A gripe and a holiday.

Okay, first thing's first, I want to complain about a coworker, well, really a temp who was in my stand the other day, she was a cook, and she was terrible, for the most part the other cooks made up for her weakness but I had one exchange at the end of the night that stood out to me.

So I won't bore you with policies much, but in every stand at the Moda Center there is at least one sink used for hand washing exclusively, I caught her telling one of my cashiers to not dump their mop bucket out in the dish sink, but to use the hand sink, then I stepped in and the exchange went like this:

"Don't use the hand sink, it is for hand washing only"
"I know, but the dish sink just got cleaned so I thought we could use the-"
"You thought wrong, the hand sink is for hand washing only"
I know that, but what about dumping water out and-"
(I cut her off a lot because she wouldn't stop talking if I didn't)
"The hand sink is for hand washing only, that means nothing else goes in that sink, it was brought up by the managers at the preshift meeting today"
"I know that, but-"

At that point I just walked away, it's a hard and fast rule, she claimed she understood it, yet she kept trying to bring up why there should be an exception, it boggled the mind. 
Anyway, vent over.


Thanksgiving is tomorrow, the day we spend with our friends and family while attempting to avoid uncomfortable topics, and eat an unhealthy quantity of food to prepare ourselves for extreme shopping on Black Friday. 

In reality, Thanksgiving gets somewhat controversial, there is always someone bringing up the genocide of the Native Americans as a reason we... shouldn't be thankful I guess? I gotta say I don't really get it, unlike many other things Americans do, Thanksgiving doesn't seem to have a lot of roots in white people being assholes, even the possibly apocryphal story of the first Thanksgiving, in which the pilgrims were helped and fed by the local tribes, is a story of togetherness rather than abuse.

In reality a harvest festival is a not uncommon thing to find in cultures and religions the world over around that time of year, and are we really going to try to say a harvest feast is somehow offensive? It is among the most universal reasons for a holiday there is.
Now I am not saying Thanksgiving related stuff can't be offensive at all, America has... problems respecting the native cultures here, particularly in regards to imagery these days, and reenactments and a lot of books directed at children aren't particularly respectful in their depictions, but again that is hardly limited to the holiday, hell I just got back from working a Portland Winterhawks hockey game, their team logo is problematic to say the least.

Historically, the states didn't even celebrate on the same day until after Reconstruction, and that was changed by Proclamation. Before that most states had their own stories of Thanksgiving, and celebrated it mostly as a combination religious observance and harvest feast, it has only been since the unification that the stories we think of about it started becoming the standard.

All American holidays and traditions have long, complicated and morally challenging histories, Thanksgiving may be among the least of those, but stuff like that is still there, to me it is sad more than anything, I think about the possibly non-existent pilgrims and Native Americans eating together in peace and joy and wonder if any of them had an idea of what was in store for their people, were the pilgrim colonists already planning how to eliminate local competitors? Were the Native Americans filled with concern over the invaders? That something so optimistic could have ended so disastrously is my takeaway from it.

So this Thanksgiving, eat a shitload of food, spend time with your friends and family, give thanks for what you have if that is your thing, and maybe spare a thought for those who came before and those who paid for you to do so, and work so that those mistakes an crimes are not committed again.