Beef in ice cream: still unpopular
I used to work at this ice cream store that was owned by a crotchety old guy named Mr. P. Mr P’s real name was Ted Pardel, but that’s not how the mailman knew him.
The subscription to Out magazine was addressed to Theodore L. Douchebag, which according to the person who ordered it for him is Bulgarian and is pronounced “dow-CHEB-egg.”
Bound & Gagged came to Theodore L. Ballsack.
And the regular issues of Black Inches were delivered to Theodore L. “KOH-soo-KAY” – a French name with a proud heritage, spelled “Cocksucker.”
“What the hell is this?” he’d grumble, then march out to the dumpster. And then my friend Chuck would lock him outside.
Mr. P was famous for being an ass. For real. He opened an ice cream store, yet didn’t like kids. He certainly didn’t like the teenagers that he employed, which was probably fair turnabout anyway because most of said teens robbed him blind and used to experiment with his food instead of serving it to customers.
Case study: If you microwave a hot dog for a very long time, it will blacken and the skin will wrinkle into a tough leather. We called these “leather dogs.”
Further exploration: If you microwave a leather dog beyond the leather stage, it will eventually catch on fire and explode. Mr. P will not be pleased with the aftermath. So the only thing you can do is to scrape the detritus into a sundae cup, cover it with soft-serve, and put it in the freezer as a Mistake.
You see, out front, Mr. P had a sign that read, “Mistakes half price!” This was supposed to mean that when a customer ordered a Turtle sundae without caramel but the employee accidentally added caramel, a later customer could buy that incorrect Turtle for $1.25 instead of $2.50. What it actually meant was that Mr. P’s shop hosted a kind of cruel and inhumane Freezer of Doctor Moreau – where buying a mistake was a breed of Russian roulette.
A customer came to the window, angry that she had found bits of aged hot dog in the Mistake she had purchased. Luckily, Chuck knew how to respond to this complaint.
“Yes, putting burnt hot dog in a sundae was indeed a mistake,” he’d say.
Other mistakes: Barbecued beef whipped with soft-serve to make a BBQ Cyclone. Slushies made with ketchup. Sundaes with bread in the middle.
“Yes, I understand. The customer who ordered it didn’t like it either,” Chuck said when a woman brought back a Mistake shake filled with mustard. “It was clearly an error on our part.”
To serve a soft-serve ice cream cone, you hold the cone under the dispenser as the ice cream is coming out and make a small circle with the cone hand, lowering as the cone gets taller. This creates the swirl effect. If you do this with a large-sized cone, the diameter of the swirl is large enough that until you top the cone, there is actually a large hole down through the center of the ice cream. Chuck would sometimes slide a hot dog down into this void and then top the cone, then set the cone in a sundae cup and put it in with the Mistakes.
A woman came to the window shortly thereafter and asked what Mistakes we had. Mr. P showed her a few sundaes and a large vanilla cone. She chose the cone and was back shortly afterward. This time Chuck waited on her.
“There’s a hot dog in here!” she said.
Chuck peered over the counter and inspected the pink interloper amidst the white ice cream. “Yes, looks like it,” he said.
“Well, what the hell?”
“Ma’am,” he said, “there is a hot dog in that ice cream cone. That is clearly a Mistake. Had that cone been made properly, there would be no hot dog in it.”
You learn things when you work around ice cream for long enough. For one thing, you learn that a large cone can generally be sixteen inches tall before the lower swirls are no longer able to support its weight and it topples, then skates under the Slushie machine. Whipped cream, being lighter, appears to have no such limit as long as the base is wide enough.
Case study: A lady at the drive-thru asks for extra whipped cream.
“Extra?” you say, “or EXTRA?”
If the customer replies with an enthusiastic “EXTRA!” then congratulations, you’ve just been given a license to steal.
From an assembler’s standpoint, you can easily make the whipped cream on top of a sundae exceed the height of a standard car window. The customer will generally try to tip the sundae into his car and drop most of the whipped cream onto the pavement, but every once in a while someone simply hauls it into the car, knocking the cap off and into his lap.
Customers pulled away from the drive-thru very hesitantly, balancing giant cones or sundaes. And once they were three feet from the window, Chuck would yell, “WAIT!”
Abrupt stop. Cone goes into windshield.
“You forgot your napkins.”
Mr. P missed most of this. Half the time he had been locked out, and the rest of the time he’d be in the back room watching game shows or fishing shows. The worst thing that could happen during a shift was for Mr. P to come up and work with the crew. Usually, when he did this, he’d eventually throw his apron on the floor and quit. He’d then march out to the corner and stand facing away from the shop with his arms crossed. Cars would honk at him.
And for Mr. P, the worst thing he could do during a shift would be to quit. More leather dogs and outrageous Mistakes occurred during these times than any other. And it was always sad when Mr. P un-quit, having realized that not only did he both own and live at his shop, but that his employees would burn it down if he stayed outside for too long.
Some very few lucky times, Mr. P, Theodore L. Cocksucker, would leave the shop entirely to run errands or to ride his bike. Those times were like paradise. And they probably were for Mr. P too, until his bike was hit by a car. Following that incident, Mr. P, shaken but miraculously unharmed, bought an orange helmet, orange reflective vest, orange tire reflectors, and a giant orange flag on a post for behind the bike’s seat.
Before realizing the identity of this new safety rider, Chuck’s mother saw him riding and noted his keen look.
“Poor man,” she said. “He must be retarded.”
Comments
3 Comments on Beef in ice cream: still unpopular
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Bryan Platz on
Fri, 7th Nov 2008 11:25 pm
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Johnny Truant on
Sat, 8th Nov 2008 7:22 am
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The Economy Isn’t Happening » Blog Archive » Trouble in the Great White North on
Tue, 30th Dec 2008 3:11 pm
I love stories about Mr. P. Please tell me you have more…
Oh yes. I just have to parcel them out slowly. It’s called “marketing.” I read it on a cereal box or something.
[...] sort of know Chet, who I realize now I accidentally called “Chuck” throughout all of this post. You know him because he used to work at Mr. P’s Barn. In fact, the McGovernsons are rather [...]
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