Introduction:
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. Before we begin this episode, I’d like to thank a number of people who have helped to make this podcast possible.
I’d like to thank, Jaclyn Barber. And my dear friends Laura Kreger and Cassie Gutierrez.
As my wife, Jaclyn puts up with so much. But specifically, Jaclyn reads through pretty much all of these transcripts. And if that weren’t enough of a punishment, she also listens to the podcasts after they’re recorded and edited.
Laura Kreger was kind enough to edit my book, Luck Favors the Prepared, and she’s helped out with a number of these podcasts as well.
And Cassie Gutierrez was kind enough to read though the transcript of this episode to check for factual consistencies and to ensure I wasn’t talking out my ass.
I am so lucky to know people who will take the time to sit and actually read something I wrote and provide feedback and suggestions. I am even more lucky that their feedback and suggestions are savvy and make sense.
I want to thank them all, from the bottom of my heart, for taking the time to help me out with these projects. For their kind attention, unique perspective, and honest feedback, they make my writing better. Also, they share the blame, which is unfortunate. We could say, this podcast is like 86% their fault.
So it goes.
Thank you Jaclyn, Laura, and Cassie for taking the time to read these awful stories, for your generosity and honesty.
Additionally, I would like to give a big big work-appropriate hug to the many people who shared these episodes on social media. Thank you so much for helping to spread this awful gospel. It means the world to me you’d share this podcast with your friends and family. Thank you. Thank you.
This week’s episode is titled “The Great Gourmet Cheese Grab.” It is about cheese, of course. But also, temporary insanity. Thank you for listening, I hope you enjoy.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Don’t Remember Me Like This. As always, if you liked this episode, feel free to share it on your social media platforms. But until then please, don’t remember me like this.
The Great Gourmet Cheese Grab
It was early in the morning, around 5:30 when the storm hit. In the bakery, I’d just loaded the morning bake of pastries, sweet rolls, muffins, and cookies into the great, roaring-hot ovens when the power went out and suddenly everything was dark and eerily quiet. The only sound was the low rumble of the howling storm outside.
On a regular morning, I’d be throwing myself into the morning mix—kneading and shaping a large wad of dough into a variety of vegetable rolls and garlic-pesto pinwheels. But without power I could barely see my hand in front of my face, let alone fumble around the bakery enough to perform the delicate choreography of rolling out, cutting up, and baking the morning mix.
Instinctively, my coworkers—all the employees from prep-foods, produce, meat, and other departments—and I gathered at the front of the store. Our opening manager was standing quietly by the large automatic doors, not saying anything, his face underlit by his phone. Through the automatic doors behind him, we could see the wild storm raging outside. Wind and rain was pounding down. Branches and cattle were tumbling across the parking lot.
Aside from the faint rumble of the incredible storm, the quiet store was creepy without the constant cacophony of buzzing lights and the thrumming HVAC and refrigeration systems. Only the emergency flood lights were on. The power outage had turned our grocery store into a deep quiet cave.
It felt exciting and dangerous. Like the beginning of a zombie movie. And there are worse places to begin an apocalypse than a fully stocked, high-end grocery store.
The crowd of coworkers gathered around the opening manager who was still buried in his phone. We were waiting for him to say something. Finally he announced what we already knew, “The power is out.” He said affirmatively. “The registers are down so we can’t sell anything. And the morning rush of customers is on the way.”
Our manager went on to explain, even though the store had no power and we’d be unable to do business, customers were still going to come to the store anyway. The inevitability of customers seemed to imply the regular morning shoppers would still arrive if the store was engulfed in flames and probably wouldn’t even notice as long as they got friendly and prompt service, stocked shelves, and rapid check-outs.
Regardless of how we felt about the behavior of our customers, it was our job to find a way to make them happy, somehow.
Our manager reminded us, “Remember,” he said. “This is a huge inconvenience for us. But this is an even bigger inconvenience for our customers! Remember,” he said. “This is our chance to shine!”
A skeptical murmur spread through the groggy crowd. What many of us heard was, “This is my chance to shine,” since our manager was openly gunning for a promotion from shift manager to become manager of his own store in the district: a notoriously treacherous career path that made normal adults do and say outlandish and cartoonishly unseemly things in attempt to garner the attention and favor of the district decisionmakers.
Having laid down the context of the situation, and painting a vivid picture of the swarming hordes that were slowly but inevitably groaning their way towards our holdout in the storm, he clapped his hands together to wake us up. He looked to us now for direction, barking encouragingly, “Come on team! Whose got ideas?!”
The staff looked around, or down at their feet, squirming in the new and uncomfortable silence of the store.
He continued, “What about the bakery?”
I snapped to attention and said, “What about it?”
He said, “Where are we with the morning bake-off?”
“On schedule,” I said confidently. Actually, I was ahead of schedule (but you never tell a manager that you’re ahead of schedule). And the ovens were gas so I’d be able to finish the bake-off with no problem.
“But,” I shrugged, “if we can’t sell anything…”
Somehow it was decided, as a consolation for the disruption to the unflappable routine of the morning crowd, we’d offer free pastries and rolls and breads and cookies and coffee. We’d have to throw it all out anyway so for some reason it made sense to give it away for free as a good show of good faith—accompanied with an exceedingly diplomatic reminder that this mishap was an unavoidable act of nature.
As we were dismissed, I met the eyes of several of my coworkers who, like me, seemed conspicuously unsure if this was the wisest course of action. In what zombie movie do the holdouts hospitably open the doors to their bunker and willingly, apologetically even, allow the monsters inside?!
I borrowed the headlight from the handlebars of my bike and, in the dim light, set about finishing the morning bake.
The pastries and cookies were browning luxuriously. The cinnamon buns and pecan rolls were puffed light as air with crispy, sticky crusts steaming sweetly. When sufficiently cooled I set about adding the final decorative touches to each delicacy. The chocolate croissants were topped with an elegant drizzle of ganache. The almond croissants got a powder-puff of confectioner’s sugar. I took care to arrange the fresh-baked bounty neatly on several trays. I was just loading the last tray into our pastry case when the first wave of pissed-off and entitled shoppers descended on the bakery.
Like the smell of blood in the air, it hadn’t taken long for word to spread that everything in the bakery was free. The hungry crowd passed over us like a plague of locusts, greedily helping themselves to two or three pastries each.
I barely made it out of there with my shirt!
In short order, we were overrun. The shelves in the pastry case—which at that hour were usually brimming with warm fresh-baked goods—had nothing left but a pile of spinning crumbs and a single row of unbothered snickerdoodles.
There was no word as to when the city would return our power. Still the people kept coming, throwing themselves against the bakery in a frenzy. When confronted with the empty pastry case, a couple peered around the corner to inquire, “Excuse me," they said, unsuccessfully trying to conceal their panic. "Where are all the free pastries?”
“We’re out.” I said flatly, implying that customer service was above my pay grade.
“Oh man,” said the man. “You mean you’re all out?”
I asked the obvious, “Is there anything in the pastry case?”
He said, “Just some snicker—”
“Then we’re out.”
“I’m sorry,” the man pressed again. “You don’t happen to have anything left there? In the back? We can wait if there’s more coming out?”
Grocery stores are a grotesque carnival of anthropology. Over the years working in a grocery store, I’d learned a great deal about the darkest threads of human behavior. One of the most surprising things I’d learned was the old “3-ask.” When an item ran out of stock, a customer might make an initial inquiry: “I notice this item is out of stock?” to which I’d apologize and confess that indeed, we were fresh out of the item. Then, curiously the 3-asker would ask a second time. “You don’t have any of the thing?” And again, I’d demure.
A common 3-ask could be rounded out by a variety of superfluous questions that ranged from, “Do you have any more in the stock room?” or, “Do you know when the item will be back in stock?” or, even, “You really don’t have any in stock?” and so on. As if asking a third time was the secret code that magically unlocked a top-secret, members-only stockroom in the back of the store.
Normally, I’d suffer a standard 3-ask with courtesy and a smile and by clenching a razor blade in my pocket. But this morning, the couple was pestering me—when they were the ones who came to a grocery store that had no power, when they were the ones who were miffed we were out of freebies—and that I could not abide. That was over the line. Literally, they were standing over the line at the coffee bar. A line that was a clear demarcation between the customer-facing storefront and the employees-only entrance to the bakery and other profanity-friendly retreats.
I pointed at the line and said unambiguously, “No customers past the line. It’s for your safety.”
Before they could demand to speak with my manager, I suggested that if they really wanted a free pastry, maybe they could go ask someone who got here before them and had greedily grabbed two or three items. They shouldn’t be hard to find, I said. I pointed out the storefront to the parking lot and guessed, “There's probably some still out there, eating. Just look for the cars with the steamed-up windows.”
The oven had cooled to warm. With the morning bake devoured, there was nothing more to do but clean up and arrange the bake-off for the next day.
Restocking the next day’s bake-off meant a trip to the walk-in freezer in the back. With the power out, inside the freezer was pitch black and spookily silent, the frozen metal racks groaned and creaked to fluctuations in the sub zero cold, and ice snapped, crackling underfoot.
Entering and exiting the freezer took a bit of choreography. Clenching the bike light in my teeth, I held the door open long enough to push through a cart full of boxes but quickly enough the frozen air didn’t come gushing out of the large freezers.
Outside the freezer in the back stockroom, as I ticked the boxes of pastries, cookies, and muffin batter off my checklist, I couldn’t help but overhear a debate between the opening manager, the manager for the cheese department and a scatter of other employees urgently trying to hammer out a plan of action.
From what I could gather, all of the cheese in the specialty department, which was stored in recessed grab-and-go cases, was in trouble. Even without their refrigerators running, the product was secure in a bath of cooled air. They’d been banking on that bath of low-lying air to last long enough for the power to be restored. As an extra measure, the cheese cases were covered with the heavy insulating overnight blankets to keep in the cold.
But the power had been out for over 6 hours now and the cheese was all beginning to warm.
They were taking regular temperature readings with a laser thermometer, so as not to shoo away the cool air or disturb the insulating blankets. But some of the readings were beginning to creep above 41 degrees. And then warmer. And warmer still.
On one hand, there was a helluva lot of cheese in those cases. And none of it was cheap. While the increasingly urgent situation in the cheese refrigerators posed a legitimate food safety conundrum, there was also a clear argument for waiting and seeing what to do. On the other hand, Americans are a scandalously litigious bunch. If any customers were to suspect they got so much as a whiff of hot flashes from cheese that’d lived through a power outage then everybody would lawyer up, and nobody wanted that.
We’d made it until eleven o’clock when we got the official news that the power was out indefinitely. The power company said it could be hours or even a day until power was restored. Not only was it a liability to have several employees trying their best to go about their daily routine in patently unsafe conditions. But the customers were starting to act funny.
As I was returning to the bakery with the cart of frozen stock, a customer stopped me in the bread aisle. She held up a bag of bread. It was just a normal loaf of bread from a shelf of shelf-stable bread. She asked me, “Can I take this? Is this free because the power is out?”
There it is, I thought. It was inevitable, but still I was surprised it had taken this long for the customers to begin displaying the first looty quirks of anarchy. They were already acting as if the End Days were upon us.
It wasn't just me who was alarmed by the increasingly frantic behavior of the customers. The employees who'd been grumbling about why they’d been allowed in the store in the first place became less grumbly, and more vocally argumentative.
Thankfully, finally, the opening manager came to his senses. He sidled up to me, really casual like, as if to avoid raising suspicion. "Alright," he said, almost whispering. "Things are getting weird. It's time to usher the customers out of the store immediately."
"Yeah," I said, "You think so?!"
That went for the employees as well. We were instructed to wrap up as quickly as possible and go home.
I was only half through the setup for the next morning’s bake-off. But I gathered and broke down the empty cardboard boxes, stacking them on a cart to take out back to the recycling. I swept the bakery and wrapped up the garbage and the compost and piled those bags on top of the cardboard, wheeling the whole precariously-stacked arrangement to the back of the store, to the dumpster dock.
At the dumpster dock outside, the storm had evaporated and the sun was out. The garbage dock was swirling with the sweet rot of old fruit and warm garbage. I shouldered the trash bags into the trash dumpster. The compost bag, which was always heavy, I hoisted the best I could with only one hand while I held open the lid of the compost dumpster with the other. The moment I opened the compost dumpster the smell punched me in the face: cheese. Cheese from all over the world cheese, delicious cheese, expensive cheese, and lots of it.
I threw open the lid to the compost dumpster and discovered it was brimming with cheese. It looked like the entire cheese department was in the dumpster, aside from the American slices.
With the help of a step stool it was easy to jump into the bin and, waist deep in cheese, rummage through the contents.
There were whole crates of cheese! Fancy bries in their own fancy balsa wood container with a fancy brand burned into the side. There was a black truffle camembert. Boxes of organic staples: swiss, cheddar, colby, jack, you name it. There were wheels of smoked gouda. Blocks of ten-year white Irish cheddar. Sharp wedges of parmesan. Mozzarella di Bufala and roquefort! Bleu, feta and something called Comte. There were soft cheeses, stinky cheeses, hard cheeses, old cheeses, Christ, the pile was immense. It just went on and on. For each incredible cheese I moved or set aside revealed another astonishing find underneath. Right there for the taking!
It’s safe to say I just, kind of, lost my mind a little.
There was nobody around. Everything in the compost bin was officially garbage, destined for a giant compost bin somewhere. I wondered, can you even compost cheese? I didn’t think so. Someone needed to do something, right away. Yes, that’d be my excuse: someone had thrown all this cheese into the compost bin and I was doing the extra chore of pulling it all out of the compost bin, brushing off their packages and bagging them to be thrown in the trash.
Or, if someone asked, that’s where I’d say it was going.
But nobody came out to the garbage dock. So, I was left to work alone in the compost bin where I filled three or four jumbo garbage bags with every sort of cheese you could imagine. I honestly didn’t know where to stop. I jumped out of the dumpster, brushed myself off, and threw the last bulging bag over the back fence to the bushes between the fence and the sidewalk on the other side.
I confidently pushed my cart through the store, casually wishing my coworkers a nice early off their shift. With the bakery closed and set as best I could for the next day, I changed to my bike clothes and rode around to the back of the store. Behind the store, I feigned bike trouble. I stopped by the trash bags full of cheese in the bushes. From the side, I could see the bushes were thick, and if I looked hard, I could see the bags, but only if I was looking for them, and looking closely.
On the other side of the street was a dense row of houses, all looking out at me where I was loitering, fiddling suspiciously with my bike. The sun was shining and it was a clear day. I could not retrieve the bags in plain daylight, not in front of all these houses. Someone was sure to blow their top watching some bicyclist rummaging around the bushes across the street from their house, and pulling out large heavy garbage bags.
And that was another problem—the bags. My little single speed bike was zippy and fast, but had no racks. And my shoulder bag was full to capacity with expired bread and pastries. The almost four mile ride home would be impossible with even one of the bags over my shoulder.
So I left the bags to bake in the warm shade along this sidewalk.
Later at night, I returned with a sturdier bike (I didn’t have a car) and a much bigger backpack.
To transport the whole loot took three rides to the cheezy jackpot in the bushes and then back home again. As luck would have it, I had a huge spare refrigerator in my creepy garage. Previously, I was kind of miffed that the former owners had left it behind. It was such a nuisance, taking up so much space in a small garage. But now, suddenly, it had become so very useful. And so very full of cheese.
Again, it was a gigantic refrigerator with much capacity. And still, I’d managed to pack the thing full to brimming. But there’s something about a refrigerator packed with that much cheese. Especially cheese that’d had such a rough journey after that fateful power outage and many hours just baking in the sun—the smell. It was both overwhelming and noxious, a beacon for all the woodland creatures of North Portland.
It didn’t take long to realize I’d really dug myself into a corner with all this product.
There was no way I could (or should) try to consume it all myself. That was obvious. I mean, I knew there’d be some extra cheese in my future. But that’s not why I took it all. I never had designs on trying to down it all myself and become the first documented cheese-induced suicide. Rather, my plan, even if it was impromptu, was to give it all away. Cheese is a huge staple. Lots of people love cheese. Just imagine how many people would be just blown away by a gift of free cheese. At least, that was part of the fever dream I suffered while in the compost dumpster, frantically bagging up garbage.
Sometimes, you’re called to act. No matter the reasoning, the opportunity appears. And those who know reach out and grab that opportunity. They take it, and work out the reasoning later.
My first attempts to give away the cheese were as clunky and cringy as you’d imagine anonymously brightening people’s lives with sudden cheese would be.
I brought a bag with, what I thought was a delightful selection of cheeses, to my other job. I arranged the cheese into an attractive pile on a platter and left the platter in the breakroom fridge. I put a note on the platter: “Free! Enjoy!” Someone took the brie right away. But perhaps for obvious reasons, nobody else even went near any of the other cheeses. It only took two days until the breakroom was thoroughly repellant with the oppressive reek of cheese. Hostile notes threatening to involve HR began appearing on the platter in the fridge.
Heartbroken—and reeling from the first effects of a diet that’d taken a sudden turn to almost exclusively dairy—I threw out the cheese from the breakroom refrigerator. And I never throw away food.
Back home, the garage refrigerator was rapidly becoming an urgent situation. There were signs around the garage, scat, tracks and scratches on the garage door, that wildlife traffic had picked up considerably. I decided to pick up the pace cheese-bombing the Kenton and Arbor Lodge neighborhoods.
I dropped off a load at the local bike shop. I needed to pick up tubes anyway. And as I was wrapping up my purchase I said to the clerk, “Oh hey, do you guys want some free cheese?”
And he was like, “Are you high? Of course we want free cheese!”
They took it all! They even sent one of the newer mechanics to New Seasons to get some crackers and olives. Unfortunately, however, this made me the shop’s “cheese guy.” Whenever I dropped by the bike shop for this or that it was, “Hey! It’s the cheese guy!”
I took a load of cheese to the tool library. I gave a wedge to the friendly guy in the Lowes hardware department. All my friends and neighbors got free cheese. I dropped off a bag at the library. I took another bag to the liquor store across the street from the library.
The liquor store had no bike racks, so I brought my bike—a chunky Schwinn Typhoon with a large basket in the front—inside with me. After buying a plastic handle of vodka, I casually suggested they could use some free cheese.
I was getting used to the ride, and was becoming sloppy in my delivery.
“What?” said the clerk.
“I thought you guys might want some free cheese?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I heard you the first time. But what are you talking about?”
Like an insane person that doesn’t know they are acting crazy, I opened my shoulder bag to show him the cheese.
“No,” he said, almost shouting. “No, we don't want that shit, or your bike, in here.”
The liquor store was busy, and since the clerk had raised his voice, all eyes were on me, holding open my bag of cheese like a sociopath. I closed my bag and, as quickly and quietly as possible, steered my bike to the door. But there was trouble at the door. I could hold the door open and steer my bike outside if it was just me, but there was a crowd of people trying to get inside and there was an awkward dance this way and that as I tried to push my bike outside.
Graciously, a woman held the door open for me. As I barely squeezed past her, she was noticing the plastic handle of vodka in my bike basket. She looked up at me and snapped her fingers. She said, “Mm-hm. Fleischmann's. You gonna need a mixer for that shit!”
I asked her, “You want some cheese?”