A geek goes to food class

As a lifelong learner, I’m thrilled about all the new stuff I get to learn while getting LaunchPad Coworking up and running. And I’ve always said I don’t want to be one of those bosses who really has no clue about what the hard working staff has to deal with. That’s why I took barista training last year. It’s also why last week, I took a food handling certification class with Tina, who already knows All Things Cafe Related.

It wasn’t just a hands on experience, turns out. It was a very clean hands-on experience. And why is that? Because we spent a good thirty minutes learning how to wash our hands. That’s right. And not only that, after the lesson, we watched a video which demonstrated the process again, more than once in fact, just in case.

You know how a shampoo bottle has those silly instructions: Rinse, Repeat? (Do we really need to wash our hair twice in the same shower? And do OCD folks get caught in that infinite loop?) Well we learned the 6 steps to thorough hand washing. Dare I speculate that if someone is so… well I don’t want to say stupid… but that if someone really needs to be taught this skill that maybe, just maybe, they’re in the wrong class? Or is that just too snarky?

So, here you go, allow me to share my knowledge. First, you wet hands with warm running water. Next you lather hands for at least twenty seconds (one Mississippi, two Mississippi…). Now rinse those fingertips, pointing downwards. Dry your hands with a paper towel (don’t even think about using your sleeves.) Turn the faucet off with the paper towel. Throw the paper towel away.

Question—if a restroom only has those air dryers on the wall, do we rip that down and use it to turn off the faucet? Do we throw it away afterwards?

Okay, okay, seriously now. I know that classes, testing, and certification are necessary to (hopefully) insure that standards are being met in restaurants. But must the classes be so long and tedious? We spent eight hours, time we’ll never get back, watching videos, listening to droning lectures and yes, enduring the scary but occasionally amusing commentary of our classmates.

Not everyone got all the lessons, even though information was repeated many, many, many times. For instance, you have to remember that raw meat needs to be stored under 41 degrees and heating leftovers requires a minimum of 135 degrees to kill any microbes.

The teacher would ask us to repeat back these numbers, and some folks would shout out numbers that were off by about seventy degrees. They’d also interrupt to say things like, “Chicken? Why I remember the first time I ate chicken in a restaurant, back in the ‘70s. I was wearing my seersucker suit and I was with my first wife, and her six cousins, and a hitchhiker we’d picked up in Elgin, or no, actually it was Hutto…”

I guess it was entertaining. Sort of. We’re certainly getting plenty of laughs at the expense of others out of the day. But too much of anything is, well, too much. In the end, we had a test to take, loaded with trick questions and stuff never covered in class, although much of it was common sense. They allotted two hours for the test. It took me twenty minutes. Which left me a lot of time to wash my hands.