"With blowtorches, saws and rope rounding out our repertoire, it occurred to me that serial killers and line cooks had remarkably similar training, equipment and temperament."
(This story is dedicated to my Mom, who saved my life; And to my husband, who makes life worth living. Original artwork by Jason Zenobia.)
The Flaming Chef
I had just gotten fired, and my mother was giving me a pep talk.
“I ran into that friend of yours the other day. You remember Kathy Winston from high school? She’s just a few years older than you and she’s a real grown up.”
I was approaching thirty and I felt as though she’d asked if I needed to go potty.
And of course I had just gotten fired.
After my last job, the temp agency was reluctant to send me anywhere new and how could I blame them? My assignment ended in disaster when two weeks of work reformatting a technical manual resulted in nothing but heartache for our client.
"What did you do?" my boss asked. I could hear her through the phone as she clenched the muscles in her jaw. It turned out that not only was my work unusable, but they had to wipe the computer’s hard disk clean and rebuild it before it would work again.
The computer would work again. I on the other hand, would not.
"I never really pictured you in a cubicle anyway," my husband said.
Getting paid to sit at a desk in front of a computer is at least tacit validation that you have some kind of brains. That validation evaporates when the computer you work on experiences the electronic version of PTSD.
So after fumbling around for a while, I decided to give cooking school a try.
