2013: When Bagel Makers And Gong Farmers Form An Amalgamated Union

I love to see people making things, and who have pride in their work. It doesn’t really matter what they’re doing.

I used to supervise the construction of commercial food preparation facilities once in a while. While the soundtrack is barrelhouse piano, this video is from the 1970s, not ancient history. I noticed about a zillion current health code violations visible in the video.

But those violations are meaningless, because I imagine the people in the video were personally invested in the quality and cleanliness of their surroundings and product. The raft of rules about food preparation — as well as many other things — are the result of trying desperately to micromanage the behaviors of people that don’t care a whit about themselves, their customers, or the product they’re making.

So the people in the video aren’t wearing hairnets, and we’re supposed to freak out, I guess. I bet everyone in the Nordstrom’s Cafe in San Francisco was wearing a hairnet. Of course you might have contracted typhoid fever from them, but you can rest serene that while they were crapping their insides out in the bathroom from their medieval ailment, they were sitting within eyeshot of a sign in the wrong language telling them to wash their hands after doing so. Which is nice.