The Ice Cream Cooler....Satan's Little Helper

Recently, I mentioned my utter disdain for the ice cream cooler at the store. Many of you are probably thinking....how can an inanimate object cause someone such anger? It was not inanimate, if you ask me. It was alive and it existed simply to drive us all crazy. Contrary to it's appearance, the ice cream cooler had numerous working parts: a motor, a bay for the scoops with running water and a faucet, the brackets that held the product, the grips that locked the brackets to the actual box, and of course, eight 3-gallon tubs of ice cream. Then you had two kinds of sugar cones, two sizes of cups, and the napkins. You see? It's a lot more than just a cold box. It's a menagerie of metal and plastic with the potential for 1,374,768 ways to break, leak, creak, freeze, melt, crush, pulverize and terrorize those of us who had to deal with it. A plague upon humanity, a cacophony of dissonance, the ice cream cooler.

It's sad that I feel this way, because I love ice cream and it gives people so much joy, but when you put up with such a disagreeable machine for 16 years....you come to a breaking point. Everybody can relate to this if you work in an office or anywhere with machines with working parts. Even my Mom hated it, and she doesn't hate anything. When Dad sold the store, I wanted to pull a Michael Bolton and wheel it out to a field and bash it with a baseball bat while Geto Boys played in the background. Instead of a PC load letter, it was broken cones at inopportune times. (+1 for Office Space reference) It was the impossibility of lining up the tubs with the brackets. It was the PVC leaking water onto the floor overnight. It was the tubs on one half of the cooler frozen solid, and of course, 5 kids want double dips of those flavors. The issues were endless. When it was time to replace a flavor, we all groaned and sauntered to the back freezer, grabbed the newest soldier in the fight and came back. Then the fun starts.

The cooler had two brackets, which held four tubs each. These brackets were linked to the box by grips that simply locked in place by turning a knob, this knob would wedge the grip against the side of the box. No screws or nails holding it in. All it took was a hard hit and the bracket would fall (which happened 3-4 times daily). You had to align all four tubs before you could lock it into place. Then you try to lock it but the other bracket is off kilter, so you have to take both brackets out, align all eight tubs and try to wedge them all in together. This is nearly impossible for one person, so everybody has to turn their attention to it. You've got two men, with their upper bodies stuffed in a 5x6 area, trying to turn two knobs at the same time. After 23 attempts, one of you has to walk away before you lose it. I swear it caused Russell to start dipping again. Before you can finish this task, three people come in and want a double dip of chocolate. When they see the brackets out, they ask, "Is there something wrong with the ice cream??" My temperature would soar and I swear I would see tiny imps from Hell standing on top of the cooler, dancing Rockettes style, singing "Indian Outlaw" in Fran Drescher's voice.

When you replaced a flavor, you had to remove the remaining product from the old tub. You simply take the scooper and get out as much as you possibly can. These tubs were not cheap, as milk prices go, so goes ice cream. Mayfield ain't discount, everybody in the South knows this. You put this ice cream on top of the freshly opened tub, so you can sell it first. Without fail, a person asks, "what's wrong with that ice cream on top?" or "Is that the same flavor?" Cue the imps, except one has now stopped dancing and is scraping a fork across an empty plate. Some people did not want the "old" ice cream (less than three days) so they would request we get the ice cream from the new tub. The new ice cream had been in the back freezer, which was set at -2,876 Fahrenheit, so this ice cream is harder than titanium wrapped in diamonds with a steel coating. If you dropped one of those tubs off the Empire State Building, it would go through Broadway, the igneous rock shelf below the surface, past Jimmy Hoffa's body, and straight to the Earth's core. It was that hard.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't hold it against people for wanting ice cream. As I said, I love ice cream. I would stab somebody for a pistachio double dip right now. However, they always seemed to want the most when we were slammed. I'm outside pumping gas in a diesel truck that holds 45 gallons and checking somebody's oil and transmission, Dad is in the hardware helping a guy with 3/4 inch fine thread wood screws and explaining why we don't carry metric bolts, and a church group comes in wanting ice cream. 15 kids ranging from 5-14, all wanting different sizes and flavors. More fun, especially when the youth leader looks at me and says, "We ALL want some ice cream!" I stare into the distance, composing myself. One imp has affixed himself on the gas pump, Riverdancing.

So, after finally finishing with the gas customer and putting a quart of oil in Mrs. May's car (because she doesn't trust anyone else to do it), I come running in, wash my hands, and saunter to the ice cream cooler. The line of children is yapping non-stop and although they've had five minutes to decide, they still need to know each and every flavor. As mentioned before, we had the obvious flavors. There was always one person in every group who asked, "So, you guys don't have White Chocolate Mousse?" Then a few of them want to sample the chocolate, as if it's somehow changed since their last cone, 24 hours ago. A line starts to form at the register. I can hear the imps, "Half Cherokee and Choctaw! My baby, she's a Chippewaaaawaaa, she's a one of a kind!" So, the first kids order: half chocolate and half strawberry on a double cone, single vanilla in a cup, Single cherry on a cone and a double sherbet in a cup. Before you finish, three things happen....1) the single vanilla changes her mind to cherry halfway through; 2) The kid with the half chocolate/strawberry drops his cone in the floor; and 3) As I am dipping, one of the cones shatters into 6,000 pieces into the cooler. The youth leader makes a stupid joke, "Bet that happens once a day, ha!" Everybody laughs...but me. The entire line takes about 30 minutes to get through. I clean up three spills, listen to two suggestions on flavors we should get for the future, and have to give away about 437 napkins.

Sometimes, when we were extremely busy and I didn't have time to change the tubs out, I would put a lid on an empty tub. Undoubtedly, the question comes out, "what's under the lid?" So many smart aleck remarks would pop into my head, and I would just have to beat them back. "Oh sir, that's a new flavor called Air. You want a sample?" It finally got to the point where Dad had to write "EMPTY" on the lids and still, "what was under there?" would come out once an hour. Then you had the elderly couples who got ice cream every day, but seemed to act as if they've never been there before. I would go through all eight flavors again, they would look at each other for about a minute and ponder, like somebody asked them what their social security numbers were, and finally order. If the price ever increased, which it did almost monthly, you would get complaints. Funny though, the complaints always came from the people who needed ice cream about as much as I needed a hole in the head. It's hard to take somebody serious who has to turn sideways to get out the door. I had a fireman once order a triple dip of butter pecan, which was the most fattening and sugary ice cream in the cooler. When I told him the price, he exclaimed, "Good Lord! That is ridiculous! I am never getting one of these again!" He still paid for it and I watched him walk out to his Tahoe, gobbling down the calorie bomb and holding his size 54 pants up. He sat down in the driver's seat and the car lurched so hard that the ice cream fell in his lap, rolled off and onto the pavement. All I could say was, "there is a God."

I look back and laugh about it now. All the times I had sticky hands, cleaning up broken cones, and picking up all the napkins that the ceiling fans blew into the floor. Even though it caused me way more trouble than it was worth, it was all a part of working up there. Most people were easy to deal with, did not complain about the prices and if we were really busy, they would just come back later. Still though, if you ever hear about an ice cream cooler that was left on the train tracks and completely destroyed by a high speed locomotive....the imps did it.