Posted by John
Perhaps I’ve already beaten the I-hate-Thanksgiving horse to death but I’m going to give it a few more swings just for good measure.
Last week at work my department had their annual Thanksgiving potluck, which combines three of my least favorite things: Thanksgiving, work, and people. The run up to this year’s potluck was no different to last year’s, as I wrote about here – the e-mails came out guilting all of us to sign up to bring a special dish and I watched day by day as the list filled up with more and more horrendous food: 8 pies, three green bean casseroles, 2 cheesy potatoes, 6 versions of “homemade” mac and cheese… 12 sticks of butter, 8 servings of carbs, 4 days worth of calories… I just threw up thinking about it all.
To be honest, I’m better off not bringing a dish to these stupid things. For one, I can’t cook shit. What am I going to whip up? Some pierogies or something? Secondly, people loath me when I bring a veggie or fruit dish or something. I watched this happen at two recent work potlucks: Bob from the structural department is making his way down the food line, piling his plate high with hot dogs, Swedish meatballs, and potato salad as he comes across a tray of veggies and I can read the look on his face, “What the fuck is this? Are these vegetables? This is a goddamn potluck, not a salad bar. Which one of you granola eating, hippie-loving socialists brought these goddamn veggies?... Oh, there you are, standing in the corner with your beard, all smug like a goddamn socialist…”
The day before the Thanksgiving potluck I was talking to a woman and asked her what she was bringing. “Cheesy potatoes,” she replied, “Why, what are you bringing? A veggie tray?” I’m not making this up. You bring a veggie tray to two potlucks and you get labeled as the goddamn veggie tray guy. Whatever. I didn’t bring a veggie tray; instead I brought the only thing I can prepare – baked apples.
The other thing about a stupid potluck is, everyone assigns so much fake merit to how much of their dish gets consumed. Like, if Connie’s disgusting cheeseball is sitting next to Diane’s cauliflower stew, and everyone is lapping up Diane’s cauliflower stew like there’s complimentary New Moon movie tickets at the bottom of the bowl or some shit but no one is touching the gross-ass cheeseball, it gives that bitch Diane the opportunity to be like, “Oh Connie, I see you’re going to have a lot of cheeseball left over…” as she lets the sentence trail off, knowing full well that she might as well have just told Connie her new haircut looks “matronly” or that her son might not be clever enough for the honor role or her dog looks “mangy”.
Rather than get caught up in that bullshit I just stack the cards in my favor by making an exceptionally small dish. I apply my patented work-potluck-dish-sizing equation: Take the total number of people in your division and divide that number in half. Then take that number and divide it in half again. Take that number and divide it in half once more and you come up with the total number of people your dish should serve. For instance, there are 50 people in my division, half of that is 25, half of that is 12.5, and half again is 6.25. Don’t round up, round down. I made enough baked apples for 6 people and I ate one serving so at the end of the day all the baked apples were gone and I was like, “Huh, looks like the baked apples were a big hit.” Meanwhile electrical Tony is staring into the biggest fucking crock-pot of green beans I’ve ever seen thinking to himself, “Well now what the fuck am I going to do with 47 people’s worth of green beans?”
Fortunately for Tony he wasn’t alone. In fact, the potluck was last Thursday and I just got another e-mail today saying there were still leftovers available. Now, if I didn’t eat Randy’s fucking pigs in a blanket last Thursday, what in the hell would compel me to eat his pigs in a blanket the following Monday? I’ll tell you what – nothing.
In the previous incarnation of the blog I made several references to “the new kid” at work. It’s been damn near a year since he started working but he’s still the newest person and I don’t have any other words to describe him so I’ll continue to refer to him as the new kid.
I’ve come to really like the new kid as I’ve taken him under my wing to help him along through the world. That doesn’t mean I still don’t fuck with him every chance I get though, which he makes exceptionally easy for me because he’s still all young and precocious as he hasn’t learned how to live life yet.
For instance, he hasn’t figured out how to go to the grocery store. Every single morning he comes rushing into his cube with this ravenous look in his eyes like he just got kicked off Survivor having not eaten for the past three weeks. Obviously he doesn’t get up early enough to eat breakfast but even if he did, he hasn’t figured out how to buy cereal and milk. Shit, he hasn’t figured out how to buy bananas or granola bars either. For some reason though he always has a bag of barbeque potato chips at his desk so every goddamn morning he comes bursting into the office, rips open his filing cabinet, and starts ravaging that bag of chips like a goddamn hyena over a water buffalo carcass. CRUNCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH! As he’s mauling the chips. CRUNCH, CRUCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH!
Who eats barbeque chips at 8 in the morning?
At first I found it funny but now it’s just goddamn annoying. The thing is though, he hasn’t yet figured out how annoying it is so I decided to drop him a hint. Just like me, it would be better for everyone if he didn’t bring anything to the potluck. I mean, what’s he going to bring? A half eaten bag of barbeque potato chips? Well, knowing full well he was going to avoid the potluck like the plague, I took the liberty of signing him up to bring a dish to the potluck anyway. As a matter of fact, I signed him up to bring a bag of Ruffles Smokehouse Barbeque Potato Chips with Ridges.
Literally within an hour of putting that on the list there was this low murmur running throughout the office as people wondered why in the hell someone would sign up to bring Ruffles Smokehouse Barbeque Potato Chips with Ridges to a goddamn Thanksgiving potluck. Was he joking? Was he serious? Someone even stopped me and was like, “Is the new kid really bringing barbeque Ruffles to the potluck?” I laughed so hard under my breath I shit my pants a little bit as I replied, “It wouldn’t be thanksgiving without the Ruffles.”
My plan worked even better than I could have expected though. The morning of the potluck everyone was gathered in the conference room getting their dishes all set out and literally there were 49 people in the room as the Division Manager was like, “We’ll give it another minute to make sure everyone is here before we say Grace,” when I saw the new kid try to sneak in through the back door and fuck me if he wasn’t carrying a bag of Ruffles barbeque chips! He kind of casually strolled over to the food table, set it on the corner, and nonchalantly walked away hoping no one noticed. Not 5 seconds later the Administrative Assistant who had organized the whole event took one last walk down the food table to make sure everything was in order and literally paused to do a double take like, “What the fuck is this? Who the fuck would actually bring a bag of Ruffles barbeque potato chips to a goddamn Thanksgiving potluck???”
It turns out, the new kid wasn’t going to come to the potluck at all but just by chance his girlfriend had a potluck of her own that day so she was going to make two casseroles so he could bring one to work. The day before the potluck he went to sign up on the list and fuck him if the list wasn’t already full. There was no room to sign up for anything. And then he saw his name already on the list, right next to the words “Ruffles Smokehouse Barbeque Potato Chips with Ridges.” He correctly thought I was the one who put it on the list but he couldn’t be certain. In fact there was enough self-doubt that he literally thought someone might have wanted Ruffles Smokehouse Barbeque Potato Chips with Ridges and he was supposed to bring them. So he did.
I watched every goddamn person walk through the food line, plates stacked high with turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls, green beans, cheesy potatoes, Swedish meatballs… and then every goddamn person came to the end of the table and paused, thinking to themselves, “Someone actually brought Ruffles Smokehouse Barbeque Potato Chips with Ridges to the potluck. Why the fuck would you bring Ruffles Smokehouse Barbeque Potato Chips with Ridges to a goddamn potluck???” Oh man, I’m laughing right now just thinking about it.
I hate Thanksgiving, but on certain occasions there’s nothing I like more than some Thanksgiving Ruffles Smokehouse Barbeque Potato Chips with Ridges.
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Despite my opinion on the occasion, I sincerely hope everyone has a great holiday.
Cheers
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