'Toast Girl' an important part of a healthy breakfast
Published Saturday September 6th, 2008
It's a bird! It's a plane!
No! It's Toast Girl!
She has butter-knives for fingers! She sports a hefty utility belt round her waist, each pouch filled with an assortment of miniature packs of peanut butter, cheez-wiz, and various flavours of jam!
She wears a paper-towel cape (handy when the rare spill or splatter occurs).
Adults respect her, children love her, and toasters fear her!
So who is this noble new super-hero of whom I speak, who selflessly prepares toast for the good citizens of Moncton with her awe-inspiring toast-making abilities, whose blindingly awesome powers attract customers from all over the country and beyond, whose has a vast population of followers but none who can ever aspire to her supernatural abilities?
Well, OK, back to reality.
Picture a slightly less brilliant version of the renowned crime-fighter described above; no butter-knife-fingers, cool condiment belt, or absorbent cape.Instead, imagine an ordinary teenaged girl with very un-metallic fingers and a grimy, white apron slung around her neck. Oh yeah, and nix the millions of devoted, teary-eyed fanatics kissing her feet, not to mention the whole attracting-customers-from-all-over-the-world thing.
Toast Girl earns minimum wage in the hot, stuffy kitchen of Hynes Family Restaurant, where your super-hero recently learned that some restaurants are so busy they actually need people on the morning shift who do nothing but make make breakfast toast in the morning.
Toast Girl is just the persona I like to slip into as I monotonously pop slice after slice of toast for three hours straight.
It gets to be a little boring, and pretending I'm an honourable toast-making diva makes the hands on the clock slide by a little quicker.
At the end of my shift, the only thing I really leave with is an outfit sprinkled in crumbs, and the promise of a heightened pay-cheque at the week's close.
One of the best things I've learned about working at Hynes this summer is that you get rewarded for hard work with more than just a pay cheque. After paying my dues as a bus-girl and a dishwasher, I was offered a promotion to toast-maker, which actually pays a little more. There's a price to be paid for ambition, though.
The first 15 minutes of my first shift as Toast Girl Extraordinaire can only be described as nightmarish.
"Eight whole-wheat, six white, two un-cut, and four multi-grain, three of them dry . . . and a raisin bagel, extra dark!," were the first words I heard.
The head-chef read off a little slip of grease-stained paper brought in by one of the waitresses.
The waitress beside me must have noticed the stricken expression on my face, because she proceeded to direct me to where the bread, condiments, and utensils could be found.
She showed me where they kept the tubs of butter in the fridge, if I ran out. She pointed out the five different kinds of bread I would be using. I made a mental note to memorise where each type was situated, to avoid potential freak-outs from the customers when they discovered that they'd been served regular white bread, not the enriched white bread they'd requested.
What a nightmare that would be.
The waitress also introduced me to the blue bag where I would throw the slices that I'd accidentally burnt, a companion I would get to know very well over the course of my first shift.
And then she left me alone with the toasters.
They tried to intimidate me but I was too strong for that. I took my father's advice and proceeded to tell them who was boss. After pathetically struggling with the monstrous assignment I'd been given, I eventually got the hang of it.
Hey, I ended up accidentally preparing four pairs of toast that had never been ordered that ended up being blatantly ignored and shoved to the back of the rack for the next three hours, but that was probably my biggest mistake over the course of my entire shift! That is, aside from the whole burning-episode, where I burned about five pairs of toast in the time-span of five minutes.
But aside from those, and maybe a few other blunders, I think I turned out to be a pretty competent Toast Girl, a feat I hold close to my heart. I may not have butter-knives in place of my fingers, and I may not have millions of worshippers bowing to my toast-making abilities, but hey, someone needs to make the toast, and that's me.
Even though I'm not the toast-making version of Wonder Woman, I still think it's cool to be able to tell people that I've made toast professionally.
That's not something everyone can lay claim to.
* Tess Allen, a 15-year-old Grade 10 student at Moncton High School, is Editor of the Whatever section.
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