a lot about how not to run a business from those days, but I also learned that employment doesn't have to be a confrontational relationship. And a lot more. Working there was my college: University of Hard Knocks, Waldo.
He showed me the digs his current empire is headquartered in. Including the desk of a guy I remember from the old days. I took a picture of his cubicle to share with you. He's a bright guy, a sharp guy, but with a talent for squalor that is rivaled only by one or two other guys I remember from that old office.
This isn't typical of this office, by the way. But when he asked me to guess who's desk it was, that it was someone who had worked with us in the old days, I had to make three guesses to nail it. I leave it to you to picture an office with three such prodigies of clutter, but as my tour guide would say, 'What the hell, I didn't hire him for his housekeeping skills.'
Remember, friends, when I had a coworker who complained because I lined up a week's supply of Diet Dew on my desk?
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