breaking bertha

In the antarctican galley and maybe in antarctica in general, there are pet names for everything. The ice cream machine is named frosty boy, the pot room sanitizer is named slim and the dish machine, where you run all the dishes after washing them, is named bertha.

There are several DA's (dining assistants or lunch ladies as I like to call us) that are assigned to different tasks throughout the day. My last task of the day yesterday was the dish room behind bertha. My friends, Lesley and Metro, where spraying down dishes in the front of bertha and Me and my buddy Chris where catching the dishes in the back of Bertha and putting them away, including the silverware. We have to put silverware in these small white holey buckets on a rack and bring them through bertha three times. it is the responsibility of those in the back of Bertha to do the sorting. Anyways, I was bringing up knives for their last run through bertha and there was a lot going on up front. Lesley took the rack from me and all the knives fell and one of them landed in the gear of bertha and got all kinds of stuck. Apparently, I had used the wrong rack to put the holey buckets in. We stopped the machine and I realized that I killed Bertha. We got a lead lunch lady, we had to call special forces, and the dishes just kept stacking up. While we were diagnosing the problem, my eyes started welling up with tears and i quickly went to the bathroom. At that moment, I realized I probably killed Bertha and would get fired...in the next moment I realized that it was too expensive to fire me so I was stuck here in antarctica being a lunch lady (which made me cry harder)...and then I thought I could quit and work at a domestic violence shelter in Auckland, NZ. My old supervisor has a friend that is a director of a Domestic Violence agency in Auckland and I thought that if worse comes to worse i can beg my old supervisor to beg her friend to hire me. Lucas could stay in Antarctica and we'd meet up when it was over...This was comforting to me...I splashed water on my face and opened the door. In the hallway was Lesley who could tell I was crying. She came over and gave me a hug and I told her my plan and she said that I was supposed to be here (in antarctica) -- Anyways, after waiting with baited breath, bertha got fixed. A few of us stayed later and knocked out all the dishes...I went home (back to my dorm) and told my friend, Kendra, who was sick and missed all of it...she could tell that I was upset and asked me what was wrong... very seriously I told her that I killed Bertha and she started laughing hysterically. Her laughter attracted, Eli, and DA from last year that
made light of the situation, too... Anyways, I can tell I'm still decompressing from my old job...and that I miss being a social worker...and that all the change of the last few months is catching up with me. Lucas is amazing as always. Solid and sweet and happy. He's so present with his life; always accepting the "what is" of a situation and being okay with it. It's really great and grounding.
I am going to nurture my fragile sense of happiness; knowing that I will be doing what I love (social work) for the rest of my life if I want to --and if it took being a lunch lady in antarctica to bring the point home, then so be it. Love and miss all of you...alex