[Sca-cooks] Re: Gifts for Assistants?

[Morgan Cain]

Liadan, there was nothing in my comment that in any way pointed at you.  I
think you are being oversensitive.  Just because it was your first working
feast, you forget that it was something like my sixteenth.  I have had quite
a few horror stories about assistants in that time.  (There was the one I
had to bodily throw out of the kitchen, for example, and the one who is too
squeamish to handle dead animal bits or even watch others handle them,
and....)

As I recall the situation, you went out in late afternoon, just before we
started organizing for set-up and were finishing the cooking, to have a
cigarette.  At that point, you had been working for about eight hours, not
the twelve you claimed, because I didn't have the kitchen going at 5:00am.
At that hour, I was trying to ignore my cabinmates' snoring.  (They had a
system - if one stopped, another picked up the slack.)

We had quite a few people in the kitchen in the hour before serving, but I
became concerned when you did not return from your smoking break (a) because
you had said that you wanted to work a whole feast to get experience before
you put in a bid for one, and I thought that should include how the feast is
plated and served, and (b) you had been complaining about your health for
most of the day, so I feared that something had happened to you.  Finally,
someone from the crew took a break and went looking, found you, reported
back.  I went out to find you sitting with your feet up, smoking and
talking.  You explained that your feet hurt too much to come back into the
kitchen, and that was pretty much that.

Truth to tell, given the size of the kitchen and the number of people who
were helping during the feast, while another set of hands is always welcome,
I don't know where you would have fit.  The autocrats were a lot more
aggravated than I when you didn't come back to the kitchen.  Remember, I did
have a number of things held for you, but we almost missed each other in the
morning since I had about packed up to leave when you stopped by for
farewells.

So obviously our memories of the situation are different.  And for whatever
reason, you felt you had to defend yourself against my comment, when I don't
see anything in that comment that pointed at you.  But that's your concern.

                                        ---= Morgan

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"Faith is believing what common sense tells you not to."
      ---= Doris Walker (Maureen O'Hara), "Miracle on 34th Street"