Cook.
Kitchen staff, for the most part, work long hours in chronically understaffed kitchens for very little pay. You get a break when things slow down and chances are you’re going to be eating, hitting the bathroom, and trying to get a little sit time in a milk crate out back in that short little window (hint, pick two of those, the third might not happen).
You get burned, cut, over heated, covered in filth, and breathe in noxious crap all day from stoves, fryers, industrial cleaning chemicals, and other things.
You, probably, and a lot of your coworkers are short tempered, sore, tired, and possibly on drugs or alcohol. You are surrounded by ideal weapons for hurting others and you will be in or see a fight every so often.
Wait staff pretend to like you but really they work shorter shifts, go home relatively unscathed, and make a fortune in tips. So you also dislike and resent them. You don’t want to but see above.
You work when everyone else is off so you end up hanging out with people in similar situations who aren’t always the best people for things like networking into a better job. They really like partying though, and who needs a future.
Then you get a little older. Maybe you are running a kitchen and finally don’t need to have roommates to afford the horrible apartment but you’re only there about seven hours in a row at any given time. You met someone through friends but they don’t see a future because you are always working.
Eventually, health issues force you to find other work and you claw your way to normalcy 15 years behind everyone else in retirement saving, salary growth, and so on.
I’ve never been there but I lived in Banff, Alberta for a while when I was 19 (which was a while ago). I was cooking at a hotel there and living in residence. Sometimes I thought I’d stay there forever but I love the ocean, too. Jokes on me, I live in a city hours from the mountains and a day from the ocean now. :)
Something about a mountain town after a snow storm… Pretty cool.
Maybe I’m old but I love John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High. Takes me back.
I had an Uber driver in Florida last time I was there (business) and when he found out I was from Canada he told me he went to Boulder in the winter for a vacation and thought it would be cool to rent a car and drive up a mountain. Yeah, he was pretty freaked out by that driving experience. :)
Good call on the Subaru. My wife had a couple and they were great in the snow. First car we ever had with heated seats, too!
As an old programmer, always build in checks for your systems. Keep a cache of posted articles and check it before posting so you know you haven’t posted this one yet.
When you let something run overnight, that’s going to go south somehow. If running overnight for the first time, throttle it to one post per hour. And not the same post. I’m the morning you check if it successfully posted a new article once per hour. Next let it post a little more frequently. Ease into your desired frequency once you have figured out all your edge cases and scale issues.
And so forth.
Don’t listen to the others. What you are doing is good. I, too, am obsessed with a decent cup.
Just yesterday, I was out with my wife and we went to a coffee shop. I got a superlative cappuccino and picked up a pretty expensive bag of beans meant for espresso. So good.
When I was younger, I could never afford this sort of thing, but as I get older I can’t really enjoy a lot of other things and don’t need to spend much to live other than basic expenses. :)
Agreed.
I keep my tolerance (and intake) low. I don’t care about getting high, I just need to sleep better. I occasionally have some when it’s not right before bed if I’m having a bad day re mental health but keep that a very, very low levels. I liken it to having a single beer.
When you do this, you get the health benefits (physical and mental) without negative effects, or at least that is how it works for me.
Work to live.
Edit: we have built a world where we measure success by money. This has meant we are all in pursuit of it all the time, even if we don’t want to be. The rich get richer by driving us to do more with less, which marginalizes those who cannot be a productive part of that. We supress our compassion because it isn’t making money. People suffer. Those of us who can contribute subject ourselves to a different kind of stress so we can enjoy a few hours of leisure here and there but we never really are free of the shackles of our employer. If you advance to a management position you are forced to evaluate and possibly fire people you could be friends with. When hiring you are evaluating how well people bend the knee. It’s not a great world we’ve made for ourselves.
Hi, I am from a family with a lot of autoimmune conditions like Crohn’s, Ankylosing Spondylitis, MS, and Alzheimer’s. My father started to “lose it” in his late 50s, retiring a little early. He lived a long life until early 90s but the last ten years were hard on everyone. But my mother took care of him and we will tried to help.
I was 38 when our child was born. I was very concerned about passing on anything and he probably is going to have Crohn’s or IBD.
But here’s the thing. All of my family has done our best to live our best lives and yes it isn’t the best physical condition at times but we have loved, taken chances, l made mistakes, had laughs, etc. That’s worth it.
I’ve also known people who were ironman triathlon champs having heart attacks.
Only you can decide on kids. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here to tell you the chance that you or they might have Alzheimer’s doesn’t have to be the deciding factor.
Also, there are pilot studies in Alzheimer’s vaccines and other treatments.
When I was a kid there was only one openly trans person I would ever see. A man at the library who wore women’s clothes (to put it in the terms we would have used then). They didn’t try to be feminine beyond the clothing. Very occasionally some makeup. Legs were not shaved etc.
I was at the library on a weekly basis and saw this person all the time but it was just this one person. My mother told me not to stare or make fun of them and that they weren’t hurting anyone and could dress how the pleased.
Now, some forty or more years later I frequently encounter non-binary people, trans people, etc. I follow the same method my mother taught me. They are just people living how they want.
It is interesting to be that William Gibson had trans characters in Johnny Mnemonic, for example, written in 1981. That’s around when I would see that person at the library.
You are not wrong.
When I was in junior high a bunch of us bussed to school and had to stay for lunch. All the rooms were locked so if you forgot a book in your classroom or wanted to get something from the band room you had to ask the lunch lady for the keys. They would always tell their eyes and sigh and make you wait forever then give you the keys like fifteen minutes before lunch was over.
I day a bunch of us from grade 7-9 worked a plan. A kid asked for the keys to get their forgotten lunch from a classroom at the very start of lunch after complaining their stomach was upset.
They got the keys and said they were going to use the washroom first then get their lunch. The master classroom key was removed from the ring.
Another student was in the next stall in the bathroom closet to the entrance by the office left unlocked. We were allowed to come and go. They took the key under the stall and ran outside, jumped on a bike another kid had unlocked and biked to a convenience store that cut keys.
Key cutting was done and paid for. The key was returned to the ring and the ring was given back to the lunch lady. The kid got a hard time for being gone so long but insisted it was from an upset stomach and they had been in the bathroom all along.
Now, we had a key and could come and go as well pleased within the school. The grade 9s held the key, very few people knew about it, and it was passed down each year.
If you tried to pull that crap now you’d probably get caught on video or something.
I haven’t worked in the industry since the late 90s so maybe it’s better now?
There are positives. I learned that stress is transitory and I don’t have to give in to it. Staying calm and working the system is how you survive getting slammed (overwhelmed by orders). I was in charge of a kitchen as sous chef in my early twenties, hiring people, ordering the supplies and ingredients, preparing for banquets and events. This was a massive confidence builder. I learned how to work with people I literally could not stand, and got to work with people I would back up in any situation.
Plus your going to be a good cook for the rest of your life and that’s a big plus. You might not want to cook when you are not at work but you can and that’s great for family entertaining and your own personal enjoyment later in life.
I also traveled to places I never would have been able to go to if I wasn’t working there. I lucked out and worked in high end places, including one featured in the European Vogue Cooking magazine (meant something back then). I also worked in some dives.
I learned so much about people and myself. But you can do that a lot of other ways that pay better!
One last thing. With the exception of one or two really tough manual labor tasks I’ve done, no job has seemed hard after my time as a cook.