Mustard Mayhem

The high school years saw me working a grill at a Mexican restaurant. I folded thousands of burritos in assembly-line fashion back in the day, and I can still wrap them at a respectable clip.

Morning prep consisted of frying hundreds of taco shells, mixing several batches of guacamole, cooking refried beans in a pressure cooker the size of a Yugo, grating mounds of cheese, and filling numerous ketchup and mustard bottles.

Any one of those tasks could turn messy, if not outright dangerous -- like the time I dropped a pot into the deep fryer and was doused in a tidal wave of hot grease, or the day a co-worker forgot about the pressure cooker during a dinner rush and had the thing explode, sending a shower of hot beans all over the restaurant (thankfully, no one was hurt by the pot's shrapnel).

It was an accident of this variety (if not severity) that made me something of a mascot at the restaurant. One morning I was filling mustard bottles; next to me a group of newly-hired managers was standing in a circle around the pressure-cooker and being taught how to pour melted lard over the beans. When I reached for the industrial-sized mustard bottle I missed my mark and knocked the thing off the shelf; by chance it fell between two of the managers and landed within the circle. I'd already taken the lid off the jar, so when it hit the floor mustard erupted in a spray of yellow mist that covered half a dozen of my future bosses from head to toe.

I couldn't have done that on purpose to save my life, but my co-workers gave me credit for subversive sentiments just the same.