Donald Crews Quotes

When you act like a nice guy, everyone examines your motives with a microscope. When you act like a conscienceless louse, they generally take you at face value.

The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.

When Elisa arrives at McDonald’s, the manager unlocks the door and lets her in. Sometimes the husband-and-wife cleaning crew are just finishing up. More often, it’s just Elisa and the manager in the restaurant, surrounded by an empty parking lot. For the next hour or so, the two of them get everything ready. They turn on the ovens and grills. They go downstairs into the basement and get food and supplies for the morning shift. They get the paper cups, wrappers, cardboard containers, and packets of condiments. They step into the big freezer and get the frozen bacon, the frozen pancakes, and the frozen cinnamon rolls. They get the frozen hash browns, the frozen biscuits, the frozen McMuffins. They get the cartons of scrambled egg mix and orange juice mix. They bring the food upstairs and start preparing it before any customers appear, thawing some things in the microwave and cooking other things on the grill. They put the cooked food in special cabinets to keep it warm.

He overheard the director talking to one of the cameramen. The cameraman was explaining that he couldn’t get a good long shot on the exterior because someone had set up a fake graveyard right in the plaza. “Kids just playing around, I guess, but it’s morbid; we’ll have to get rid of it, maybe bring in some sod to—” “No,” Albert said. “We’re almost ready for you,” the director assured him. “That’s not a fake graveyard. Those aren’t fake graves. No one was playing around.” “You’re saying those . . . those are actually . . .” “What do you think happened here?” Albert asked in a soft voice. “What do you think this was?” Absurdly, embarrassingly, he had started to cry. “Those are kids buried there. Some of them were torn apart, you know. By coyotes. By . . . by bad people. Shot. Crushed. Like that. Some of those kids in the ground there couldn’t take it, the hunger and the fear . . . some of those kids out there had to be cut down from the ropes they used to hang themselves. Early on, when we still had any animals? I had a crew go out and hunt down cats. Cats and dogs and rats. Kill them. Other kids to skin them . . . cook them up.” There were a dozen crew people in the McDonald’s. None spoke or moved. Albert brushed away tears and sighed. “Yeah. So don’t mess with the graves. Okay? Other than that, we’re good to go.

The menu Kroc used to take McDonald’s national was similarly minimalist, with exactly three food items—Pure Beef Hamburger, fifteen cents; Tempting Cheeseburger, nineteen cents; Golden French Fries, ten cents. He aimed to make his burger construction line as standardized and closely measured as the Crystal Palace, decreeing, among other things, that McDonald’s burger patties must weigh 1.6 ounces and measure 3.875 inches in diameter. Don’t like a quarter ounce of onions on your burger? Too bad, just scrape ’em off—custom orders slow things down, and speed was the whole point. That’s why they call it fast food. Then Burger King countered with “Have it your way” in the ’80s, and to compete, McDonald’s started broadening its menu and allowing for special orders. Today, the average McDonald’s menu has more than a hundred items, and special orders are commonplace. But customers never changed their expectations of miraculously instantaneous service to match the vastly more complicated menu crew members are working with. So a lot of people who’ve experienced the magic of getting a Big Mac seconds after ordering it seem to believe there’s some Star Trek machine in the back that zaps food into existence from nothing. At least, that’s the only reason I can think of that customers like this lady get so mad when their special orders take an extra minute or two.

What you don’t understand is, it’s like somebody walks up to you and says, I have a battleship I can’t use, would you like to have a battleship. And you say, yes yes, I’ve never had a battleship, I’ve always wanted one. And he says, it has four sixteen-inch guns forward, and a catapult for launching scout planes. And you say, I’ve always wanted to launch scout planes. And he says, it’s yours, and then you have this battleship. And then you have to paint it, because it’s rusting, and clean it, because it’s dirty, and anchor it somewhere, because the Police Department wants you to get it off the streets. And the crew is crying, and there are silverfish in the chartroom and a funny knocking noise in Fire Control, water rising in the No. 2 hold, and the chaplain can’t find the Palestrina tapes for the Sunday service. And you can’t get anybody to sit with it. And finally you discover that what you have here is this great, big, pink-and-blue rockabye battleship.

There has been a more recent case, known to the historians at the Admiralty Library as ‘the great mashed potato mutiny’. At Singapore in 1945 the crew of the landing ship Northway were served badly-prepared reconstituted mashed potato after some had spent the morning peeling real potatoes (it transpired that the cooks had managed to burn these). This was the trigger to down tools and refuse orders to fall in, but again this single incident was not the sole cause, having been preceded by some weeks of complaints about the food in general.

With all the alarms that trigger when a problem arises, even though it might be minor, and all the everyday failures, how does one know which might be a significant indicator of a major problem? Every single one usually has a simple, rational explanation, so not making it an urgent item is a sensible decision. In fact, the maintenance crew simply adds it to a list. Most of the time, this is the correct decision. The one time in a thousand (or even, one time in a million) that the decision is wrong makes it the one they will be blamed for: how could they have missed such obvious signals?

the basics have to be stressed over and over. If I had a brick for every time I’ve repeated the phrase QSC and V (Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value), I think I’d probably be able to bridge the Atlantic Ocean with them. And the operators need the stress on fundamentals as much as their managers and crews. This is especially true of a new location. So

Certainly, if the world ever is saved, it’ll be by somebody young enough not to know that it can’t be done.

I learned that Nordic beer comes in three grades of potency. The lowest grade is apparently a kind of beer-flavored soft drink that can safely be fed to babies; the highest is, to hear them tell it, loaded with atom juice. It sounded worth investigating, but when I asked for it I was regretfully informed that the place couldn’t supply it, since their license didn’t extend to such violent stuff. I had to settle for Grade Two, known as ordinary pilsener.

Chris discovered malware on Raider, the most important server in the whole system. Raider was the server that all the other servers backed up their data through. Any malicious entity that gained access to Raider essentially had the keys to our whole digital kingdom. When Chris discovered malware still running on it, the team was shocked. They thought Raider had been taken off the network when the DNC remediated the hacking, but there it was still trying to make connections to servers in a foreign country. With the discovery of malware on Raider, the team realized the scope of this attack might be much larger than predicted, placing the core of the DNC’s systems at risk. Heather flew to DC and worked alongside the Hacker House crew for the first time.

An equally unusual thing happened in 1953 when the McDonalds were designing their “golden arches” building. They wanted to lay it out in the most efficient way possible, placing windows and equipment so that each crew member’s job could be done with a minimum number of steps. Mac and Dick had a tennis court behind their house, and they got Art Bender and a couple of other operations people up there to draw out the whole floor plan with chalk, actual size, like a giant hopscotch.

A more concrete example happened in 1984, when a surgeon at Loma Linda University in California attempted to replace the defective heart of “Baby Fae” with the heart of a baboon. Not surprisingly, the poor baby died a few days later due to immune rejection. An Australian radio crew interviewed the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey, and asked him why he didn’t use a more closely related primate, such as a chimpanzee, and avoid the possibility of immune rejection, given the baboon’s great evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey said, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.” If Bailey had performed the same experiment in any other medical institution except Loma Linda (which is run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventist Church), his experiments would be labeled dangerous and unethical, and he would have been sued for malpractice and his medical license revoked

Kushner’s group was mocked more derisively; “that whizbang crew of numb nuts

Durstan Reginald McDonald, whom everybody called Dusty. Dusty became one of my most important mentors. Aside from being chaplain, he taught philosophy and had a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Probably in his late forties at the time, Dusty was a married father with a crew cut—in other words, a grown-up. Contrary to the iconic proclamation of the ’60s to “never trust anyone over thirty,” Dusty was trusted by every kid on campus, from conscientious objectors to conservative fraternity guys. Dusty helped me arrive at answers in the way a good chaplain does: He listened, asked questions, and maybe made a few suggestions. He never made a conclusion for you, instead helping light the way as you eked out your own path. We had one particularly influential conversation on an airplane, on our way to a student conference. I was still considering law school but starting to think more and more about ordination. I told Dusty about my father’s financial struggles. “I’ve seen what that’s like. I don’t need to be rich, but maybe I could go to law school and make some money and do good at the same time,” I said. “It’s true, you don’t get rich by being ordained,” he said. “But you’ll never starve, either. Your family will have enough to get by.” Thinking about my own family again, I realized that even under extreme circumstances, it was true. In the worst crises, we never starved, or even wanted. “You have to ask yourself what you want out of life. If it isn’t money, then maybe having enough is enough.” This conversation helped me get much clearer on myself. It wasn’t my dream to be rich. I knew I wanted to work for a better world. But should it be through law or public administration, or in the church? I meditated and prayed on that question, and I always felt myself coming back to my grandma.

Fort is amongst the most rare category of writers who are "political" because they make us aware of what is happening to us in the deepest sense. He points to a rediscovery of the waY THat fantasy -processes dtermine the perception of time, change, and indeed the creation and growth of fact and product in themselves. Thus he demonstrates the workings of that operational cargo cult which is modern techno-capitalism, and whose fuel is engineered mystique. The belief that the new experiments in the new laboratories will be an improvement on the old experiments in the old laboratories is a millenial promise worthy of any island cult of New Guinea, worshipping, as many there do, the skeletal rusting parts of the corpse of the American military machine of over fifty years ago. In this sense, Fort cautions us about scientific promises and expectations. No matter how hard the islanders try visualising the world that manufactured their "magical" bits of B-29 wings, they cannot visualise technological time and it's cost/resources spectrum. For them, any day scores of B-29s will land on the long-overgrown strip with tins of hamburgers for free. But the apple pie America that made the B-29 is gone with Glen Miller's orchestra , the Marshall Plan, and General McArthur's return to Bataan, while the far fewer (and much more expensive) B-52s of our own day are only seen as sky-trails in the high Pacific blue. In any case, landing on a grass strip in a B-52 would be suicide for the crew, and certain death also for many fundamentalist believers. If such a thing did happen, it would seem to be a wounded bird in great trouble, and if the watchers below were saying their prayers as it approached, so too would be the captain and his crew. As for the hamburgers, well, there might be some scorched USAF lunch-tins available after the crash, and when they were found, whole cycles of belief could be rejuvenated: McDonald's USAF compo-packs might become a techno-industrial packaged sacrament, indicating that whilst times might be hard, at least the gods were trying. Little do the natives know that some members of the crews of the godlike silver vehicles wonder what transformation mysteries the natives are guarding in their turn. The crews have some knowledge that is thousands of years ahead of the natives, yet the primitives probably have some knowledge that the crews have lost thousands of years ago, and they might wonder why these gods need any radio apparatus to communicate over great distances. Both animals, in their dreaming, are searching for one another

Breitbart’s pirate crew became tribunes of the rising Tea Party movement and champions of Sarah Palin, with whom Bannon was close, bedeviling GOP leaders and helping to drive the 2013 government shutdown.