The Legend of Tiff

So when I was in my late teens, waiting for the Internet to become a thing, I had a job as a dishwasher in a somewhat infamous private-dormitory cafeteria at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The UW is where most of the smartest people in Wisconsin settle for going to school.

It’s also the most prestigious place that wealthy families on the East Coast can find to dump their dumbest failsons and -daughters. Failson wasn’t a word yet, but boy, did we need it.

Hijinks ensue.

I didn’t personally meet everybody who toiled for four dollars and fifty-five cents an hour serving entitled college freshmen in that cafeteria, but given the amount of underused talent that went through that town, somebody must have at least worked getting coffee at a TV network.

Or maybe it’s more likely that this kind of frozen-yogurt character drama repeated itself all over the country; I dunno man, I’m in my own little reality tunnel over here.

All’s I know is, we got to see the Seinfeld episode eerily aped long before it aired, thanks to Tiff.

Mingling with the best

I call the place I worked a fancy dorm full of fail-siblings, mostly because it had its own movie theater and workout room. And fancy living suites, more like a hotel than a dorm, where each kid got their own room, and only shared a toilet with one person. But its built-in cafeteria was actually smaller and smelled worse than the big dining halls shared by the public dorms.

That’s because the point of the place was mostly to keep the nice clean trustafundians from having to interact with the white-trash native students outside of class and extracurriculars. Well, except for the cafeteria staff.

Dressed in a maroon polyester bow tie, matching apron, and baseball cap, we served Sysco slop for minimum wage, even though the residents’ parents paid far too much for the privilege. Maybe the residents were dimly aware that most of us were also students, or maybe they weren’t aware of our humanity unless they were angry and wanted to yell at someone, but boy, were they failcunts to us.

This is why I ended up working exclusively in the dishroom:

Five minutes of working in an actual customer-facing position, and they had to lock me in the cooler for the safety of others. I had a lot of excess energy.

Some of the food was just shitty cafeteria food, but much of it tended toward more health-faddy slop. The age of heroin chic in advertising had begun, and the residents had the luxury of spending most of their time being stringently image-conscious, so by “health-faddy” I kind of mean “they thought it was a magic way to lose weight.”

Of all the coveted health-faddy foodstuffs in the cafeteria the soft-serve, fat-free frozen yogurt was the total cult fave.

They were infatuated with that creamy, watery, off-white sludge. To me, it looked like the soft-serve machine was pooping clotted milk of magnesia. But they consumed it religiously. It was like a weird little incantation:

I get to eat all the ICE CREAM

cause it has NO FAT

so I won’t GET FAT

That’s how goddamn powerful advertising is.

LISSEN-A-ME: That’s how GODDAMN POWERFUL advertising is. No matter how skeptical I think I can trust myself to be around all the ads on Facebook, there’s a reason I avoid that place!

Science already knew that excess total calories are what makes you gain fat, not how much fat makes up the calories. They told you that in grade school. The keto diet fad was only a few years off, so this was not cutting-edge math. Maybe they didn’t have access to studies telling them that under lab conditions, a calorie of fat suppresses hunger better than a calorie of sugar, but everyone knew what a sugar crash was.

But still, after a few years of watching cokeheads in tight jeans pretend to munch on a particular brand of sugar-frosted “fat-free” snack bars three times for every episode of Friends—which they watched on the cafeteria’s multiple televisions as they chewed—these TV-mesmerized bitches were convinced that fat-free products would protect them from the wrath of the Fat Gods.

Look, it’s right in the name!

If they could not obtain half a gallon of fat-free yogurt after dinner every day, they would surely perish from diabetes. Or social ostracism.

So woe to the cafeteria worker who didn’t reload the trough fast enough! That stupid yogurt machine ran empty at least once a shift, and we never heard the end of it.

I used to wonder why a relatively simple thing like nutrition totally confuses people, and then I finally figured out that propaganda, such as advertising, fills us with magic incantations that are hard to override.

Eating fat makes you fat, derpy derpy derpy derp! Why do you think so many advertisements rhyme and use alliteration? If there’s one good heuristic in life, it’s:

“If they’re rhyming their words, they are speaking in turds.”

Anyway, most of the faildaughters were at least a little neurotic about the yogurt machine, but there’s always one who takes the cake.

This taker, my frens, was the legendary Tiff.

Tiff had a complaint about the yogurt almost every single day. She couldn’t do math around calories, but boy we got to hear how many ounces she had gained or lost that day. Angrily.

Tiff was often upset with us because Tiff, according to Tiff, was not losing weight. But Tiff was on a diet, so her failure to lose weight could not possibly be because she couldn’t count or was insane. She was eating the right things and exercising perfect willpower, and never pouring any dessert in her trough except the fat-free fucking yogurt.

So clearly the reason her diet was failing was because WE WERE SLIPPING REGULAR LOWFAT YOGURT INTO HER FAT-FREE YOGURT.

Maybe even high-fat yogurt.

Mother of god.

So every time Tiff cruised into the cafeteria with her “you bowtie-wearing diet saboteurs” face on, everyone braced for the ritual and went in the back to look for the mix bag.

Yes, for evidence. We had to keep the fucking yogurt-mix bags with the date on them to prove to fucking Tiff that we were not spiking her fucking yogurt, or else she would throw another fit and berate us for ruining her day. They would have been more of a sanitation hazard to keep around if they weren’t full of enough sugar to count as fruit-free jam.

I don’t know if she thought we couldn’t read, or couldn’t remember which machine said FAT FREE on the front, or if she thought we were somehow involved in her social life and wanted to sabotage her, but it was easier to just keep the dripping, milky bags around than to try to convince her that there really was no fat in her fructose goo.

The company probably would have freaked out if they even knew we were showing the customer a mix bag; they were supposed to think the yogurt was a branded item that came fully formed from a leprechaun’s gizzard. No offense to the Irish. I’m not even going to get to that Jewish joke I promised. It always seems like it’s too soon lately.

(Yeah, I’m putting a lot more teasers in my discourse lately. Fuck tying up all the loose ends. Everything is a sitcom and we don’t want it to be over.)

Anyway, Tiff liked to trigger people avant la lettre for her own emotional catharsis; most of us had sort of nightmarish families so I guess she got her way, yelling at us from an untouchable position of power. Nobody was ever able to tell these monsters no. Nothing was too petty to be less important than some worker bee’s human dignity. (One of the trust-fund hippies who lived there called me that—”worker bee” when he tried to bum a cigarette and I didn’t have any. Thanks a lot, Kerouac.)

But I guess in a way we felt sorry for her. What’s it like to be so obsessed with people’s judgment of your perfectly normal body that you’re verbally abusing a servant?

Yeah yeah, heroin chic season is misogyny season I guess, but we had a hard time understanding the thrall this fake beauty standard had over them when we were working this shitty job precisely so that we didn’t have to be hungry all the time. We ate their leftovers; I’m lucky I don’t have hepatitis. What kind of aristocrat had three bucks to waste on a copy of Vogue so they could make themselves miserable?

People’s judgments must have been driving her crazy, to make her act this way.

So in order to puncture her self-esteem out of decades-old spite, I was going to wrap this anecdote up with a joke about how skinny or fat or normal she was in order to fill in the expected joke arc, and that’s when this became a story about zen and Oedipus, because I realized:

I can’t remember whether Tiff was chubby or skinny.

How can I say she was worried about being judged rather than about weight-related health problems? Well, that’s part of why I can’t remember: I don’t think she was morbidly obese; that was rare enough at the time that I probably would have remembered it. She wasn’t skeletal, either, because it was Wisconsin, so that would have stuck out, too.

But those five or ten or twenty pounds she was agonized over to the point of turning into a Disney villainness? It’s so blatant that I’m starting to wonder if my memory is correct. Was this just one of the plots of the stupid shows that were constantly blaring over thoselarge-screen TVs we couldn’t escape?

Zero memory. I have no idea. I can’t even picture her. I don’t know if her hair was nice. I don’t know her ethnicity. Or whether she had the same jeans as on the TV.

All that neurotic worrying about half-inches around her waist, a panic over status so intense she thought it gave her an excuse to act like a wild animal—and all I remember is what a bitch she was to me and my friends.

People aren’t always judging you based on the stuff you think they’re judging.

I realize the Internet is very image-based, and the kids can sniff out the fact that looking hot in pictures is one of the very narrow paths that might help them skate over the Balrog pit that appears to be not too far down the tunnel.

People are probably always judging each other, insofar as they notice each other’s humanity. But still, they’re not always judging you for the things you believe. Especially if you believe in kind of annoying things.

So it’s not just Gen Z who foolishly build their identity around their appearance when they’re young and hot… although a lot of my friends got away with it by dying before they could get close to old.

And I’m well aware that I probably could stand to have thought more about that story earlier in life, but I didn’t think about it till today, so now I’m warning you, so you’re welcome. Oedipus, zen, et-cetera.