Cafe Yumm'd

Quick, off cycle post today, prompted by the passage of the $1.9T economic assistance law the other day.

Lay-off or Furlough

Last Spring, as CoViD-19 was really picking up steam, my son T's former employer, like so many, shut down operations as directed by the state to help contain the spread. Since there was considerable focus by the news media on what was happening, many employers did not just flat-out lay off folks. Laying people off during a rapidly spreading pandemic would not look good. So, for public-relations reasons, a furlough (not fired, but eligible for unemployment) saved many companies from closing their doors forever. But a furlough is not free for the employer. A portion of the unemployment benefit received by the employee is underwritten by the employer, just as if the employee had been laid off. The big difference is that once the employer lays you off, they no longer have any control over your unemployment status. With a furlough, they do: you still technically work for them. This may be what makes a furlough less of a political black-eye for employers than lay-offs, but, for many employees, it doesn't seem any different.

Funny Furlough

So, how can a company with questionable ethics effectively reduce their unemployment costs while also avoiding a public relations issue? Well, they can't lay you off: like we just established, the company will definitely have to pay a portion of those benefits. Back in Spring 2020, most of us did not necessarily know the economic impact would last this long, but many experts were saying it would be 2022 before things were normal, and they were saying that in June 2020. So, paying unemployment benefits on your employees for 2 years, especially for an employer, say.. like Cafe Yumm... who has an employee retention in the less-than-6-months range, is highly unattractive.

So, how do you get people off your unemployment bill? The ethical thing would be to help your employees find other work. Were there many same-role jobs for Cafe Yumm workers at that time? Maybe not, but as fast food was closing down, grocery stores were grossly under-staffed for the surge in shoppers; shoppers who usually dined-out most meals. Grocery stores were so desperate for workers there were ads on the radio and my neighbor (who works at Safeway) stopped me on my driveway to ask if any of our kids wanted to work at Safeway. The Cafe Yumm's of the world could have easily coordinated with the local Safeway, Ralph's, etc. to help their furloughed employees find employment. Delivery business was also booming, so some kind of partnership with UPS or FedEx could have been figured out.

Cafe Yumm'd

Cafe Yumm, however, did not do any of that. Cafe Yumm did not try to help their employees find work at all. Instead, they looked for ways to trick their employees into accidentally quitting. How do you accidentally quit? Well, Cafe Yumm management required all employees to have a region-wide chat-stream active on their phones. These chats had 50 or more people on them, and an individual employee's phone would blow up with hundreds of text messages a day. Buried within this company-mandated spam would be a single notification about a mandatory meeting where attendance would be taken. If you chose not to attend, the company would accept that as your resignation.

That's right. First, they require you to accept hundreds of texts, rendering your phone into a useless noise-maker. Then, they bury an employment ultimatum within the messages, which many employees missed within the sheer volume of messages. By missing that call, your unemployment status is changed: you lose your weekly payment. Your access to the expanded dollars due to CoViD are jeopardized; in T's case they were lost. Suddenly, you, and many like you are without the unemployment safety net during a period when millions, literally 10's of millions, of people are out of work. Heartless doesn't begin to describe this Ebenezer Scrooge action by Cafe Yumm. Other companies have probably pulled this maneuver; I only know of Cafe Yumm because my son got screwed this way. I imagine there are many similar accidental-quit stories out there.

Vote with Your Wallet, Vote with Your Feet

I absolutely bring all this up partly to bring attention to Cafe Yumm, but also to highlight the power we all have when we vote with our wallets and our feet. The pandemic has given us all an opportunity to see how our friends, neighbors and local businesses behave under considerable stress. Cafe Yumm failed miserably, and I will not patronize Cafe Yumm again. I encourage you to look elsewhere for your "healthy" (honestly, not-healthy) fast food as well. 

Some of my favorite local one-off restaurants managed to not only stay open, but find new streams for their order-out business (GrubHub, DoorDash, etc.) so they have about the same staffing levels they had pre-pandemic. The dishwasher may not work as much, and the wait staff are now just doing kitchen-to-driver expo, but with the increased volume of food moving through, they are making it. I have genuine conversations with my friends there, and to a person, they are all doing "okay". Not great, but surviving. I am sure they will appreciate the government check to help ease some of the stress from the smaller-than-preCoViD paycheck to smaller-than-preCoViD paycheck barely-makin-it living.

As for T, he got hired onto a fire crew a few months after he got Cafe Yumm'd. He had to couch-surf along the way to eliminate expenses he no longer could afford (like rent, power, and internet), but he came out on the other side. And, he helped contain one of the worst fire seasons Oregon has ever seen.

Back to the normal posts on Tuesday. Thanks for following along-

Almost Frog Lake (Part 2)

Today's post is a continuation of Part 1, but this time I actually get to the ill-fated trip up Mount Hood, vagabonding, and Boo's saving the day. In the last post, I had packed the bus mid-week for our weekend camping trip. We usually do this the evening before, but one of my old friends was getting married that Thursday, so we went a different route. In summary, we had a yard sale over the weekend, then the purchasing / flush fill of the coolant on Monday/Tuesday, packing Wednesday and a wedding on Thursday leading up to the departure on Friday. Timing was tight. Now, on to the adventure-

Up Hill, Up Temps

We hit the road for what was to be a weekend of camping lake-side in the Oregon Cascades. With visions of hiking and floating in a paddle-boat driving us on, we headed west out of Beaverton shortly after 6. We knew we had at least 3 hours before darkness hit, so we drove at a relatively easy pace over the Sellwood Bridge, over OR224 to OR212 to US26. We came upon another bus on the OR224: a nice blue and white 2-tone which the driver had just purchased. He had a flat, and AAA on the way to help, so after exchanging pleasantries, he waved us on. Along the way, the bus temps were staying around 185*, the point where the thermostat opens. But, as we climbed more hills, the temps started rising. We stopped at the Subway for a quick dinner in Sandy and to let the bus cool off before returning to US26. By the time we hit ZigZag, I was genuinely concerned, pulling over periodically to let things cool off. As we passed through Rhododendron our temp was approaching critical, so I pulled into the breakdown / chain-up lane between forest service roads (FR) 24 and 26. With the engine idling, the fans blowing, heat fans on, the temp kept climbing. We passed 206* for the first time, and before I could kill the engine, steam started venting out through the overflow bottle. I turned off the key, the engine stopped and steam eventually stopped venting, but not before a large puddle had appeared under the passenger side rear-end of the bus. We were stuck: never add coolant to a hot motor; the engine needs to cool to ambient temperature or you could crack your block.

Vagabonding

WildWood Recreation Area

I was in a form of shock, self-loathing for not doing the job "right", maybe using the wrong coolant or not getting the coolant-to-water concentration right.... but Boo leaped into action. The sun was dropping, and we needed to get off the road or deal with authorities. She scouted FR26, about 100 feet ahead of us, and spotted a clearing just off the road. With an apology to Hapy, I started him up and crept to the turn-out and nosed him into the clearing. While off the road, we were still very visible, so Boo started off down FR26, and returned with a big smile on her face. She found a driveway off to the left, leading to a private property which had been triple padlocked with a barrier, but the barrier was 20 feet off the road into the forest. The entryway was flat, and the locks were well-rusted, telling us that not only was no one home, no one was probably coming tonight either. We moved Hapy, noting an "if you see suspicious activity call the sheriff at..." sign, and while darkness closed in, we put up our curtains... only to discover that when we let K2 use the bus as a tent the night before the yardsale, he had left the cabin lights on, draining the auxiliary battery dead. The day had cratered. Boo, though, was incredible. She pulled out a couple of camping chairs, a couple of beers from the cooler and our leftover Subway sandwiches and served a picnic in the dark. Day saved. No sooner did we put everything away than we saw headlights on FR26.

Solving and Slipping Out

WildWood Recreation Area

Fortunately, the headlights turned to the right and went to a different cabin. We chose to settle down and get as much sleep as we could, expecting to hear a tap-tap-tap of a Sheriff's flashlight on the side of the bus to awaken us before dawn. That didn't happen. In fact, we slept for 9 hours and awoke to birds chirping at a post-dawn sun. I peeked out the window and saw a man walking his dog, and he had a "what's that?" look on his face. Recognizing the man would probably call the Sheriff, we started moving rather quickly. I had a full liter of 100% G12 under the bed, so I pushed the bedding out of the way of my self-cut engine hatch and poured it into the overflow bottle. Luck was on our side as the coolant filled the overflow bottle to the "full" mark, telling me also that we didn't lose that much coolant in the prior evenings debacle. With the bottle full, we packed up for travel and fired Hapy's engine. He started without delay and hummed like nothing ever happened. Recognizing that were were still literally in the woods, we quickly checked that the space looked as we found it and drove to US26. As soon as we were on the public road, we headed for the chain-up area about 100' downhill. With Boo's foot on the brake, I went around back and checked everything. The coolant level had dropped a little bit, but it was still closer to full than fill.

ZigZag and WildWood

Rather than continue to drive away from civilization up to Frog Lake, we chose, instead to lollygag our way back out of the mountains, stopping first at the ZigZag Cafe. Boo and I had driven past the ZigZag Cafe for years before first stopping in a couple of years ago. Since then, we try to include a meal there when we're up at the mountain. It is a mom and pop place where the owners cook and serve some great food. You just need to wait for it. We whiled away our morning, sipping coffee, watching the trickle of the ZigZag River out the window and enjoying an easy brunch. Deciding that we still didn't have great confidence in the cooling system, we continued downhill. Just west of Welches, there is another spot we've driven past for years, but never visited: WildWood Recreation Area. Wildwood sits on the Sandy river with many riverside picnic areas, a group shelter and, apparently, very few visitors.

We turned a weekend camp into a day at the river, selecting food, drinks, and materials for a riverside hang out. We sat in the river and talked, snacked, and relaxed. We encountered only the camp hosts, a young family (who also had a VW bus in their yard) and a tourist from Singapore. The tourist was looking for natural sights so we talked about some of the wonders of Oregon, encouraged a visit to the coast and learned about Singapore. All in, we visited for about 20 minutes, but it really resonated for us.

Homebound

We had decided that driving up to the camp site was probably a lost cause; someone else probably found the reserved, but unclaimed spot and nabbed it. Besides, we still weren't 100% sure our cooling issues were behind us. So, as the afternoon shifted to evening, we packed up into the bus and nosed towards home. Now, the drive "down" from Mount Hood isn't all downhill. Most of it is, but there is a stretch between Brightwood and Sandy just past the Ivy Bear Restaurant where there is a long uphill pull. That was our first real test. By the time we got there, we were running at 185* (our Normal Operating Temp with the thermostat we have). As we started climbing the hill, the temp didn't really move, so I pushed the speed a little bit, trying to stress the system. That did it. A little bit. The temp rose into the low 190's, but stabilized at 194 the rest of the way up. Once we crested the hill and leveled off, the temp dropped right back down to 185 and then 183 (thermostat closed). Hazah!

There are 2 more meaningful hill-climbs on the way home after that one. The first is leaving Boring heading west towards Clackamas and the other is on I-205 between Oregon City and West Linn. The first, we took from a dead stop at the intersection across the street from the Timber Pub and Grub. We stayed in the slower-traffic lane, but held at speed the whole way and didn't see our temp get above the new high-point of 194*. For the second, we were at highway speed (60mph in the bus) and would have maintained speed except for a slow moving heavily-laden semi-truck in the right lane. Regardless, our temp wasn't a factor, and it appears that our cooling issue has been solved.

Since this ill-fated trip, the bus hasn't seen much action. I have been focused on getting the little convertible MGB into road-ready shape before the nice weather ends. My next few posts will probably be focused on that work. I hope to isolate another weekend day for a day at a park with the family in Hapy. We have plenty of water-side parks here, so it's just a matter of circling the day on the calendar and doing it.

That's it for today. Thanks again for following along-