At work we had something of a “talent show” where some of my colleagues got to show off something they’re passionate about. I decided to throw my hat into the ring and hopefully teach some people how to make a pretty damn delicious chicken broth – the base of so many things when it comes to food.

It’s great to work at an organization that puts company culture on the forefront, so naturally I’ll give a quick shout out to TrueContext and all the fun we have. That said, the rest of this is going to be adapted from the 15 minute presentation I gave to my colleagues. It’ll include a step-by-step guide on making a mouthwatering stock, some tips I wasn’t able to cover in the presentation, and some helpful links for further learning.

I doubt that few reading this will have much of a clue what I’m about to talk about, and fewer more may care, but it’s a lot of fun for me. It’s a story about learning, tinkering, and forever evolving. It really all started about 25 years ago when I built a couple web pages back in the early days of the Internet, and has culminated in me more or less having a small farm of servers running in my 676sqft condo. Along the way I’ve learned a LOT of things, and the beauty (or, brutality) of it all is that I have done it all on my own. Self taught. I’ve fallen more than a few times, but with failure comes an opportunity to learn.

It was a completely innocent walk to the post office, most specifically the Shoppers Drug Mart at Queen & Beverly – my local one. I dropped off my mail, took a jaunt over to the LCBO to replenish some stock, noticed they were closed, and turned to head home. As I passed back in front of the post office, there stood a man who appeared to be high, likely on meth as evidenced by his shaking, muttering, and erratic posture. As I got within about a step of him I realized he was brandishing a sharp metal spike in right hand, something I could only see at the last second. Motherfucker has an ice pick.

I immediately open my body to skirt around him outside of arms reach and backed away as quickly as possible. He didn’t explicitly lunge or swing at me, but his erratic body posture put me on alert, and as he took a step towards me, I immediately reacted. I got within a safe distance and then I was faced with a pretty considerable moral and ethical dilemma. What do I do now?

I’ve held this opinion for a long time, but whenever I brought it up I’d be completely dogpiled with hate. Understandable, seeing as a lot of people only are able to scrape by through the tips they collect. By saying it needs to go away, they feel threatened that their primary source of income would dry up, and this is more or less me saying “you don’t deserve to make this money”. I’d be upset if someone was to suggest I get paid less too – but that’s not at all what I’m saying.

We have been conditioned to think this way in North America and it’s one big massive fucking grift by our corporate overlords so they can reap massive benefits we’ll never see as the working class. So, let’s talk about it, and why this needs to stop (but, likely never will).