I Hate Food Pull

LO Food Racks

Every week we pull food from the LO (Logistics Arch) to stock the kitchen. Food pull and taking out the trash occur EVERY week, and in the summer possibly everyday. Eating, trash, and poop seem to be pretty consistent here in the station. Yet, it seems the ass-hats that designed this station did so with the sole purpose of making these three activities as hard as possible, well pooping is pretty safe I guess, unless you are in a solar-outhouse. Pooping in a solar-outhouse might be super uncomfortable, but you’ll probably escape pretty unscathed over-all. But food pull and trash are just fraught with peril and frustration.

Super brave grub lugger on the ladder.

Food Pull just sucks.

I would rather do just about anything than climb a metal ladder in blue boots, at 80 below zero, and then have to manhandle a heavy box off of the shelf and back to the ground, pile the heavy box onto a metal cart -that was never meant to be used at 80 below zero, so the wheels are dodgy. Repeat this climbing the ladder, hauling frozen boxes, and piling boxes on the cart a ton-o-times. Once you have gathered all the food from the shelves, you reorganize the cart in hopes of reducing the inevitable falling of boxes from the cart in the valiant attempt to get the cart to the elevator.

To get to the elevator, you push that heavily laden piece-of-shit metal cart down an uneven walkway, while boxes hurl themselves off and break open. After stopping to pick up all the broken food products, and making a mental note you need to grab a new 30 lb box of butter, you shove the metal cart, which by now the wheels have shit-the-bed and no longer work, to the elevator.

The silver bumps are hell to get the cart over.

BUTTER DOWN! BUTTER DOWN!

Once you get the cart and all the food to the elevator, you call a UT (utility technician) to come make the elevator work, and while waiting for them to arrive you attempt to load the cart into the elevator using every technique, threat, and cussword at your disposal. The elevator is never quite level with the floor, so it takes several runs with the groaningly heavy cart to get over the lip and into the elevator. This thrusting and heaving generally results in more boxes hurling themselves to the floor, and more cussing at the asshole who designed this station in such a way that the simple task of gathering food each week can result in a call to the suicide hot-line. Plus, the cart handles are right at boob level, so the girls take a beating in this commotion.

I forgot to mention that it is several carts, and in the summer it can easily be 9 or 10 cart loads worth of this debacle. Once the carts are on the elevator, someone sprints up the beer can and “Calls” the elevator to the top floor. Once the elevator makes it to the top floor, the person yells,

“Lower! Lower! Higher! Lower! Higher!”

down to the UT, who is pushing buttons until the elevator is level enough with the floor to pull the carts off. Sometimes the elevator won’t play nice and get level, so we have to climb into the elevator and manhandle all the food off.

Besides climbing the metal ladder in blue boots, climbing in the elevator is hands down my most despised thing to do during food pull. An elevator that can’t even level itself correctly, was not built to work at 60 below zero, has a thousand or more pounds of frozen food in it, and is hanging in the air a couple stories in the air-and now I get to climb in and hand boxes out. Sounds like a CNN headline in the making right there:

South Pole tragedy! Two people crushed by 9 year old boxes of bacon when an elevator plunged to the ice below!

It’s not really ice below us in the beer can, but the media always sensationalizes Antarctica.

In my humble opinion- I do not think you should be able to design a building that you have ZERO experience living or working in. Especially if said building is at the bottom of the world, but since none of the decision makers do food pulls, it is really a moot point.

And yes, we eat nine year old bacon. Which is my third most hated thing of food pull- seeing how outdated our food is.

Ohgod…I was here in August 2006.

…and in September 2006.

Six year old cheese anyone?