Golf Carts, Goldfish and Garbage...

Without a doubt, one of the most laid back cooking jobs I ever had was as the acting Banquet Chef of an upscale golf resort in the middle of nowhere. This particular golf community was in it's infancy and all of us who worked there spent a great amount of time sampling wine (did I mention it was also a winery?) and practicing trick shots on the putting greens. There were some busy days... don't get me wrong, but all in all it seemed like a year of collecting a very undeserved paycheck.

The reason for the lack of business was due to a serious lack of people. The developers of said golf resort/community planned on selling 200 acre parcels for rich Bay Area commuters to build houses on, but because of the isolated location and lack of a reliable water table, only four houses had been built in the two years it had been opened. That left us with a million dollar kitchen, all the high tech gadgets a Chef could dream of, gorgeous banquet facilities, two full-service bars and a serious case of boredom. Four kitchen employees + unlimited access to wine + nothing else to do in the middle of nowhere = trouble...

Due to the nature of the golf course operation, the kitchen employees were always the last to leave, and we were responsible for locking up everything. One building we got to lock up was the golf pro-shop. I know what you golf enthusiasts are thinking but no, we didn't steal any high-performance golf balls or high-dollar clubs. We may have been trouble, but we weren't thieves... besides that, there were cameras in the pro-shop. The reason we had access to the pro-shop in the first place was because that's where the carts were garaged. To explain, our waste containers were about a mile and a half away from the kitchen so without the golf-carts, taking out the garbage every night would have been exhausting and time-consuming. We would simply grab a couple of the carryalls, load up the cans and go for a ride.

Right before I started working there, one of the new cart mechanics showed our closing cook how you could adjust a gas-powered golf cart's regulator to make them go up to 50 miles per hour. He had given us the green light to do so just as long as we promised to set the regulator back to normal before the first tee-time the following day. For the most part, we were pretty good about doing so. Except for one fateful night...

After one particularly slow workday, we decided to close a bit earlier than normal. The sun was still out, but the last golfers had already headed home. We weren't the only ones who decided to call it a day; the clubhouse office staff, the pro-shop guys, the maintenance crew and even the guard at the front shack all took off early leaving us to an afternoon of sunshine, wine and a world-class golf course all to ourselves. Needless to say, it was turning out to be a very nice afternoon. As we were loading up the trash cans onto the carts, one of the line cooks asked if we could stop by his car on the way to dump the trash. He explained that he had brought his fishing gear with him and had been wondering what fishing for the Japanese goldfish on hole 11 would be like. Being that we were all pretty tanked on pinot noir, it seemed like a great idea. Not just that, but he had his Wife's and son's pole with him so we could all fish.

We dumped the trash, dropped off the cans back at the kitchen, grabbed a few more bottles of wine for the road and proceeded to hole 11. We dropped lines and within seconds, the koi were biting. These were big fish too. Big, lazy and stupid fish... We were seriously hooking them at a rate of about five per minute but we were releasing them. Keep in mind that each of these fish were worth about $200 each and besides, what were we going to do with all those koi - run them as a lunch special? We stayed there drinking wine and trying every possible bait in the tackle box (those stupid fish even bit at tin-foil) until the sun started going down. It was officially time to close up shop. We jetted back to the pro-shop after returning the fishing equipment to the car and then went to tuck the golf cart in for the night. Amazingly, we managed to lock everything up and headed home for the night.

The next morning, we all showed up to work bleary-eyed and headachy but we still managed to get through lunch unscathed. Sometime around 2:00 though, we were all called into the clubhouse manager's office. She told us to have a seat and then asked us why we thought a golfer had tipped a cart going about 35 miles per hour that day. Speechless, we all looked back and forth at each other and had a mental conversation. You could tell what each of us was thinking... "I didn't readjust the regulator, did you?"

As it turns out, a rather intoxicated golfer hit a corner going way too fast and had an unfortunate mishap involving a tipped golf cart and some very surprised ducks. The only reason the golf course wasn't being held responsible was because thankfully, the golfer wasn't injured and was rather embarrassed at being so drunk in the first place. All that said though, the guys from the pro-shop passed the blame onto us (it was our fault after all) and we were each written up and put on probation. As an added measure, the golf cart mechanics were instructed to start locking up all the gas-powered carts and the kitchen could only use one crappy old electric cart that was on the verge of being retired. What used to take just 5 minutes now took the kitchen almost 30 minutes and two trips to dump the trash.

Needless to say, the relaxed atmosphere changed on us rather quickly and that added to the lack of work forced us to look for jobs elsewhere. I myself found a job closer to where I lived that payed double what I was making before. I heard the Sous-Chef went on to become the Chef of another golf course and the line cook with the bright idea to go fishing for koi ironically ended up opening a pet supply store with his brother. If not for a careless drunken oversight, some of might still be there twiddling our thumbs today. Strange how things happen sometimes...