The abusively overworked dude who finally showed up with the corporate approved screw asked me who did this, I said me, he looked at me and said

“That’s some pussy macguyver shit right there.”

Greatest compliment of my life to that point https://twitter.com/teknomantik/status/1352871726242091008

It’s super hard to explain kitchens to someone who worked in a place with HR, so many people don’t understand how “macguyver but with a pussy” is like the highest praise a lady can get from an underpaid corporate mechanic

Rich people pay for a dining experience in which they’re the only ones allowed to abuse the staff

In a diner any customer and any coworker can fuck with the new people until they’ve proven they can work and/or insult people more fluently than anyone else

Both, ideally

I’d just add that since I wrote my debut memoir (288 pages in which I assert that it sucks to be poor)

Science has affirmed that people who swear fluently tend to be more intellectually capable and also that the act of swearing makes acute pain more tolerable

Also wealth demonstrably makes one less altruistic but I digress

reason kitchens aren’t office-professional is that it ain’t an office

It’s a place you might have to rig an oven with your underwire then trust the dumbass on fryers not to slip and put your head in boiling oil

Maybe if they’d ever paid me enough to worry about etiquette I might have politely asked

For the work I did for that pay? Lol fuck “professional standards”

Bring me safety equipment and then we can talk about my language or maintaining standards in the workplace

I say all that because it is absolutely inevitable that someone will say that it’s horrible I had to hear “pussy” as a descriptor

When I once told a new cook that his worthless chickenfucker of a father should have taught him to cook an egg

I mean to be fair he’d tried to correct me on a proper over medium and was absolutely wrong, he thought over hard was over medium and he couldn’t poach if you’d paid him a million to get it right just once

Point is in that business you have to be ready

Because whatever the ticket cost at some point a customer will say worse than you’ve ever dreamed

And you’ll have to smile and agree

And then you get into the kitchen and you can tell someone to their face you hope they choke

Kitchens are relentlessly profane and brutal and absolutely inappropriate

Because front of house is relentlessly saccharine and apologetic and polite

And ain’t nobody getting paid enough where an hour’s wage would cover an entree

Anyway that’s how a lovely quiet maintenance man who was being just absolutely exploited once called my fix “pussy macguyver shit” and it was an admiration, and I said trust a woman

And ever after that I slipped him the good coffee we weren’t allowed to have for shift drinks

Also I had to explain to him what an underwire was but he didn’t have good English and I didn’t have good Spanish and everyone was dying laughing

The cook let me say “titty metal” and apparently the repair guy said “breast spears”

Whole time the cook could have translated

I still don’t know the word for underwire in Spanish and that maintenance guy has five kids so I know he knows how bras work

But the cook thought it was hilarious to watch me explain how I’d fixed an oven with my bra

Which. I’m sure he wasn’t wrong,

“The metal of my underwear” was the best I could manage

Which is not(!) what the lovely maintenance man expected

Given the peanut gallery I assume I inferred that I’d fixed the oven with my chastity belt

I would, were I just there, also have let that all play out hilariously

I did point out later that my tits, or at least the beauty standard that made me wear a bra, saved the day and then challenged any male in my kitchen to please fix any appliance using only the clothes they’d put on in the morning

Weirdly none did

weren’t even pussy macguyvers