Monday, June 02, 2008
Those crazy Amish.
When someone mentions "Amish" it provokes thoughts ranging from "quaint" to "weird" and lot in between. A friend at work, a machinist, was traveling through Amish country with his family a while back. They stopped into an Amish place that sold souvenirs, mostly hand made wooden knickknacks and such. It was a slow day, and they got to chatting with the guy who was manning the store. He told my friend that he was not the shopkeeper, he was just watching it for his brother-in-law (or something) who was ill. The Amish guy indicated that his "real" job was that he owned and ran a machine shop, which was right next door. Well, that got my friends attention, intrigued by the idea of seeing how an Amish machine shop might work. He told the guy that he too, was a machinist, and asked if he could see his shop. He was expecting to see something out the last century. Like most any machinist, the Amish guy was more than happy to show off his shop. They walked next door, and he pulled open the door. They stepped inside, and the Amish shop looked pretty much like the one we have at work. Go figure.

I thought of that because after dinner yesterday, we all had a slice of "Amish Friendship Bread" for dessert. This is that mysterious stuff that someone gives you in liquid starter form, usually in a ziplock bag, and you have to follow a multi-day, many-step, complex process to finally end up with something you can bake and eat. In the process you end up with several additional batches of starter goo that you then pass on to other "friends". Some of the instructions that come with this stuff include grave warnings stating that if you don't make this and pass it on, and let the starter die, that you are out of luck, as "only the Amish" know how to make the starter. And that this starter has been going for generations. Don't YOU be the one to mess it up! This strikes me as the baked-goods equivalent of a chain letter. All-in-all, I'm not sure just how friendly this all is. After all, you are being assigned a complex time consuming task, with grave consequences for failure. You have the sense that if you kill it off, it might be the last of its type, and someplace in Pennsylvania a bunch of guys with beards, black hats and scythes will know, and plot their revenge. Yikes. I guess it is lucky for us that we have few friends, so we don't get these too often.
thus voiced The A, Mistah @ 9:24 PM
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