I'm Set Free

(continuing a series on various tools I own and love)

For the better part of my 20s I worked at a bar & grill in Lincoln Nebraska called POPears (nlib), as a cook and then as the kitchen manager (I bartended a few times too, atrociously). One of a cook's daily duties on the grill side of the operation was to change the oil in and clean the fryers. The fryer baskets hung on a thing--let's call it a "hanger"--when not in use and the hangers had to come off so you could clean the gunk out from behind them. Of the three fryers we had, two were outfitted with nice simple hangers that just lifted off and away, but one had a hanger held on by knurled thumb screws. One of those screws had long been lost and replaced by a bolt. That meant that when it was time to clean that fryer you'd need a tool to get the hanger off. A wrench probably would've been best option for doing so (actually, replacing the thumb screw probably would've been the best option; why didn't the lazy-ass kitchen manager ever bother doing that?), but as it was a pair of pliers was set aside in the kitchen specifically for this, and only this, use.

Now you might think that if you need a pliers to do one simple thing twice a day (off+on) that you probably can get by with the cheapest, crappiest pliers you can find, like maybe even a pair you found in an alley or whatever. And you'd be right. But at POPears the pliers we had to run that bolt off and on once a day were a pair of Snap-On slip-joint pliers that would set you back over thirty bucks if you bought them today*.

None of the dudes working there at the time were especially big car guys--except one of them--and if they were, they weren't aware of the instrument's pedigree so it just did its job day after day for years. The one who was kind of a car guy, and who eventually pilfered it on his way out in June of 2004 was, of course, yours truly.

The pliers' feelings on its change in status might run one of two ways. The way I thought of it was that it was a fine tool whom circumstances had sentenced to a pathetic position, and it was begging to be liberated to be put back in the fight. But instead, maybe it's hated me ever since, because I yanked it from its cushy job. We'll never know, I suppose.

*I'm not saying that someone went out and threw down that much moolah for a pliers to do one stupid thing. I'm sure it ended up there as an escapee from someone's stash.