Dirty Work at the Senior Center, Continued
One of the best meals long-time chef Marva Savariau used to make at the Senior Center was her roast turkey luncheon. She was scheduled to serve it again this past Monday, but, as we all now know, she was rudely and summarily fired the Friday before. What actually happened at Monday lunch is an interesting object lesson in how quickly and how far things have suddenly spiraled downhill at the Senior Center.
Instead of the real bird fresh out of the oven, fit for a Thanksgiving table and carved in front of your eyes—"Would you like a drumstick? White meat? Dark meat? Some of each?"—it was a tasteless commercial deli loaf fed into a slicer. A few thin slices, topped with smarmy white gravy out of a can instead of the rich brown giblet gravy Marva used to prepare—that was what you got. And the desserts, instead of being the usual homemade pies and cakes and bread puddings, were either a tiny serving of jello with a little Redi-Whip on top, or six pieces of uninspired canned fruit. It was a mockery of what Marva had planned for Monday’s lunch, and she would have died of shame before she would ever have served such unspeakable slop to her beloved seniors.
But that is the way of the future, dear reader. Pay more, get less, and shut up. The way things are going in this Town, the seniors are lucky to get anything at all. And next year…who knows? If the commercial food service isn’t making enough profit on their chintzy meals, they may just bail, and leave the seniors foodless. Why should Morrison Senior "Living" care? They will have milked their ill-gotten contract for all it was worth, and then moved on to do the same thing to some other unsuspecting town up the line. It’s the American way, after all. Get what you can before the truth catches up to you, and then set up shop somewhere else. It’s just like the Duke and the King in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. There’s always a bunch of greater fools two towns over.
Meanwhile, dear reader, we here in Greenwich are at present the greater fools. We took an operation that wasn’t broke, and was actually working very well, and we “fixed” it. Your tax dollars at work, dear citizen. We screwed ourselves, not to mention a faithful long-time Town employee, are enriching a greedy outside corporation, and will eventually be left holding the bag. Gee. We should be really proud of ourselves. Isn’t Greenwich great?
posted by Bill Clark | 6/16/2010 08:52:00 AM
1 Comments:
As much as the TOG deserves to get bashed for this exercise in stupidity, I see it as symptomatic of what has happened to America as a whole. Outsourcing is ruining our economy by sending jobs overseas, and the government agencies and corporations that have done so will only finally catch on to their mistake when those other countries doing our work and building our widgets pass worker reforms of their own that take the profit out of our exploitation of their unfair labor practices. So, in a similar vein, the TOG has shot itself in the foot by outsourcing to outside (of the Town) entities that fail to provide the same level of service and quality that we were already getting from home-grown labor. When the TOG finally wises up to that fact, it will already be long past fixing their initial mistake and will instead have to outsource to yet another company that will likely be a clone of the one before and offer similar, shoddy service. A vicious cycle indeed, which can only be broken by (re)creating positions and filling them with workers whose primary goal is to provide a quality service (and goods) as opposed to providing the minimum they can get away with in return for the highest margins (a la typical corporate mentality).
"If it ain't broke, fix it until it is."
Way to screw the pooch...
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