The Ladies I Worked with at MDH Summer of 2000

My first office job was working at the Oak Street location of the Minnesota Department of Health in the Summer of 2000. I have a collection of facts I’d like to share and memories with you.

• This was my first office job, there was also effectively no looking at the Internet because they had everything blocked.

• My main job was entering in results from water tests. Including a water test from suspicious liquid found at the Nicollet McDonald’s that they thought might be terroristic and related to some sort of Olympics related event happening in town (it wasn’t).

• It was at this job that I learned the technique of taking very long number 2s on the company dime with copious amounts of reading material

• There was a deaf woman who I worked with who thought that all the other ladies on the floor hated her, and she hated them. She had worked with them for a long ass time. Maybe they did hate her. I thought she was cool as hell. We communicated on those little yellow pads you grab when you find out a meeting is more serious than you thought it was gonna be and you have to write some
  

  I secretly made of fun the older women I worked with for being so basic. We didn’t have that term yet. But basically the whole day was talking about food with small breaks to actually eat food. They’d show up at 8:30am and start talking about what they had breakfast and whether they enjoyed it. Mind you, they’d be working on their data entry forms while doing this. Then, by 10am at the latest they’d talk about what they wanted to do for lunch. “did you bring something?” “have you tried that new place Chipotle” “the lines are so long” “I don’t like their egg rolls” “they might be closed for the summer” “it’s good pizza, I think it’s great”. I thought it was so dumb and thinking back. . .what else is there to talk about. It’s life and food is a real treat. Talk about it all day. Who cares. But anyway, then they’d go get lunch, sometimes together, sometimes separate. And then they’d talk about what they had for lunch til maybe 2. And then by three o’clock they’d talk about what they were cooking for their family for dinner. “does he even show up for dinner” “he won’t eat spicy” “I made that on Monday but what cares, it’s good”. Dear ladies of MDH in 2020, I’m sorry. Two years into the pandemic I would absolutely shave off all my body hair to hear a long day rolling conversation about food. You are amazing.
  
  Let’s talk about Chipotle. The first Chipotle in Minnesota was at Stadium Village. It opened that summer. You can say what you want about Chipotle, we’ve all had some bad meals there. But oh my god, that summer it was honestly the most amazing food I had ever eaten in my entire life. I’d get that veggie burrito, heavy sour cream presence, oh my fucking god. I think it was also maybe 6 dollars or so. Legendary.

  I decided to quit early by like two weeks so I could get my head straight before I headed to the University of Minnesota for the first time. My boss, Monica, was uncharacteristically upset. As I think about it now, she shouldn’t have been that surprised that the flaky musician kid was dipping out a few weeks early. You should budget for that Monica.

  Any who, the minute I told Monica I was leaving the job early, she dumped all sorts of crap work on me. Namely it was filing and entering paper only STD test results from a solid decade ago into a database. I knew it was just busy work that she was using to make my last couple weeks more difficult. Don’t tell me that in the year 2000 you just upped and decided it was a priority to file test results from 1991 into digital form Monica, I don’t believe it. So I did what any asshole kid would do. I hid the stacks of test results in the upper part of my cubicle storage. And a week before I was gonna be done one of my co-workers did what any nosy lady who talks about lunch all day would day which is open up the cubicle thing and tell me I was going to get in trouble for this. And so I did what any super asshole kid would do and I hid the test results in weird parts of the building where I know nobody would see them. I did not use MDH as a reference for future jobs.