Earning My Cheese Cred

So you know that formula in movies, particularly sports movies, when the weak kid who the audience is really rooting for makes some awesome play to win the respect of the team and fans? "Nice work, kid," his teammates might casually say while giving him a playful head rub. The audience wipes away a single tear.

Well that happened to me in real life on Valentine's Day. Except nobody called me kid, nor did they rub my head. I was the only one crying, on the inside at least. Oh, and I wasn't in a movie or playing a sport. I was selling cheese.

Oh hello, my nemesis.

I am the weakest link in the machine-like cog that is the new cheese shop where I work. I am the new kid amongst knowledgeable cheese mongers who know the most delicate flavor profiles of cheeses from every which region of Europe and can cut through GIANT 40-lb wheels of rock-hard 2-year-old Gouda like it was butter. Until February 14, I had eased into my new job by working mostly weekdays and only one moderately busy, but very well-staffed, weekend day.

The rest of my two week introduction involved slowly getting to know the inventory of cheese and methodically and repeatedly wrapping cheese. I had figured out the characteristics of maybe 1/4 of the almost 200 cheeses. The fine art of wrapping the cheeses was a bit more elusive. The minutes accumulated as I fumbled to find the exact right way to make the plastic wrap practically invisible and glass-like on the surface of every oddly shaped piece. I would often re-wrap the same piece five times until I could get rid of the dreaded air pockets that can cause cheese to deteriorate. This was all good and fine on a slow day. On a busy day, our counter space is valuable. It's a tight squeeze behind the counter and quickly wrapping cheeses to go back in the case is the only way to service a hoard of hungry cheese freaks.

I'll admit my first few days, I felt like an idiot. It became immediately obvious how little I had learned about the vast world of retail cheese in the year-plus I had been working in this field. Sure, maybe I had a leg up on the average new trainee, but I felt like a lowly noob, continually asking my colleagues what cheeses to direct customers towards. Slowly I began to feel a little more comfortable with the case (or could at least guess based on the look of a cheese) and figuring out what the customer needed. I was getting better at wrapping cheeses for the case if I didn't have anyone anxiously waiting for my help. Plus, when nobody was watching I could hack off a workable piece of extra aged gouda from a giant wheel.

So when I showed up for work that Tuesday, I expected another slow easy transition into the expert cheese world. I was SOOO wrong. We were staffed for a regular weekday, and nobody saw the retail slam that was about to hit our doors. From 4pm until we closed at 9pm, nobody had a chance to eat or breathe. There was a lull for three minutes exactly, at which point I shoved a Fiber One bar down my throat. The line never ended. People wanted meats and cheeses and pairing suggestions for their loved ones and the crowded store and frantic cheesemongers were not deterring them. It didn't stop. It's 8:30pm! Shouldn't you be on your date already?!

And there I was, the lone new kid working with three dudes who REALLY know their cheese, their knife skills, and how to wrap and restock quickly to keep our cramped quarters clean. Then it happened. A customer points behind me to the giant bright orange wheel of rock hard gouda. I mentally crossed my fingers as I followed the trajectory of their gaze, hoping they were pointing to something else -- the baguettes maybe? Those are easy. Wrong.

In the middle of a crowded store, standing on a milk crate for leverage, I had to steady a giant knife through a nearly impenetrable wax rind because some fool only wanted a quarter pound of this giant wheel. It's not easy for these weak hands to steady a shaky blade and cut a razor thin slice off this behemoth. But everyone else handles the task with such apparent ease, and I'm going to have figure it out sooner or later.  It was ugly, but I did it without the luxury of assistance or moral support because everyone else was swamped. I wrapped up the giant wheel, restocked, cleaned some knives, and worked through the rest of the customers, person-by-person, keeping pace with my colleagues in trying to get everyone in and out quickly. Eventually, the store cleared out and most of the customers left seemingly happy.

At the end of the night, my co-workers applauded my work. I'm sure when the line started to back up on our understaffed cheese counter they were prepared for a worst case scenario of the new kid bringing the store to a crippling halt through nervousness and ineptitude. Granted, I did have some of that, but at least I managed to avert disaster instead of creating it. That was the day that I finally felt like I'd at least be okay at this.

There are still days that I come home feeling like a loser, brooding about that piece of cheese that fell apart because of one errant knife move or the piece that took me ten minutes to wrap. It will take me a while until I reach their level.  But at least the team can count on me in a moment of crisis.