Chowder

[fbhjr]

When I was in school getting my engineering degree, I worked a lot of different jobs to make money. Most of them involved the food industry as they were fairly common jobs that had flexible hours.

For several years I worked at the campus food center in the dish room. Not a glamour job, but it made me money and gave me a free meal before each shift. When I was 18, I needed that.

The food service was notoriously cheap. Something made for dinner one night would have the leftovers show up again the next lunch and the day after be some sort of soup or chowder.
So one cold winter night some three day old corn had been made into chowder. This corn had been two previous meals, and all the students knew that. So, very little of it was eaten and at the end of the evening there was 4 or 5 liters of uneaten hot chowder still in the pot.

As part of my job cleaning up after dinner, I had to take the hot soup and throw it away. As it was now several days since the ingredients were cooked, this was wasteful, but for the best.
I picked up the large pot of it and started heading towards the dish room where I could throw it away.
I did not realize that the power cord for it had fallen to the floor and was trailing behind me.
Just before I reached the dish room, the cord caught on something and brought the pot to a stop. As I was walking forward with it, this made it tip over and all the hot soup pour out.
I had just been taking a step forward at the time, so the entire contents of the pot poured into my right boot.

It was very painful.

As it was winter I ran outside and put my foot in the snow. But, the boot was on tight and now full of almost boiling soup. So, it was very hard to get the boot off without burning my hands too.
Eventually I did.

As it had been winter and I was wearing boots, a lot of the chowder was caught in my boot and a lot of my foot and ankle burned.
It was an interesting burn to see as the different items in the chowder had been at different temperatures and burned me a different amount.
The scars on my foot show where the corn kernels in the chowder were as they were slightly cooler than the liquid and burnt less.

I’ve had a lot happen to that foot. I’ve broken toes, broken the ankle, twisted it and all sorts of other things.
None of that was a painful as this burn.
And, it continued to be painful. It was the only time in my life I used crutches as to even flex the skin while it healed was very painful.

It’s been a bit more than 30 years since that happened. But, as I was writing this I pulled down my sock and could still see little marks in the shape of corn kernels. They are a bit more distorted now due to all the other things that have gone on with my ankles.
But, I’m not going to forget that chowder any time soon.