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| It's your old pal Dumdum! |
The countdown has begun until my departure from LLF, and your faithful friend Gittles was really aiming to finish out strong, leaving a good impression in my wake, so as not to be doomed to the "Don'ts" column of former Lazy Lady employees.
Whelp.
The day that I broached the (for me) emotionally harrowing discussion of my departure with Laini, I also somehow managed to wrap the wrong batch of cheeses, requiring that Laini herself descend to the cave to correct my mistake. This was not the first time this happened. Previously, it happened with a raw milk cheese that requires a minimum aging time, and necessitated that an entire shipment of cheese be returned. I felt horrible about it. It was an honest mistake but a big one, and one that cost Laini both money and trust amongst her buyers.
The second time it happened was that fateful day that I gave Laini my notice. I saw Laini emerge from the cave on my way to milking, smiling seemingly to hold back tears of frustration at my carelessness as she muttered that I'd wrapped the wrong cheese. I was gobsmacked. I tried to visualize in my mind's eye the rack upon which the Sweet Carolines had been resting, to summon the image of the little tag thingy that indicates which batch and date and lot number is which and run over in my mind how -- HOW -- I could possibly have gotten it wrong.
At first I was in denial -- surely LAINI was the one who was mistaken, because I was careful, so careful! Ordinarily there are several batches of Sweet Carolines in various stages of ripening in the cave at any given time. Because it requires several weeks of washing, the batches accrue and cycle out according to their readiness. Initially I thought perhaps the tag had gotten misplaced, or that I'd wrapped PART of one wrong batch because of its shelf proximity to the correct one. I couldn't conceive of how I'd gotten it so so wrong.
Later, Rebecca told me that Laini had intimated to her that I should be able to tell just by looking at the cheese which batch is the oldest and thus the correct one for wrapping. I agree that at this stage of my development, that ought to appear clear to me. And yet ....
My mistake was still a complete and total enigma to me, and I assumed that it had to do with simply mistaking the lot number. I had sworn to myself to take extra care to make sure that I read the lot numbers more carefully and did this yesterday morning when I went down to the cave to wrap the ill-fated Sweet Carolines. I remember thinking "Gee, these look a bit dried out," but because Laini sometimes makes adjustments to orders per her own observations or intuitions, and because I have yet to trust my own guts or instincts, being that I routinely feel like a motherfucking moron at work, I didn't allow myself to go much further with that.
Last night I returned to the farm for evening milking as I do every day, and it wasn't long before Barry broke the news to me that I'd yet again wrapped the wrong cheese. He did so in such a way that illustrated how it had thrown the day's operations into havoc -- Laini was supposed to wash buckets so that Barry could work on the buck barn, but because she instead had to re-wrap the cheese, Barry had to pick up the slack.I spent the entire milking shift on the verge of tears, vacillating between disbelief and self-flagellation. And here I thought the worst thing to happen to me that day was that my scoop of strawberry yogurt from Tim and Doug's had leapt to its death on the sidewalk after one measly lick. I'd have given up every future ice cream cone from here to eternity to have not made the goddamned same mistake twice, nay a third time ...
Again, I pored over my mental image of the cheeses on their racks, the placement of them and the geography of their attendant lot numbers. And then it dawned on me. IT FINALLY FUCKING DAWNED ON ME. I hadn't been looking for the right physical characteristics to begin with. The tag was indeed misplaced, but I had expected that the "oldest" batch of cheese, ie the one ripe and ready for shipping, was the one with a powdery, slightly dry-ish exterior, when in fact the opposite was true. Washed rinds are effectively the inverse of bloomies in this regard. The washing is meant to rid the cheese of that particular white mold on the exterior and encourage the growth of B. linens, which is responsible for the orange-y color and sticky wet texture of those awesomely funky washed rinds. So in an ideal world, the one you're sending to market is moist and supple on the exterior without being so sticky and wet as to cause a mess or affect the interior goopiness of the cheese.
Why did I not know this, intuitively, at this stage? I've been trying to suss this out for the last 18 hours. I could say that early on in my tenure there were a number of batches of Sweet Caroline that we held back to dry out a little before sending out specifically because they had been too moist to wrap and ship. But I've had many more months' worth of experience to understand that that was an exception, not a rule. I suppose that if I'd come to this realization sooner, and identified that that had been the cause of my mistake the previous time, I'd have been better equipped to avoid making the same mistake a second time. Because I didn't really KNOW what I'd done wrong before -- other than that I'd wrapped the wrong cheese -- I was unclear of how to safeguard against it again.
The last day-ish has been a rough one on me mentally. I've been beating myself up for being careless, stupid, lacking in common sense. I've imagined Laini's anger at me and unbridled relief that I'm leaving, and the suspicion that, if pressed, she would not feel inclined to give me glowing references to a future employer ("She baked great cakes but man was she an idiot! Don't hire her!"). My disappointment is exponential, as it's not just my frustration at myself but the ire and exasperation I feel confident I've stirred in Laini, the person that this whole time I've wanted to impact, impress, and do right by most of all.
Probably most normal people would not fess up to such failures. Certainly over this past year, I've become more and more aware that my inclination is to trumpet my missteps rather than trying to stifle or mitigate them. Maybe it's the same reason that any time someone compliments me on my hair I feel obligated to tell the flatterer that it comes from a box. I don't want to accept credit where it isn't due, nor do I want anyone to think I'm unaware or ignorant of my own faults.
I don't feel any real relief in confessing this Turric sin. I didn't feel any after penning a note of apology to Laini at the end of the night and insisting on not submitting hours for my evening shift as some sort of penance for the time she had to take out of her day to redo my work. On the drive to the farm this morning, I tried to reason with myself -- what's done is done, you acknowledged your mistake and apologized for it, now keep your head down and do your job. But a persistent, gnawing feeling of ... almost ... guilt? keeps digging into my stomach. And shame that I am not better, not further along, not more perceptive or careful or fastidious. After a year's time, I should be advancing my techniques in cheesemaking, not continuing to make thoughtless errors that further undermine my desire to appear trustworthy and competent.
Does all this add up to my deep, nagging fear that I'm JUST NOT CUT OUT FOR THIS SHIT? Is it simply part and parcel of the process of learning to do something new and unfamiliar? I wonder how much my own awe and reverence for Laini has wound up working at cross purposes to my potential success at Lazy Lady. I often think about the interns and wannabe employees of Rolling Stone that I encountered when I worked there who had dreamed the whole of their young lives of writing for or working for the magazine, had memorized interviews or covers from the 70s and could quote reviews or reel off album years, but for whatever reason -- whether due to their skill or their inability to jive with the professional culture -- couldn't hack it there. And meanwhile I, who'd never subscribed to the mag and frankly preferred Spin aesthetically, had unwittingly wound up in a role these other youngin's would have killed for. I wonder if my outsize admiration for Laini has colluded with my insecurity and lack of know-how to trip me up in areas where I could and should be confident and stable and secure.
As I look forward towards my new job, I am scared shitless at the prospect of yet another inevitable learning curve, and afraid I don't have the resilience to withstand another passel of months of NOT KNOWING WHAT THE FUCK I AM DOING AND/OR DOING IT VERY FUCKING BADLY. The wise old Buddha in me is whispering that that is the sum total of life and it's really a matter of learning how better to roll with these punches. But I'd like, just for a little while, to feel I'm good at something, doing something right, excelling. I'd like the satisfaction of knowing I'd done a nice job instead of this low-grade panic and despondence and ... I mean, shame really.
Thank god for NPR, which never fails to remind me of how much worse other people in the world have it than me. I have my health. I have my family. I still have goat friends to hug around the neck, a bed to sleep in, good food to eat (barring certain aforementioned ice cream cones).
It's all going to be ok, in the end.
Right?
Right!
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