INSPECTOR #5

My first job in the working world consisted of duties at the local neighborhood Pizzeria. I remember slightly fudging the truth about being able to drive a stick shift transmission vehicle in order to land the gig. I knew the theory of how to drive one so how hard could it be? We of course delivered the food so driving was a must, and all of the delivery vehicles were of the stick shift variety.

Imagine if the owner found out that I wasn’t as well skilled in the manual transmission department as I had claimed. Actually he might have laughed himself silly if he had actually known how smooth it went my first time behind the wheel of one of his delivery cars. I tried to put that sucker in reverse to get it out of the back alley where the autos were kept between deliveries. After stalling the thing out about 45 times and reaching a frustration level of a postal worker I finally decided to gun the engine. I finally got it moving, backward. It seemed like I went about 45 miles per hour for about a second and a half. That’s when I sent the huge Pizzeria dumpster rolling across the alley after hitting it like a missile fired by Wrong way Corrigan.

After the cheers from my coworkers died down I finally got it out of there to deliver my now cold pizza order. That first delivery took me about an hour
and it was only six blocks away! Of course first I put the wobbling dumpster back in its place. Because we had so much business I must have gone out on 30 deliveries that night. During the course of my duties I proceeded to learn how to actually drive a stick shift in that one evening. Theory is NOT stronger than reality!

One of my other favorite memories of that period was the added responsibility whether it was mopping the floors at closing time, waiting on customers, or sneaking up behind flies on the table where we mixed up the pizza sauce. If you were good at it you could catch them off guard. We’d snatch the flies between our hands thus proving our quickness. By the way I never did eat there and I don’t like meat sauce too much!

Another recollection was of writing dire help notes on the inside tops of pizza boxes that were being delivered. “Help I’m being held captive in the pizza factory and forced to squash tomatoes for sauce and milk cows to make cheese all day and night. Please send help” was such a typical message.

It was amusing to us young workers. I often wondered what the person receiving the delivery thought of such jocularity. No one ever called or sent in the swat team. I could just imagine being led out in cuffs from the store with
two Arnold Schwarzenegger looking dudes as escorts for such pranks. “Naught Fawnee” one of them would say in his best Terminator accent.

Either Pizza consumers care about slave labor in their pizza factories as much as Kathy Lee Gifford or they must be so anxious to get their famished lips on the pies that they don’t even notice the notes. Of the ones that did notice I’m sure someone must have wondered about it.

Much in that same vein I have often opened up my new stereo box, dress shirt packaging, or some other freshly purchased store item and fount a little calling card. The tag carefully placed within always says something like “Inspected by #5.”

What exactly is being inspected? In a case of a product with multiple little parts inside for instance where you have to put your kid’s bike together it must be a nightmare of a job. In those kinds of parcels nothing is marked very well and every size screw looks like the next except there is really a one sixteenth inch difference between the smaller and the larger ones. In addition the guys drawing the direction booklet have the graphic dexterity of a 3 year old. It is a good bet that #5 is the guy who makes sure you get the right parts and that you get all of them. He’s the worker that gets the blame when you come to the end of the project and you can’t put the seat on the damn thing because you were short of that one important bolt. Usually when that happens there is no tag from #5 or anyone else for that matter and there is just a phone number that says “in case of defect call.” It is always either the phone line is disconnected, causes you to wait for three hours for an answer, or is located somewhere in China where you have to dial direct.

When it comes to men’s dress shirts, poor ol’ #5 has to stand there all day making sure that the cardboard is stuffed inside the fabric and that the clear plastic collar is in place not to mention the 14 pins that make the whole package presentable before it goes into the plastic wrapping. Appearance is after all everything in the clothing industry. In the event the removable plastic shirt collar liner is made of white cardboard you can insert it into a black shirt and become a priest. That however is covered in another one of my columns entitled “Impersonate a priest for just the cost of a shirt and go to jail in a stylish Van Heusen.” That however is best left to another time.

How bad is your job? Do you stand around counting or making sure the correct amount of pins are properly placed within the right clothing widget at the right angle? It takes a special kind of person to do that. It takes
A CAPTIVE! I can’t imagine any other reason for being in that line of work. I’d really like to know exactly who #5 is because on more than one occasion that I have found the clever little tag in my pants pockets it’s usually in a pair of pre-washed jeans. Does that mean pre-worn too? That idea makes me wary. I can imagine # 5 might be a homeless person with the hygiene of a laughing hyena!

“Nothing comes between me and my Calvin Klein’s” huh Brooke? What about #5? I can envision the poor captive soul in the blue jeans factory sliding into the Levis and unpinning all of those clasps to don the dress shirt as a clever disguise in an effort to make a break for it before the factory screws catch onto the plan. They blow the whistle summoning the hounds of hell to hunt down #5 in his bid to break free of the garment prison I’m sure he’s trying to escape. Or is the inspection tag just like a joke on the inside of a pizza box? Has my mind run amok and my imagination got the best of me?


Perhaps, but the tag in the pocket of the last pair of pants I bought said “Inspected by number 5, please send help!”

FEAR!

Fear! Even the word scares me! Actually there is a certain amount of healthy fear that each individual must have within them. Without such fear we might just walk off the roof of a 10 story building, cross the street in front of oncoming traffic, or trust our kitty cats too much! In doing research on the subject of phobias I noticed that there are no less than seven terms for the fear of cats? Why so many? I don’t know but any animal that has eyes made of marbles should not be trusted. In fact there are quite a number of fears related to animals. How silly. The only justifiable dread that rings true to me is alektrophobia which is the fear of chickens! Having spent over a decade on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Delaware where the chicken industry is akin to New York’s Wall Street I can tell you about our devious feathered friends.

They turned the famed Frank Purdue from a handsome businessman into someone who actually resembled a chicken! Aside from farm after farm of chickens and their low rise houses there is the ever present fragrance that you can get a whiff of when the wind blows just right. This is a phenomenon no matter how far you live from the offending birds. It’s sort of a skunk cologne meets polecat perfume! While most areas have an official state bird, flower, song etcetera, the Eastern Shore of Mid Atlantic States has an unofficial smell all its own and it’s fowl alright. The foul stench of chicken!

Sure chickens look stupid enough especially after falling off the truck on its way to the factory. The dislodged poultry wobble down the road yelling “hey wait for me!” You haven’t got a clue about hen deceptiveness however, until you step into a chicken house amidst all of the squawking and they all quiet their clucking at the same time and look at you as if to say “what?” Their beedy eyes focus upon you in a show of silence when you know perfectly well that they are up to some sort of planning. They look at you as if to say “We weren’t talking about regrouping this evening while you and Mrs. Farmer are sleeping. We’re not going to sneak into your house and shred your grandmother’s family heirloom pillows to shreds with our incredible voodoo like claws. We weren’t planning wild moonlight frenzy on the kitchen table and then finding your beds to beak you to death.”

Any aficionado of children’s literature who’s seen the movie “Chicken Run” knows what those cleaver creatures are up to no good at any given moment. That is why the smart farmer sleeps with a shotgun near the bed (for the chickens and to help a perspective groom decide to do right by the farmer’s daughter. Farmer’s also eats chicken 5 times a week! You gotta let ‘em see you’re not afraid even if you are! You know what the chicks were up to but you just let it lay because they’ll be gone in a couple of weeks and you have other things on your mind.

For instance dealing with someone who has coulrophobia (the fear of clowns) comes to mind. After all of the trembling, shaking, weeping, wailing, and the panic stricken look in the face at the circus you hurriedly escort your family away from the offending painted minstrel so as to prevent starting a stampede. You solemnly promise you’ll never go there again. The kids object to leaving but you have to explain that mommy just knows Brownie the Clownie is really a spooky version of Attila the Hun! You drive home among the disgruntled children listening to a chorus of “He was looking at me I swear,” repeated over and over by a woman who keeps rocking back and forth in the front seat like she was a character in a straitjacket from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. As the man you don’t understand it, but then again you can forgive the ranting because you know you have some smidgeon of inconvenience that you offer when it comes to your own fears.

Most people of course have the usual phobias: dentaphobia (fear of dentists), acroiphobia (fear of heights), achluphobia (fear of darkness), claustrophobia (fear of confined spaces), Triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13), and Alliumphobia (fear of garlic)! That last one is especially troubling if you are a vampire or an Italian. The latter can get you leaned on by the Don if you don’t hide that one well. No one wants to wear cement shoes because they are scared of an herb that comes in clove form!
There are some real interesting and historical ones (not hysterical I said historical) for instance the Biblically renown fear of toads (bufonophobia). You tick off God and watch plagues of frogs fall from the sky like rain and you too might have a healthy fear of slime (blennophobia).

Chirophobia is the fear of hands. Exactly how to you keep from being afraid all of the time, wear mittens? Your hands are with you all of the time (the sneaky evil things), and you have to see them a lot during the course of the day. It’s enough to make me long for the days of my youth when the only irrational fear I had was ponophobia (fear of overworking). You might be able to see this in your own teenager at home. If you’re kid is in bed at 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon you can bet it’s an anti-work kinda thing! There is even a fear of things to the left side of the body (levophobia). That could bring a whole array of things into play that you could potentially fear. It would change with every move. I think that left side fear probably starts for men when they get married considering the woman is usually on the left side of the aisle. That fear never really goes away either. You can tell if a husband has it because you will often hear him repeat the phrase “yes dear!” Every man usually gets hit with a double whammy as a result of the wedding too. There is pentheraphobia (fear of the mother in law). I don’t have that one, I swear! I keep telling my wife that but I’m not sure she believes me.

In any event the whole fear thing is kind of silly. It tickle’s me like a feather. Unfortunately I have a fear of being tickled by feathers (pteronophobia). It probably has something to do with that chicken thing! Actually I have no such set of fears. According to the website The Phobia List “Phobias are marked and persistent fears that are excessive and/or unreasonable, cued by the presence or mere anticipation of certain objects (e.g., spiders) or situations (e.g., heights). Nearly 5% of the nation is affected by phobias of one kind or another.” That means the chances for you or I to have serious phobias is quite slim. However with so many overweight people in the population those of us obese individuals have a good chance of encountering geniophobia (fear of chins). Everytime I look in the mirror these days that one keeps getting worse and worse for me. I am lucky. As a man I can hide those extra chins. Women have no choice but to display the horror outright! The other option for them is to have a plastic surgeon lift and hide the extra skin. The next time you’re with a good looking, over 40, woman check behind her ears. If it’s fat back there you know it’s really just her chin! It could be some other things too if she’s had a body lift…then it might be more fun than you thought to look behind the lobes.

As I age and take to account all of the possible things to fear in life I realize as Franklin Roosevelt said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That is so true especially if you have counterphobia. That is the preference by a phobic for fearful situations. Sometimes we call that being a daredevil. Other times it’s known as just plain stupidity. Well even a nervous Nellie has to have some fun. After all there is nothing to get your heart pumping like a good old fashioned scare real or imagined or chicken oriented!