Necessity

I had this good idea for a post. Like, a really, really good idea. But I didn’t, because I needed to talk about this instead. This feels more necessary.

This isn’t a bragging moment, or even a “humble-bragging” moment, but in my line of work, I tend to work near really hot things. The only exact measurement I know is the oven, which frequently reaches temperatures of five hundred degrees fahrenheit or more. But I’ve been burned before on the other pieces of hardware. One of our previous cooks burned his arm so badly that he had to be hospitalized.

Of course, there are various protections against this. The most useful, in my experience, has been the dark blue industrial-grade oven mitt we keep in one of the building’s many corners. I used it for everything, from cleaning to transporting hot items to the back to cool down. Really, any time I could come in contact with something dangerously hot, I looked for the oven mitt. So, as you would expect, eventually it became a bit more worn. The thumb was especially frayed, though it still protected just fine in my experience.

Two weeks ago that oven mitt was thrown out. So for two weeks, we operated without an oven mitt. And there were workarounds, sure. “Just use a wet rag,” was a sentence I heard often over the course of these two weeks. Another one was, “We can’t just buy a new mitt because you want one, F. It’s not necessary.”

I never got burned, but I came close a few times.

Recently, our restaurant had its quarterly inspection. I wasn’t personally there for it, but the results were a very good ninety-two percent. I noticed this written on a whiteboard somewhere, and asked if some of the points off were because we didn’t have a necessary piece of equipment. The answer was no.

Two days later, we had a new oven mitt, and I feel like I’m the only one that noticed.

-F