As I have recently posted, I’ve been working at a Tropical Smoothie for the past couple of weeks. My early impressions are a melding of delight and flashes of holy-mother-of-God-what-have-I-gotten-into?
Breezy mornings of prep are sometimes disrupted by 10 cars anxiously waiting on their morning smoothie fix and a breakfast item that comes with a zillion options made to order. Going from zero to sixty in 3.5 seconds can become a multi-task of multi tasking. Orders, inputs, the right bag, where are the napkins? Straws? Does it come with a side? Ding! Another drive up. That’ll be—-Ding! Another…and so on.
The last time I did this sort of thing it was on a cash register where you counted change (no credit cards or reward clubs) and the kitchen prepared either food item #1, 2, or 3. Now we are in the post-Starbucks era where every customer designs every menu item just for themselves.
I’ll get through the rush and my son (a manager saving money for school) will remind me: “That was nothing, Dad. Wait til lunch.”
Fortunately lunch isn’t on my daily schedule. That’s because I’m basically the guy who comes in eeeearly (because getting up before the sun has been my thing ever since I realized many years ago that we die someday) and preps the mangos, strawberries and bananas and runs the drive through when there are usually only about 2 customers at a time. I’m doing this to help the company start each day a little easier.
And I’m doing it for ME.
Because I am retired and on a mission to rediscover my life through retirement and not in spite of it. My belief is that many of the things we did when we were young; our hobbies and jobs after school, before our careers even started, are great ways to design purpose in our post-career lives.
An outline of such a “purpose” happened for me this morning. It started with the rekindling of something I hadn’t felt in over 4 decades.
Back in college one of my jobs, in order to pay for Northwestern University, was working in the kitchen of a coed cafeteria. Every morning at 7am I would fill huge vats of peeled carrots. Carrots, if you’re not familiar with institutional-education-cuisine are the equivalent of hamburger helper. They go into everything from a cheese-bake to meatloaf and endless medleys. No college kitchen can ever have enough peeled carrots in the walk-in cooler and I was a carrot peeling Messiah. I could wash, cut, and peel to a soft, orange- translucence, more carrots in 15 minutes than if every other member of the staff peeled together for an hour.
I could peel, baby, and turned it into an art form. If you mentioned my name to anyone today who ate on South Campus between the years 1977 and 1980, they would say: “Kroeger? Carrots! Kroeger and carrots. Never saw anything like it. Did he go on to do anything else?”
My job was to fill 4 huge vats by 8:00. My work-study agreement required that I put in an hour every day, but I had every possible carrot peeled by 7:15.
So…what did I do with the remaining 45 minutes in order to fill my requirement?
I went to the kitchen manager (Ms Barth for anyone who may be from Northwestern between 1955 and 1985) and asked her if I could spend my remaining time in the dining room. She said, “Check first with every station’s prepping needs and if no one needs anything then stay in the dining room until the end of the hour.”
Not a problem. No one ever needed a thing. I knew that already from watching while I peeled. As I peeled if I noticed we were low on beans or potatoes I’d prep those as quickly as I could spin a carrot. The walk-in cooler was prepped before anyone would even know to ask for help.
This may have been one the best collections of lessons I’ve ever culled from a life experience:
1) Be on time and work efficiently
2) Anticipate needs/be helpful
3) Ask for what you want
4) Maximize your time to be creative.
That’s how you get ahead (take notes)
The people in the cafeteria who became my breakfast friends are still my friends. In many cases they were the friends with whom other alliances were formed on campus and off. Some of us even built our eventual careers together. Those were pretty substantial byproducts of a simple, but disciplined, carrot-based, philosophy.
And it brings this epiphany back to Tropical Smoothie this morning: As I efficiently prepped my fruits, I was afforded more time to prepare at the window to greet customers. Suddenly, that past experience from college washed over me.
“I’ve felt this way before,” I thought to myself. I was taken back to the kitchen at Allison Hall with a carrot in one hand and a peeler in the other, anxiously looking forward to seeing my friends and sitting down to breakfast. There was a dormant synapse sequence in my brain that still fired and was holding onto how I felt each morning 45 years ago. I felt the rejuvenation of camaraderie, of the anticipation of the unknown life that lies ahead and the laughter that always follows when people trust and support each other.
I felt a surge of energy and optimism like I had at 22. When I left Tropical Smoothie this morning I went to work on 3 different projects I’d been procrastinating for months. The challenge now is to make these rusty mechanisms a part of the routine again. It takes time and new habits. Some of which will be to find old habits.
Careers, and even success (or maybe especially success) can pave over motivations and even the excitement we once had when we didn’t know where we were heading. In retirement, when we are lucky enough to even get here, we just might be able to restore some of the best material that made us who we are.
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