Cafeteria Worker Quotes

I'm not good at having friends. I mean, I can make myself useful to people. I can fit in. I get invited to parties and I can sit at any table I want in the cafeteria. But actually trusting someone when they have nothing to gain from me just doesn't make sense. All friendships are negotiations of power.

As already suggested, when the individual first learns who it is that he must now accept a his own, he is likely, at the very least, to feel some ambivalence; for these others will not only be patently stigmatized, and thus not like the normal person he knows himself to be, but ma also have other attributes with which he finds it difficult to associate himself. What may end up as a freemasonry may begin with a shudder. A newly blind girl on a visit to The Lighthouse [probably the Chicago Lighthouse, one of the oldest social service agencies in Chicago serving the blind or visually impaired] directly from leaving the hospital provides an illustration: „My questions about a guide dog were politely turned aside. Another sighted worker took me in tow to show me around. We visited the Braille library; the classrooms; the clubrooms where the blind members of the music and dramatic groups meet; the recreation hall where on festive occasion the blind play together; the cafeteria, where all the blind gather to eat together; the huge workshops where the blind earn a subsistence income by making mops and brooms, weaving rugs, caning chairs. As we moved from room to room, I could hear the shuffling of feet, the muted voices, the tap-tap-tapping of canes. Here was the safe, segregated world of the sightless — a completely different world, I was assured by the social worker, from the one I had just left…. I was expected to join this world. To give up my profession and to earn my living making mops. The Lighthouse would be happy to teach me how to make mops. I was to spend the rest of my life making mops with other blind people, eating with other blind people, dancing with other blind people. I became nauseated with fear, as the picture grew in my mind. Never had I come upon such destructive segregation.“ (p.37)

Carajo!" Paco says, throwing down his lunch. "They think they can buy a U-shaped shell, stuff it, and call it a taco, but those cafeteria workers wouldn't know taco meat from a piece of shit. That's what this tastes like, Alex." "You're makin' me sick, man," I tell him. I stare uncomfortably at the food I brought from home. Thanks to Paco everything looks like mierda now. Disgusted, I shove what's left of my lunch into my brown paper bag. "Want some of it?" Paco says with a grin as he holds out the shitty taco to me. "Bring that one inch closer to me and you'll be sorry," I threaten. "I'm shakin' in my pants." Paco wiggles the offending taco, goading me. He should seriously know better. "If any of that gets on me--" "What'cha gonna do, kick my ass?" Paco sings sarcastically, still shaking the taco. Maybe I should punch him in the face, knocking him out so I won't have to deal with him right now. As I have that thought, I feel something drop on my pants. I look down even though I know what I'll see. Yes, a big blob of wet, gloppy stuff passing as taco meat lands right on the crotch of my faded jeans. "Fuck," Paco says, his face quickly turning from amusement to shock. "Want me to clean it off for you?" "If your fingers get anywhere close to my dick, I'm gonna personally shoot you in the huevos," I growl through clenched teeth. I flick the mystery meat off my crotch. A big, greasy stain lingers. I turn back to Paco. "You got ten minutes to get me a new pair of pants." "How the hell am I s'posed to do that?" "Be creative." "Take mine." Paco stands and brings his fingers to the waistband of his jeans, unbuttoning right in the middle of the courtyard. "Maybe I wasn't specific enough," I tell him, wondering how I'm going to act like the cool guy in chem class when it looks like I've peed in my pants. "I meant, get me a new pair of pants that will fit me, pendejo. You're so short you could audition to be one of Santa Claus's elves." "I'm toleratin' your insults because we're like brothers." "Nine minutes and thirty seconds." It doesn't take Paco more than that to start running toward the school parking lot.

James Thompson, a twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker, eloquently articulated the Negro dilemma in a letter he wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier: "Being an American of dark complexion," wrote Thompson, "these questions flash through my mind: 'Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?' ... 'Will colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?' These and other questions need answering; I want to know, and I believed every colored American, who is thinking, wants to know.

They think they can buy a U-shaped shell, stuff it, and call it a taco, but those cafeteria workers wouldn’t know taco meat from a piece of shit. That’s what this tastes like,

[Jobs and Forstall] would have lunch together regularly in the Apple cafeteria, where workers swiped their badges at the checkout register and the price of their meals was deducted from their paychecks. Jobs insisted on swiping his badge to pay for lunch. ‘This is great’, said Jobs, who wasn’t taking a salary. ‘I only get paid a dollar a year. I don’t know who’s paying’.

¡Carajoǃ” Paco says, throwing down his lunch. “They think they can buy a U-shaped shell, stuff it, and call it a taco, but those cafeteria workers wouldn’t know taco meat from a piece of shit. That’s what this tastes like, Alex.” “You’re makin’ me sick, man,” I tell him. I stare uncomfortably at the food I brought from home. Thanks to Paco everything looks like mierda now. Disgusted, I shove what’s left of my lunch into my brown paper bag. “Want some of it?” Paco says with a grin as he holds out the shitty taco to me. “Bring that one inch closer to me and you’ll be sorry,” I threaten. “I’m shakin’ in my pants.” Paco wiggles the offending taco, goading me. He should seriously know better. “If any of that gets on me--” “What’cha gonna do, kick my ass?” Paco sings sarcastically, still shaking the taco. Maybe I should punch him in the face, knocking him out so I won’t have to deal with him right now. As I have that thought, I feel something drop on my pants. I look down even though I know what I’ll see. Yes, a big blob of wet, gloppy stuff passing as taco meat lands right on the crotch of my faded jeans. “Fuck,” Paco says, his face quickly turning from amusement to shock. “Want me to clean it off for you?” “If your fingers come anywhere close to my dick, I’m gonna personally shoot you in the huevos,” I growl through clenched teeth. I flick the mystery meat off my crotch. A big, greasy stain lingers. I turn back to Paco. “You got ten minutes to get me a new pair of pants.” “How the hell am I s’posed to do that?” “Be creative.” “Take mine.” Paco stands and brings his fingers to the waistband of his jeans, unbuttoning right in the middle of the courtyard. “Maybe I wasn’t specific enough,” I tell him, wondering how I’m going to act like the cool guy in chem class when it looks like I’ve peed in my pants. “I meant, get me a new pair of pants that will fit me, pendejo. You’re so short you could audition to be one of Santa Claus’s elves.” “I’m toleratin’ your insults because we’re like brothers.” “Nine minutes and thirty seconds.” It doesn’t take Paco more than that to start running toward the school parking lot. I seriously don’t give a crap how I get the pants; just that I get ‘em before my next class. A wet crotch is not the way to show Brittany I’m a stud.

realizes a huge metal tray cart has overturned. The floor is piled with plastic trays and debris. The moment of shock evaporates. People help the cafeteria workers pull the cart upright and slide trays back into the racks. Last night’s shotgun blast tramples through Adrian’s thoughts. The

If I switch metaphors... it’s like if you make a meal and your audience is waiting to eat it, but when you put it on the table, they have to watch you eat it. That would be the Ashbery kind of poetry. It’s a great meal, and maybe you’re a terrific eater, so they watch and wow, those noodles look delicious. But Mary’s attitude is that, if you never get to eat it, you’re like the cafeteria worker, which is why she does not like that kind of poetry. ...Baraka would say your obligation is to feed black people. If other people are eating it, that’s fine, but this is your job. But does that mean I’m only making black-eyed peas and collard greens? What does it mean to say only certain people? I like a little sea bass, too, or a little halibut. So for someone to say this is your audience and you have to give people the thing they’ll really eat, I’m saying you don’t know what people’s capacity is. Maybe they’ll like caviar, maybe you’ll like octopus. Or maybe they won’t. But I’m still trying to get people to the table. Who those people are, I don’t really think too much about that. I don’t think about everybody that looks the same; I don’t know who those people are, but I’m going to feed them.

By the fall of 2021, schools across the country had lost a staggering number of teachers, paraeducators, substitutes, bus drivers, and other staff who quit, retired early, got sick, or died because of the pandemic. In September 2021, 30,000 public school teachers gave notice. Florida had 67% more teacher vacancies than the previous year. California's largest school district had five times the number of teacher vacancies as in prior years; Fort Worth, Texas, was close behind with four and a half times the number of vacancies. A small Michigan district lost a quarter of its teaching staff, while statewide there was a 44% increase in midyear teacher retirements. Lacking enough staff to operate, some schools across the country temporarily closed; hired students to serve lunch during school hours; grouped classes together in the cafeteria, where building services workers or untrained parent volunteers supervised hundreds of students; and/or asked the National Guard to fill in as bus drivers and substitute teachers.

Principal Hansberry came to each of our classrooms that afternoon to talk to us about discipline and wasting food and respecting the cafeteria workers. I was really worried that Danny would be suspended for starting the food fight. He’d only been helping me. If he got in trouble, I’d have to come clean and take his punishment instead. But the principal had decided that this was “first-week high spirits.” Instead of singling out anyone for punishment, she made the whole school use the last hour of the day to help clean up the cafeteria. That was the first time we’d been punished like that for a food fight. We all got to see what a huge gross mess we had left behind. Lots of kids complained that they hadn’t thrown any food, but Principal Hansberry said that since making the mess was a “group effort,” cleaning it up should be, too. Plus we all had to write a note to take home that said, “Dear Mom and Dad, I am sorry if I have ketchup or anything on my clothes today. We were involved in a food fight at lunch, and we feel very bad for causing so much trouble. Please accept my apology for the extra laundry.” Personally, I thought this was kind of a funny note. But we had to bring it back signed by our parents, so a lot of people didn’t think it was so funny. Luckily they weren’t mad at me or Danny, though. Except for Avery. He tried to get Danny in trouble by telling Principal Hansberry who’d started the fight. But she told him that wasn’t necessary. She said everyone was “responsible for the mob mentality we saw here today,” whatever that means. The most amazing part was that nobody said anything about Merlin. I guess a lot of people didn’t see him. But even the ones who did didn’t admit it. Vice Principal Taney came into our class and asked: “Did anyone here see a dog in the cafeteria before or during the food fight?” No one raised their hands. After a minute, Heidi said: “Maybe you imagined it, Mr. Taney,” in this really innocent voice. I was worried that Avery would tell, but later Hugo told me that nobody in Mr. Guare’s class answered Mr. Taney’s question either. I don’t know why Avery didn’t say anything. Maybe he already knew everyone was mad at him for snitching on Danny.

In a subsequent study, this time in New York City, Pager and her colleagues fielded teams of White, Black, and Latinx testers to apply for real entry-level jobs. The testers were articulate, clean-cut, college-educated young men between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, similar in height, physical attractiveness, verbal skill, and interactional style and demeanor. The Latinx testers were US citizens of Puerto Rican descent and spoke without a Spanish accent. The testers were trained to present themselves in similar ways to potential employers as high school graduates with steady work experience in entry-level jobs. They applied for jobs in restaurants and retail sales, as warehouse workers, couriers, telemarketers, stockers, movers, customer service representatives, and other similar jobs available to someone with a high school degree and little previous experience. In applications to 171 employers, the White testers received a positive response (interview or job offer) 31 percent of the time, the Latinx testers received a positive response 25.2 percent of the time, and the Black testers, 15.2 percent of the time. Stated differently, the Black applicant had to search twice as long as the equally qualified White applicant before receiving a callback or a job offer.22

The Chinese were the first Asians to immigrate to the United States in large numbers, arriving in California in 1850 as part of the rush for gold. These first arrivals were single men who paid their own way to the California gold fields, hoping to get rich and then return to China. As the gold rush waned, many Chinese did not have enough money to go home. Hired at wages one-third below what Whites would have been paid, Chinese men found employment as laborers working on the transcontinental railroad and on California farms.126 When the US economy took a sharp downturn in the mid-1870s, White labor union leaders blamed Chinese workers for the depressed wage levels and the Chinese became a frequent target of racial bigotry and violence. In fact, in 1871 the largest mass lynching in US history took place in Los Angeles when a mob of White men attacked and lynched more than twenty Chinese men.

Specialists in information technology are the new lawyers. Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose. (Easy example: I can write a book, and my editor can edit a book . . . but neither one of us can read and understand the contract that allows those things to happen.) IT workers became similarly unstoppable the moment they realized virtually every machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he’s a nitpick—but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for no reason whatsoever (because how would anyone understand what he’s lying about). He can smoke weed at lunch, because he’ll still understand your iMac better than you. It doesn’t matter how he behaves: The IT department dominates technology, and technology dominates the rest of us. And this state of being creates a new kind of personality. It creates someone like Kim Dotcom, a man who’s essentially an IT guy for the entire planet.

A superspreader is likely to be someone who (1) is not immunized or is immunocompromised and therefore particularly susceptible to infection, (2) does not engage in basic hygiene (e.g., covering coughs) and therefore likely to transmit influenza, (3) comes into contact with a great many people, through some combination of their social and occupational roles (e.g., a flight attendant, cafeteria worker, or someone with a highly active social life), or comes into regular contact with sick people that are particularly susceptible to infection

For cafeteria workers far and wide. We love you guys!

I once had a foreign exchange trader who worked for me who was an unabashed chartist. He truly believed that all the information you needed was reflected in the past history of a currency. Now it's true there can be less to consider in trading currencies than individual equities, since at least for developed country currencies it's typically not necessary to pore over their financial statements every quarter. And in my experience, currencies do exhibit sustainable trends more reliably than, say, bonds or commodities. Imbalances caused by, for example, interest rate differentials that favor one currency over another (by making it more profitable to invest in the higher-yielding one) can persist for years. Of course, another appeal of charting can be that it provides a convenient excuse to avoid having to analyze financial statements or other fundamental data. Technical analysts take their work seriously and apply themselves to it diligently, but it's also possible for a part-time technician to do his market analysis in ten minutes over coffee and a bagel. This can create the false illusion of being a very efficient worker. The FX trader I mentioned was quite happy to engage in an experiment whereby he did the trades recommended by our in-house market technician. Both shared the same commitment to charts as an under-appreciated path to market success, a belief clearly at odds with the in-house technician's avoidance of trading any actual positions so as to provide empirical proof of his insights with trading profits. When challenged, he invariably countered that managing trading positions would challenge his objectivity, as if holding a losing position would induce him to continue recommending it in spite of the chart's contrary insight. But then, why hold a losing position if it's not what the chart said? I always found debating such tortured logic a brief but entertaining use of time when lining up to get lunch in the trader's cafeteria. To the surprise of my FX trader if not to me, the technical analysis trading account was unprofitable. In explaining the result, my Kool-Aid drinking trader even accepted partial responsibility for at times misinterpreting the very information he was analyzing. It was along the lines of that he ought to have recognized the type of pattern that was evolving but stupidly interpreted the wrong shape. It was almost as if the results were not the result of the faulty religion but of the less than completely faithful practice of one of its adherents. So what use to a profit-oriented trading room is a fully committed chartist who can't be trusted even to follow the charts? At this stage I must confess that we had found ourselves in this position as a last-ditch effort on my part to salvage some profitability out of a trader I'd hired who had to this point been consistently losing money. His own market views expressed in the form of trading positions had been singularly unprofitable, so all that remained was to see how he did with somebody else's views. The experiment wasn't just intended to provide a “live ammunition” record of our in-house technician's market insights, it was my last best effort to prove that my recent hiring decision hadn't been a bad one. Sadly, his failure confirmed my earlier one and I had to fire him. All was not lost though, because he was able to transfer his unsuccessful experience as a proprietary trader into a new business advising clients on their hedge fund investments.