...The Pulper...

I am not a sympathetic puker. I have cleaned countless nasty urinals without so much as gagging. I haven't been car sick since I was little. With a record like this, I thought my stomach was pretty dang tough. Then I met THE PULPER.

I work at the Missionary Training Center cafeteria in the evenings. Usually, I work on "the line" where I serve the missionaries food. On Tuesdays, however, I get the marvelous privilege of working in the dish room. Today was my first Tuesday, and I 'got' to be the scrubber. This is code for the person that sprays and/or scrubs off all the left-over and crusted-over food before the dishes can go into the machine. It didn't sound too bad...

So there I was, getting ready to be the best little scrubber I could be, and then someone turned on THE PULPER. The PULPER is like a giant garbage disposal that can eat whole bread sticks in mere seconds. It swallows pans full of mixed vegetables like I swallow water. It's a monster. And it's so loud a deaf person would have to plug his or her ears just to think. It was my job to spray the dishes, aiming the gunk that came off so it would cascade down a slide of murky water and land in the jaws of the PULPER.

I was scrubbing along when I came upon a meat pan, or a tub which was at least four gallons and had previously been filled with raw hamburger meat. There was still a good inch of raw hamburger blood pooled in the bottom. For those who do not know my opinion of red meat, I'm about to give it to you. I think it's absolutely DISGUSTING. I don't like to eat it, but even less I like to cook it. And I will not touch raw meat or get within three feet of the oozy, bloody juice if I can help it. But here I was, faced with tub after tub of the nasty meat blood.

I decided to suck it up and try to spray out the waste so I could just move on with my job. As the steam from the hot water baked the mingling scents of raw meat blood and barbecue sloppy joes into my clothes, skin and hair, I began to question the abilities of my midsection. My morning meal decided it would try to jump in and go swimming with the already rank concoction. It was all I could do to keep from tossing my cookies into the waiting jaws of THE PULPER. As I threw up a little in my mouth, I accidentally sprayed the meat pan so the water ricocheted off the plastic tub and onto the apron on my front.

By the time my first shift in the dish room was over, I was drenched from the outside with left-over missionary munchies and sweating on the inside because the room could have been no less that thirteen million degrees. To say I was disgusting would have been a phenomenal understatement. I wanted to go home and shower twice.