Dietary in a Retirement Home: Birth of a Monster

Food service can turn people into slaves, but what makes it worse is the guilt. When you work in a retirement center/nursing home you tend to feel responsible for feeding the elderly. You are bound by the job and shackled and chained by the guilt. You have a need to feed them when they come into the dining room. No matter how much you hate your job you feel an obligation do give them what they want.
No matter what it takes you will try to please them. They pay is hard to live on and you suck the blood right out of the paychecks when they are deposited in your bank. You are paid higher than the average restaurant, because severs at a retirement home does not and cannot receive tips. So you suck down all the compliments like a fine wine, right before you go home and drown yourself in a bottle of cheap wine. Anything to take the edge off. The guilt isn’t the hard part. The hard part is the job environment.
It starts at the top with management. Puppets wearing masks, raining down changes with good intentions, leading to collision of bad intentions. Blood soaked wounds can’t even fathom the same as a fake person barking promises. So much fake and so much hate. All the money they collect while soaking up all of the dollars from the social security checks must help them sleep tonight and every night. When the director wears her suits and talks with a voice that sounds more automated than a robot you begin to wonder how a simple nurse rose so high to become a director?
Nursing is an honorable great job, but it usually lures people in who have no idea what they want to do with their lives. Passionate sure, but can these people actually be counted on to lead a million dollar private business? Its’ not only the money but the hundreds of elderly who live in this company. Not to mention the cesspool of workers.
Ah yes, the cesspool. Upon my first days at this place over 4 years ago I could smell the cesspool the minute I stepped into that kitchen. It was filled to the top with people who had no problem finishing last place in life. No ambition but the safety net to hold them in for years to come. No courage to educate to become more, nor the passion to be all they can be. The cesspool is where the American dream was gang raped and choked to death on its own blood.
A sort of cocky pride comes to a person who works in the dietary department of a retirement home. However, their value and worth as a person is probably no higher than that of a truck stop sink. Beauty is dead and the beast lives on. The men are trash hiding behind a lace curtain and the women are the classiest of trashy whores. Classy trashy whores do exist, but are hard to come by. The cesspool of course isn’t complete without the sassy, trashy, and uneducated opinions of anyone with a trap of a mouth.
Politics should never leave the lips of these cesspool swimmers. They suckle the teats of the democratic while jerking off the republicans. The best of both worlds no doubt. Backwards and stupid, the best kind of Americans. A mix of races who ties into a corrupt union, for Illinois is one of the few states where you can be terminated if you refuse to pay for their lack of services. The Union can’t save anyone and if you have any pride in your union then you are a fool. Your job can still fire you even with the Union protecting you and that is based on the card “We Can Do whatever We Want Because I Went To Culinary School So I Must Have a Degree In Good Steak And Good Management Of People.” Please…..give me a break. Is that what you told the Director Nurse when they hired you? You can’t even read or write. No wonder you went to culinary school……
If you’re a young single male that works there you instantly become Grade A meat for the women. They see you not as a person but a “Free Dick” and they lash at you from all directions. The succubuses’ lick your balls with a sensation that can make your skin crawl in temptation. You run home to hide at the bottom of the bottle of whiskey. The only thing you ever wanted was some job to help pay your bills, but now you can feel the chains around your neck.
Tell me….when you fire a person at a job then an open position needs to be filled right? Well months pass and more people quit, more people get fired and still the positions are not filled. Short help forces the others to work double duty with shackles driving them into the mud, making them pay for the failures in upper management. Tell me……when stock runs short the management should order more right? No they let it run dry and you are forced to make do with the scraps you have left. By the time you get stock on one item again you run out of another. You run like a chicken with your head cut off almost willing to allow yourself to be plucked, fucked, and dipped in batter. Deep fried until the madness leaves your mind.
You tear your heart open trying to please everyone and the cesspool only cares for themselves. You try your hardest to help the elderly but if you have no stock on your V8 juice then allow yourself to be crucified in their 90 year old, blind deaf, and dying opinion. You work hard but get thrown into the icy waters, feeling your soul fill with madness. You think the worst part is over but then on a drunken whiskey binge you stab walls with knives, you threaten everyone you know, and you pick apart random people hoping they will go home and slice their wrists open with razor blades.
I try to be nice but the cesspool dragged me to the end of my chain. I see the problems but no one can fix it, no saving grace…just nothing. I was once taken into an office to talk about how “bad” of an employee I was…only to be promoted to management six months later. Do you see the logic in this? Either they were lying to me or made a very bad move. I used to fear the monster, now I have become the monster and after a year and a half as a monster….My teeth are ready to draw blood….I think it’s time to break these chains.