Your briefly lasting lunch hour
You can see it fading fast
As you rush into the bathroom
The hallway seems so vast
You wouldn't eat that again
If they promised, "It's free, Ma'am."
The things they think are tasty
I can't understand
Are you kneelin' in the john
Throwin' up the whole time
Are you barfing like your peers
Have you had enough this time
They've been tellin' us they're chefs
Like we are seventeen
In all the time we've known them
They've always been this mean
The new sunflower butter
Didn't turn out like they planned
The things they think are tasty
I can't understand
Are you kneelin' in the john
Throwin' up the whole time
Are you barfing like your peers
Have you had enough this time
We spend a lot of money
And get little time to dine
Those moldy meat hamburgers
Are still etched upon my mind
Of all the things we've ingested
I'm shocked we're still alive
The things they think are tasty
I can't understand
Are you kneelin' in the john
Throwin' up the whole time
Are you barfing like your peers
Have you had enough this time
No. I did not eat the school lunch. Are you crazy? I swore off those long ago. The precipitating incident was the promise of chocolate cake on the menu. But when I got through the line, there was no chocolate cake! Is that any way to run an in-the-red business? I think not.
I don't even venture in for a grilled cheese anymore. The food is not pleasing to the eye, nor the palate. I'll be darned if I'm going to throw away $1.80 on a meal! We can't even have the peanut-butter-and-Karo-syrup sandwiches on chili day now. Not for the last three years. I wash my hands of them. The school lunch department.
Earlier this week, we had "Teriyaki Chicken." You know what folks were expecting. Those plump breaded blobs of breading that were served the last time we had Teriyaki Chicken. But no. It was a tray rectangle filled with some slivers of dark meat chicken floating in a bath of brown water. And three teachers ate it! I think they're jonesin' for an award at the end of the year. Or workers' compensation. Nobody actually ran to the bathroom, but something tells me that chicken was trying to peck its way out of their large intestines by 1:00 o'clock.
As one ingester said, "You'd think maybe they could have thrown in a little bed of rice or something to soak up that liquid."
Nah. That might have been too many carbs, what with the little powdered donuts and the Pop Tart and the chocolate milk they served the kids at breakfast. You'd think we were training marathoners.
The last sentence of the third-to-last paragraph made me laugh out loud.
ReplyDeleteOUR school lunch is $1.90, but occasionally, it's decent. Perhaps you'd like me to send you a care package from our cafeteria?
Or, when I come to your book signing, I could bring you a cooler full of some of our tastier fare...
Reelin' in the rears....ewwww!
ReplyDeleteSioux,
ReplyDeleteThat's a standing joke at the Newmentia teachers' lunch table. A colleague no longer with us (no, he's not dead, a victim of years of school lunches--he's just retired) started it.
The story goes that he dared give a "C" to the lunch lady's daughter at midterm, and from that day forward, he was repaid on his lunch trays. For instance, the chicken nuggets that were charred to the pan were set aside until he came through. He watched the lunch lady reach back to A SEPARATE PAN for his allotment. I saw them with my own eyes. He could knock them on the plastic tray like so many rocks from a gravel parking lot.
One day after a nugget-fest, he informed us: "By 1:00, those chicken beaks were trying to peck their way out of my large intestine."
There will be no need to spend that King's Ransom on cafeteria food for my benefit.
*****
knancy,
Yeah. That just about describes the situation. It would have made a good title.