“Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.” W. C. Fields

I managed to break a cork off inside the bottle of Merlot that I opened last night. 

It hasn’t happened in years, but it took me back to a time when I worked food service and we served those dinky little bottles of wine. Looking at them, I was never impressed with how people ordered them at a pizza joint or a greasy diner. Of course, those dinky ones wouldn’t have a cork, so I’m trying to remember how it was that I served someone a nice glass of Chardonnay or Zinfadel with bits of cork floating in it?

While my memory is foggy regarding exactly where I was, I do recall my manager being dumbfounded (rightly so) that I would not even notice little bits of cork in the glass. What can I say, I’m an idiot. 

But there’s something to be said for life experience teaching you stuff. Your boss asks you, “Have you ever sliced onions?”, and you answer in the negative because you don’t want to lie. Boss looks astonished and says, “Well, okay, here ya go” and demonstrates.

Some people are naturally good at food service – I am not one of them. By “good”, I really reference the amount of thought that it takes to perform a given task. I over think a lot of things including slicing onions. So I was never that great at it.