Look Me In the Eyes, Unsatisfied

A week of work lunches from our staff cafeteria.  The long standing lunch-lady, Ms Megan has gone on to pursue other ventures.  In other words in the retail world, fired, for some nonsense reason they can't explain without sounding guilty of something illegal.  They screwed her but she was so unhappy, unsatisfied.  She longed to be back to her warm beautiful sunny home. And I felt for her with that.  Having to play mother to all these snotty, ungrateful kids.  She was a Nazi about what kind of meal you fixed though.  There were two choices in her mind, the entree or soup and salad and she fixed sample plates just in case you needed a visual of right and wrong.  In my mind though the combinations were unlimited. 

She put on a face when I got to the check out, looking down at my plate.  I usually try not to take more food than allowed, which was her biggest pet peeve.  But like above, throwing some steamed vegetables from the main selections into the tomato soup would send her into a spin.  She regularly yelled at the young kids for breaking the rules but she never quite knew what to do with me.  I always asked about her day and made sure to acknowledge her.  Not because I was sucking up but because she was an older woman and deserved to be respected.  Even when she would take off to the back room just as I was ready to pay and stay gone for minutes on end, completely ignoring my half hour time line.  Even when after these niceties she had the gall to tell me, 'you can Not take and put da cold meat on your salad Andy' in her heavy accent, which I loved by the way.  She was from Trinidad.

On this day I took the black bean burger and put it atop a bed of lettuce, added some salad fixings and took the complimentary bag of chips. 

And  I added the steak from the burrito bar to a big salad.  The new young gals who run the cafe neither care nor blink at my odd combos and sometimes charge me a dollar less not knowing what to make of them.