Breakfast Anyone?

My last venture home from North Carolina brought yet another interesting airport experience.

This was not quite as exciting as closing out the 2018 work year by missing my connecting flight because I was watching NCIS episodes on Netflix while idiotically seating myself at the wrong gate.

On that trip, I managed to incorrectly read numbers. I sat at Gate 14 rather than Gate 12.

Let me back pedal a little here and not take all the blame.

I was seated very close to a counter, which had the flight information for Gates 12-14 posted and attendants at the counter. I expected this was where the announcements would be made.

However, since I fly so frequently, I should have known to look at the actual door leading to the plane and home to my wife.

Instead, I sat down, ass-u-me-ing I was naturally in the right place. Then, I popped out my iPad, plugged-in my headphones, and queued some already downloaded episodes of NCIS, immersing myself in the world of Agent Gibbs and his team.

NCIS is my generation’s version of Law & Order.

As I was midway through my second episode, it occured to me I had been waiting a long time. Maybe my flight was delayed. In fact, I am sure it was since flying is terrible. These airlines and their constant delays. They should be ashamed of themselves.

I approached the counter to find the information posted as “Boarded.”

This can NOT be true, I’m not on board.

Apparently, sitting at the wrong gate with headphones in my ears like a millennial resulted in missing the announcements from my correct gate attendant who called me by name over the PA system to no avail.

Result:

1) Real life detention. Get home four hours later than planned.

2) Humiliation. Well-deserved humiliation. I could literally hear my father recanting his favorite phrase to use at times like these - “Good thing you went to college.”

No, this current experience was just entertaining people watching, which is my new favorite airport hobby to pass the time since I cannot be trusted to watch NCIS anymore.

As usual, I had some time to kill. I bought a coffee and found a seat next to the window. It was cold outside, but sunny, as opposed to the constant grey and rain following me for the past month.

From my window seat, I could see all the little airport mobiles moving around below, following all those crazy painted lines. Those lines make as much sense to passengers as looking down on a playing field simultaneously painted to provide play for football, soccer, and lacrosse.

Only the drivers know the meaning and rules for those lines, and they negotiate them accordingly and at fairly impressive speeds.

I watched these mini-mobiles, seeing luggage trains, fuel trucks, the staircase mobiles, and the tows for assisting the airplanes to the gate.

Then, for the first time l saw a “Lavatory Waste Vehicle.”

It makes sense. Obviously, this is a part of air travel needing attention, service, and maintenance. Although it caught me off-guard being my first sighting, its existence did not shock me.

What did, however, make me laugh out loud while sitting alone at my table sipping coffee was the driver.

I may not, scratch that, I am definitely not the most hygienic person on earth. I abide by the 5-second rule. I have also been known to use my pant leg or the inside of my pocket as a napkin. I have even Costanza’d items my wife has recently tossed in our kitchen trash and are sitting on top in their sealed containers begging to be rescued.

However, when I looked down at the “Lavatory Waste Vehicle” (a.k.a. turd truck, poop porter, or honeywagon) to see the driver eating her breakfast sandwich barehanded while driving this mobile feces pick-up and delivery vessel, I drew the line.

She was in a whole different league of nonchalance.

If you haul and transfer human waste all day in that thing, your feeding should take place elsewhere.

Flashback

On a recent sales call, I met an extremely polite young man - let’s call him Drew - who looked to be about the same age as myself.

Drew and his fiancé lived in a relatively new doublewide set on a parcel of land down a long unpaved driveway, which winded behind their neighbor’s property.

The young man met me at my car and immediately greeted me politely and with questions about our product. Drew wanted to know where we could put it, and how it would be situated on his property. Fairly typical questions from all customers.

Standing outside, we briefly went over these items before entering his home to discuss some of the broader details of the project.

Once inside, seated at his kitchen table and discussing the minutiae of the project as well as the investment it would require, he asked about financing options, which we discussed briefly.

After returning from gathering my information and plugging it into our system, Drew and I began to discuss exact costs and specific financing options.

I noticed something different about Drew. He was constantly wiping his lower lip with the collar of his sweatshirt. The more we discussed finances and credit scores, the more he needed to use his sweatshirt as a handkerchief for his lower lip.

Apparently, Drew was a bit of a nervous drooler. He was right to be nervous in this case; he told me his current credit score, and it was not going to qualify him for any financing.

We parted ways as politely as we came together.

All the way home, I laughed, not at Drew, of course, but because his drooling flashed me back to my days as an Assistant Principal:

I had known Darnell since he was in 6th grade, and I was interning as an administrator at his middle school.

It’s hard to call a 6th grader a jerk, but it’s a lot less difficult if the 6th grader is Darnell.

Although, I cannot say his personality had much of a chance. His mother was no model citizen, never mind worth being called a parent. She gave birth, for sure, but a parent she was not.

Darnell would take out his cell phone and call his mother every time he got in trouble - roughly every 10-minutes. One day I was fortunate enough to be there for the phone call, in which Darnell handed me his phone as his mother screamed, “I am sick of these white people calling me all the time.”

“Hello Ma’am, this is Dave, I am curious as to who all these white people are who are calling you about Darnell? Darnell is the one calling you right now, and pretty much all day, from his cell phone, which he will not give up. Also, none of his three teachers in the IBS (Intense Behavioral Support) room where he spends all day are white. Are there random white people calling you telling you they are from the school we should know about?”

Mom immediately backpedaled, and said she had to go - no time to discuss her son’s behavior and academics. Surely, she had much more pressing matters to handle.

Fast-forward four years, and Darnell is a freshman at the high school where I am an assistant principal. Did Darnell graduate 8th grade? I guess that is one way of putting it.

Another way is referred to as social promotion. While this may not be the best educational answer to Darnell’s situation, it would do even more damage to everyone in middle school who would have to share a classroom with Darnell as he aged into adolescents, grew a beard, and started driving to middle school - all the while refusing to cooperate with endless opportunities for a free education.

And so, Darnell graduates middle school and becomes a high school student, having little to know academic knowledge to succeed in high school level classes and no desire to learn.

Darnell was brought to my office by one of our amazing SROs (School Resource Officers) who caught him trying to leave campus without permission.

I hid my true feelings as Darnell entered my office and greeted him with a smile. “Good to see you again, Darnell. How have you been?”

“Oh man, not you. Anybody but you. I remember you.” Darnell said this as he sucked his thumb.

Yes, he still had not kicked the habit of thumb sucking. He only managed to stop sucking his thumb long enough to complain about being in trouble. Then, the thumb went right back into his mouth - social promotion and quality parenting at its best.

After Darnell left, the SRO filled me in on Darnell’s resume for the last four years. This thumb sucking, 80-pound, skinny-little-whiner, was now a “shot-caller” in a local gang, moving drugs.

In my best Hollywood gang scene imagination, I could not envision him angrily bossing around fellow gang bangers while sucking his thumb and complaining about their inability to move enough weight? This is the new age gangbanger? Fiersome.

His older sister, who was a senior, was the brains of the operation. Darnell assuredly followed her orders.

She was actually highly intelligent, but her mother - the ever-amazing parent she was - decided to use her daughter’s brains to expand and progress the family business of being in a gang and hustling drugs. Her daughter, at the age of 16, had tattoos to broadcast her life’s path - one of which was a large 9MM Glock on her chest, which she broadcast proudly each day she violated dress code.

It was the kind of heartbreaking scenario far too prevalent in public education.

Darnell proved to be far less of a headache then I imagined he would be, as he rarely bothered to attend school.

A few months went by and winter settled in. Sometime shortly after returning from our Christmas break, the SRO came by my office and asked if I had read about Darnell in the paper.

I prepared to hear about a gang shoot-out, his arrest, or his overdose, but none were true - well, not exactly.

Apparently, Darnell called 9-1-1 from his car to report someone had shot him while at an intersection.

When the first responders arrived to administer aid to his gunshot wound, the police also questioned him about the events.

Darnell, who I imagined was giving his statement while sucking his thumb, let the police know someone shot him through his window while he was at the intersection. He did not know who it was.

As they pressed him for details, Darnell assured them he was shot through is window.

The police eventually pointed out to Darnell his window, all of his windows, were fully intact. It was winter. His windows were rolled-up. How could he have been shot without the bullet going through the window and causing it to shatter?

Perplexing.

Darnell later confessed to shooting himself while driving without a license and carrying his illegal handgun - at least he wasn’t still attending middle school and influencing other 6th-8th graders about the glory of gang life.

Camo Cooker

One of my favorite customers popped into my head recently. I was on a jog in downtown Durham, North Carolina, and passed by Maverick’s - a smokehouse and taproom.  They operate a fairly big smoker on their front patio.

The sense of smell is the most highly linked of the five senses to memory, which is why my run passed Maverick’s brought me directly back to Mr. Camo, who lives in a rural-suburb of central Florida.

He was one of the rare occasions in which I visited a customer twice, but he sticks with me for more reasons than a double visit.

On my first visit, Mr. Camo - a man in his late 60’s - greeted me at the door dressed in a full camouflage sweatsuit. When we walked into his house, I noticed his shotgun propped in the corner of the foyer.

The sweatsuit was not just a fashion statement.

Mr. Camo, however, was an unbelievably nice man. None of the false machismo many of these gun-toters usually exhibit, like a peacock strutting around with their feathers flared.

He stuck with me throughout the entire visit, talking to me while I ran measurements, took notes, photographs, and a video.

When we entered his backyard, I noticed his enormous smoker. This was a custom made tow-behind smoker trailer. I immediately commented on it and began to pepper him with questions about the smoker and his technique.

What do you smoke with a cooker that big?

Oh I do all kinds of different meats. I am retired, but I have a catering business I run on the side. It keeps me fairly busy.

We chatted passionately about how good smoked meat it is; how it is the best way to make turkey by far, and how it is just a fun way to spend the day; a hobby in which to try different strategies, meats, woods, and seasonings to see what works best.

Mr. Camo was like a fun grandfather in our conversations. He didn’t ramble on (although I may have), and he had a good sense of humor, joking about his catering jobs, how he didn’t trust using other venue’s kitchen’s because they don’t keep things as clean as he likes them, and of course, his health issues causing him to cut back on the number of jobs he takes.

Although Mr. Camo was happy with everything I presented on the job, his wife was not present for my call, and he would need to discuss it with her.

This is usually a brush-off from most people who are to hesitant to just say they aren’t interested, but I had a different feeling about him. I told him I would call him in two days to see what he decided.

The next day Mr. Camo called me. He wanted to use our company over a lower priced company because of my presentation, which highlighted some items others missed, and our reputation.

His wife, however, just wanted to go with the cheapest option.

We came to an agreement on price, but Mr. Camo wanted me to come by to finalize the deal in person. Luckily, I had an opening in my schedule near him and was able to stop in to accommodate his request the next day.

When I arrived, Mr. Camo, once again, greeted me at the front door. And, not so much to my surprise, he was donning the very same camouflage sweatsuit. To be fair, he may well have 7 sets to meet his daily needs.

Mrs. Camo was just as nice as her husband - a little more cynical when it came to salesmen - nut nice all the same. After a few minutes the three of us were laughing as we went over the final documents.

Before I left, Mr. Camo asked me if I could come out back to see something.

Absolutely!

When we walked out back, Mr. Camo had his smoker going and opened it up to show me twelve chickens he was smoking. These birds were 5-pounds each, he explained. They barely occupied half of the enormous smoker.

The sight and the smell were fantastic. The chickens were golden brown on the outside and the scent of hickory he was using filled the air.

I will probably never see Mr. Camo again, but every time I see, pass, or smell one of those huge smokers, I’ll be reminded of the big, kind man in his camouflage sweatsuit.

The Locker Room Lunch

Traveling Gym Fail #2

Men’s locker rooms are not the most appealing places.

First, there are naked men of all types. It doesn’t freak me out, but it’s also not a place in which I would choose to spend any extra time.

They are also usually a shared area with the men’s bathroom, which provides a less-than-appealing aroma at most times.

Which is why it continually baffles me when I see guys, standing, sitting, or pacing around the locker room...eating their lunch.

Really? This is the environment in which you prefer to take your meal?

Maybe this is a psychological experiment for them. They are probably trying to train their brains to associate eating with something unsanitary and unappealing. Maybe after months of forcing themselves to eat around stinky, naked men, the next time they reach for food or a late night snack, they will have a horrible flashback to naked men using the toilet and refrain from their planned indulgence.

Maybe, but these guys don’t look like psychology students to me.

I have been noticing this ridiculousness for a few years now. It’s a super strange fad equivalent to a cult classic movie. Except some of those movies are good. This is just stupid and unsanitary.

There are not a lot of these guys out there lunching-in-locker-rooms, but man, they are a serious few.

Typically, these guys are in decent shape, which is annoying. I wish they looked like the pear-shaped creep who just sits in the locker room playing on his phone with his headphones in like he’s in a coffee shop.

It would make it much easier to belittle them for their behavior.

However, these guys usually fall into three different body types:

They are either ripped to shreds, on their way to being ripped to shreds, or a 300 lb massive mammal who is into lifting heavy weight and requires a mid-workout snack to maintain his intense caloric intake and prevent him from just biting the closest human nearest his weight rack for necessary sustenance.

When I say these guys are eating lunch, I do not mean they are chugging down their protein shake or pre-workout creatine punch.

These gentlemen are having actual meals: chicken & rice, quinoa & chicken, boiled chicken, chicken & beans, grilled chicken salad, or something else and chicken.

Ten feet away (at most) in direct line-of-sight, and definite line-of-scent, from this lunch break, several men are using urinals. At least one person is evacuating his bowels...loudly. The sounds of toilet flushing are abundant (except for the one guy who doesn’t understand what a courtesy flush is), and naked men are emerging from hot steamy showers.

I know. It makes me hungry just thinking about it.