I might have told this story before, but I couldn’t find it anywhere in my archives. If you’ve heard this before, I apologize and will make it up to you somehow.

Contrary to popular belief (and it IS popular; eavesdrop on any water cooler conversation and people will be discussing it), my first job wasn’t at McDonalds on Saanich Road in Victoria (where most of the universe worked at one point in time) – rather, a friend of a friend of my mother hired me to work at her Mexican food stall in a tiny food court outside a movie theatre (University Heights, for those who wish to visualize).

The job was good for two reasons: it introduced me to the marvel of chips and salsa, and gave me a taste of what it was like to have my own pocket money. Other than that, it was nothing special. I took orders, made food, cleaned up. Simple.

I had to be trained, though. At that time, Mexican food was a complete mystery to me. I didn’t know a taco from a hole in the ground, and I needed to be shown everything. The owner did a bit of the training, but her attentions were much more focused on their main business: a Mexican restaurant, of which the stand was an offshoot. Her two daughters ran the food court side of things, and they delivered most of my training.

It soon came to pass that I was utterly hopeless at making burritos. Something about the art of rolling a tortilla escaped me, and I had to be shown time and time again how to do it to their standards. In my fear of creating taco chaos, I would inevitably skimp out on filling as to not strain the tortilla shell. After making many sub-par food rolls, the younger of the two daughters shared some advice with me that will stick with me for the rest of my days:

Roll your burritos like you like your men!

From that day on, my burritos were thick, meaty shafts of considerable width and girth.

Okay, that’s technically not true. I was a 14 year old virgin, and while I was extremely familiar with the birds and the bees (and their lesser known companions: the lonely housewives, the curious bears, and the double-ended black silicone snakes), I had never actually SEEN a penis outside the extremely blurry, partially obscured, flaccid image in one of my educational Penthouse magazines. I had no idea what I was doing. I learned about sex through these magazines – not so much the pictures, but the Penthouse Forums. So, I attempted to roll my burritos like what the men who wrote those letters imagined they were packing between their legs.

My burritos turned out to be extremely exaggerated.

Learning about sex at the age of 8 thanks to your dad’s Penthouse magazines can really fuck a girl up. Imagine my disappointment when I realized that sex is usually between two people only, rarely takes place on pool tables, penises are almost never 10” long and wider than my wrist, and having sex for 8 hours straight is more painful than fun.

My job as a taco slinger didn’t last very long, but the advice I received has become a beloved catchphrase – almost anything can be done like you like your men. Personally, I like my burritos like I like my men: covered in salsa, in groups of 5, and without lettuce.

How about you?