Day 162
One of the perks of working in the restaurant industy (or hotel catering in my instance) is that there's always food around. The nicer the place, the nicer the food.
The place I'm at now has amazing food: the Blue Crab restaurant. Everything is fresh, made from scratch, and incredibly expensive for customers. Yesterday I showed up for work and there was a wrap sitting there with my name on it, literally (a note pinned to it saying it was for me). I'd be a blimp if the job didn't involve walking around all day.
Many of the events we cater (in the various halls and booked rooms the hotel has) are corporate functions of one sort or another, and a shocking number have oddly vague titles, itineraries, and descriptions. There's a lot of self help, self-actualization, self-management, profit potential, power this and dynamic that. And they love lists, all of them. It's always the top however many ways to increase productivity or maximize whatever else. And I can say without qualification that most of the attendees are complete losers.
They are not the normal kind of losers, though. The normal kind are the men who you see alone at the grocery store, physically unkept, wearing sweat pants, and carrying a basket with a lot of starchy and/or meaty food. The normal kind are the people in Wal Mart with a giant cart full of crap, or on the bus, or at the casino, or at the counter of Denny's.
The losers at these conferences are the sneaky ones. They dress well, talk with gramattical correctness, and they even have little cell phone holders attached to their belts, in turn attached to slightly loose-fitting khakis and patterned button-up shirts.
But if you watch and listen very closely, you can see the loser in each and every one of them. They occasionally blurt out a personal story or truth that isn't quite socially comfortable. They'll give an opinion that sounds intelligent and even edgy, until you think about it for a few seconds. They'll dart their eyes at lunch before wiping the side of the soup bowl with their fingers. They'll describe their job position with just a few too many jargony business-like words. They wear nametags that say things like "elite team member" or "gold club participant."
It is all a facade: a win-win situation in which the owners of these companies bilk all sorts of losers out of their money in exchange for idiotic tips on self-actualization (whatever that is), and the losers get to dress up and pretend to be successful, to eat the fancy lunch and watch powerpoint presentations and have people like me cater to their fanciful whims, if only for a few hours.
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On an unrelated topic: has anybody noticed how much media attention Hulk Hogan has been getting in the last week or two? First his son gets thworn in jail and now his wife is all PO'd about him not paying his share for their condo (the hulk lives in a condo?). And the media loves it, which means that the audience loves it.
But please, and I mean this in all sincerity, can we stop using his stage name in these stories? This insane juxtaposition of the name "Hulk" with these genuinely serious stories is really weirding me out. That doesn't even sound like a name!
Hogan's real name is in fact Terry Bollea. That's right, the hulk was given what might be the most androgenous name ever to grace the english speaking world.
The place I'm at now has amazing food: the Blue Crab restaurant. Everything is fresh, made from scratch, and incredibly expensive for customers. Yesterday I showed up for work and there was a wrap sitting there with my name on it, literally (a note pinned to it saying it was for me). I'd be a blimp if the job didn't involve walking around all day.
Many of the events we cater (in the various halls and booked rooms the hotel has) are corporate functions of one sort or another, and a shocking number have oddly vague titles, itineraries, and descriptions. There's a lot of self help, self-actualization, self-management, profit potential, power this and dynamic that. And they love lists, all of them. It's always the top however many ways to increase productivity or maximize whatever else. And I can say without qualification that most of the attendees are complete losers.
They are not the normal kind of losers, though. The normal kind are the men who you see alone at the grocery store, physically unkept, wearing sweat pants, and carrying a basket with a lot of starchy and/or meaty food. The normal kind are the people in Wal Mart with a giant cart full of crap, or on the bus, or at the casino, or at the counter of Denny's.
The losers at these conferences are the sneaky ones. They dress well, talk with gramattical correctness, and they even have little cell phone holders attached to their belts, in turn attached to slightly loose-fitting khakis and patterned button-up shirts.
But if you watch and listen very closely, you can see the loser in each and every one of them. They occasionally blurt out a personal story or truth that isn't quite socially comfortable. They'll give an opinion that sounds intelligent and even edgy, until you think about it for a few seconds. They'll dart their eyes at lunch before wiping the side of the soup bowl with their fingers. They'll describe their job position with just a few too many jargony business-like words. They wear nametags that say things like "elite team member" or "gold club participant."
It is all a facade: a win-win situation in which the owners of these companies bilk all sorts of losers out of their money in exchange for idiotic tips on self-actualization (whatever that is), and the losers get to dress up and pretend to be successful, to eat the fancy lunch and watch powerpoint presentations and have people like me cater to their fanciful whims, if only for a few hours.
----------------------
On an unrelated topic: has anybody noticed how much media attention Hulk Hogan has been getting in the last week or two? First his son gets thworn in jail and now his wife is all PO'd about him not paying his share for their condo (the hulk lives in a condo?). And the media loves it, which means that the audience loves it.
But please, and I mean this in all sincerity, can we stop using his stage name in these stories? This insane juxtaposition of the name "Hulk" with these genuinely serious stories is really weirding me out. That doesn't even sound like a name!
Hogan's real name is in fact Terry Bollea. That's right, the hulk was given what might be the most androgenous name ever to grace the english speaking world.
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