How I missed becoming the Taco King of the Midwest

The business that gave me my first job celebrated its 43^rd anniversary recently. Taco Boy had only been serving up Mexican food a couple years when they hired me on. I landed the job on the recommendation of my buddy Mick; he’d been working there three months without missing a shift.

I arrived at work, filled with sugar-plum visions of the many wonderful things I would buy with my first real paycheck. A new Corvette, maybe, or a house in the Hamptons.

I was a little vague on that whole “minimum wage” thing.

The manager appeared to be of genuine Mexican descent, which seemed to me exotic, and leant an air of authenticity to the place. I no longer remember her name, but it might have been Maria.

Maria patiently showed me how to operate the tortilla steamer, the lettuce chopper, the cheese grater…if you’re not responsible for payroll and taxes, there’s really not a lot to working at a Mexican fast food restaurant. I paid close attention anyway; this was my first job and I planned to work my way up to manager within a year, buy my own franchise, and eventually become a household name to rival Ronald McDonald. Mike Taylor, Taco-King of the Midwest.

Fifteen minutes into my first job, but I had big dreams.

After showing me the basics of taco building, Maria turned me loose on a couple customers. It soon became apparent that my math skills were such that I was never going to be able to make correct change or simultaneously carry two orders in my head without screwing up at least one of them.

Maria decided my skills might best be utilized in the kitchen steaming tortilla shells and chopping lettuce.

Now, this was my first job and I had never heard the word “hazing” before. Mick hadn’t warned me that Maria often played little jokes on new employees as a way of helping them “settle in” to the Taco Boy family.

So I was taken aback when she set an enormous bowl of pinto beans in front of me along with a spray bottle and kitchen towel and instructed me to clean each bean individually, making sure to keep an accurate count of each bean for “inventory purposes.”

This seemed a pretty humdrum job to lay on the future Taco-King of the Midwest, but I’m nothing if not a team player.

I removed the first bean from the bowl, sprayed it with water, rubbed it dry, and dropped it into a waiting container. One down, countless hundreds to go.

An hour later I had cleaned and counted 1,423 beans. The bowl was still half-full. Maria stuck her head around the corner.

“Hey Mike,” she said. “When did you say your birthday was again? I need it for the paperwork.”

“Um, November 26,” I said.

“And what’s your Social Security number?”

I told her; she made a notation on a clipboard.

“OK, thanks,” she said. “How many beans so far?”

“Uh…” I had lost count. “I don’t know exactly. Over a thousand.”

Sighing, Maria took the container of cleaned beans and dumped them back into the bowl of unclean beans.

“Sorry,” she kindly said. “You’ll have to start over. Management needs an exact count.”

I made it to bean number 2,012 before giving up. I threw my apron on the floor and stomped out the back exit. My career as Taco-King of the Midwest had lasted exactly 93 minutes.

Later that day, Mick explained the whole hazing thing to me. I felt too much a fool to ever go back for my paycheck. But I figure Taco Boy still owes me for that 93 minutes of bean counting.

Based on the minimum wage at the time, Taco Boy owes me nearly two bucks! Pay up, Maria.

More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

The real education takes place during summer vacation

A couple weeks back one of my fellow columnists, Kathy Runyan, wrote a piece in which she implied that, deep down, most kids would rather be in school than on summer vacation. Now, Kathy’s a good friend, a very sweet lady and—in my opinion—the best columnist since Erma Bombeck, but she’s also obviously a little crazy.

Either that, or a girl.

I remember hearing rumors, back when I was toiling away at St. Isadore’s Elementary, that some girls actually liked school. We didn’t have the term “urban myth” at the time, but I assumed it was something like that; a fairy tale invented by girls to further distance themselves from the grimy, skin-kneed rabble that is prepubescent masculinity.

Whatever the case, I do know there are no schoolboys who pine for the chalk-dust-smelling confines of the classroom during summer’s long, temperate months. The school year is a time of vacant stares, watched clocks, irrelevant memorizations and flickering fluorescent lights.

Summer vacation, for a boy at least, is when the real education happens.

Remember that writer, Robert Fulghum, most famous for his book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”? Well, all I ever learned in Kindergarten was that I prefer chocolate milk to white, and that you really can eat paste.

The things I really needed to know I learned during summer vacation.

For instance:

- Nothing feels as good as June grass against your bare feet. But there are boards with nails in them out there; care must be taken.

- Crawdad pinchers don’t really hurt that much, but it takes courage and faith to discover this fact for yourself.

- Grapes you pick yourself from wild-growing vines taste better than those you buy in a store, even though they have huge seeds in them and are frequently a little sour. Same goes for strawberries.

- A bicycle can go just as fast as you imagine it can go, and as far.

- A book read in a tree fort on a sultry July afternoon is infinitely superior to any book assigned by your teacher—even if it’s the same book.

- If you lie on a hillside beneath a star-littered night sky and gaze upward long enough, you will see God.

- Like grapes and strawberries, watermelon from the neighbor’s garden tastes better than watermelon from a store. But it also tastes better to your neighbor; don’t expect him to give it up without a fight.

- Skateboards are fun. Sidewalks are hard. It’s the same with life.

- If you sneak one cigarette from your father’s pack on the bedside stand, it won’t kill you. Unless you’re caught.

- Trains, not books, are the preferred transportation of the imagination.

- In the summertime, you sometimes become aware of air, even when there’s no scent upon it but the veiled aroma of faraway times and places.

- Life—despite sour grapes, boards with nails, and the distant shadow that is the resumption of classes in September—is good.

Oh, school serves its purpose, I suppose. We must learn to read and write, after all. But it’s during summer vacation that we learn the things worth reading and writing about.

To contact Mike Taylor with your questions, comments, or petitions to increase the length of summer vacation, e-mail mtaylor325@gmail.com or write via snail mail to: Mike Taylor, c/o Valley Media, Inc., PO Box 9, Jenison, MI 49429. Miss a week? More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com/advancenewspapers.