Cheating to Survive (Fix It or Get Out) Read Online Free PDF

uncouth, insolence, vulgarity and terror. Feared by the entire food service department and responsible for the resignation of at least ten employees including her own management staff, she kept her dietitians waiting while she finished her morning egg-white sandwich.
    They avoided conversation, expecting the conference room door to open any moment with the usual wallop and smash into the grey wall, expanding the hole in the sheetrock. Their weekly meeting triggered anxiety and dread.
    Catherine and Victoria crossed and uncrossed their legs nine times between the two of them. Victoria rubbed her palms down her hydrangea blue pants and Catherine cleared her throat in an annoying repetitive manner.
    Heather only thought about avoiding her stench. She sprang out of her chair and propped the window an inch before retaking her seat. Outside, a profusion of sunshine burst from the forsythia bushes, and callery pear trees provided a white canopy along the hospital’s parking lot, but Heather focused instead on the housekeeping employee dumping trash into the dumpster. What she wouldn’t give to see a body or two tossed in there.
    The door shot open fracturing the already damaged surface. A chip of sheetrock hung, teetered, then crashed to the floor. Jean Vollbracht, the food service director, took one step in and jarred to a halt, her ridged posture disturbed only by rapid gulping of air and nostrils that flared.
    Catherine and Victoria flinched. Heather stretched, arms high above her head, and then returned to her seat, easing into it. Her pen whipped up and down between her fingers mimicking her co-workers’ heartbeats.
    Jean tramped into the room and slammed her papers onto the far end of the rectangular table directly across from Heather. The air quality as far better on this side of the room.
    “Well?” Jean shouted.
    Catherine and Victoria glanced at each other and then to Heather who shrugged her shoulders and tossed them a vacant look.
    “No one has any ideas for National Nutrition Month?” Her fist pounded the table three times. “Why the hell are you working here if you’re so incompetent?” She opened her mouth wide and swayed her head back and forth mocking their obvious stupidity. Bits of egg lingered on her hefty tongue. Heather’s life could be worse. She could be an egg remnant.
    As usual, Jean failed to mention what this week’s meeting entailed. Catherine and Victoria shuffled through blank papers, stared at the ceiling and glanced at the clock. Heather cracked a bubble in her gum and flicked off her high heels.
    “Well,” Catherine’s hesitant voice began, “we could discuss the importance of eating five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day. It’s so important.” She circled a random word on her paper, avoiding Jean’s blazing eyeballs.
    “Fruits. And vegetables? That’s the most insipid, lackluster thing I’ve heard. Done to death.” Jean shoved her chair away with her massive thigh, not because of anger, but because she couldn’t fit in it. She always stood in their meetings.
    Heather leaned back, arms folded in her chest and fixed her gaze directly on Jean. “We could talk about the myths of fat. How whole eggs are one of the most nutritious foods. How butter is high in lauric acid and how lard is loaded with Vitamin D, which we’re all now highly deficient in. We can explain how people that order egg-white sandwiches but pile it on a deadly white roll, with fake margarine, sausage, bacon and cheese, are really not helping their cholesterol levels.”
    Jean arched over the table and dug her nails into the faux wood grain top, her veins tensed against her skin.
    “What if we discuss how patients with diabetes no longer require a snack before bedtime?” Victoria interrupted Jean’s impending outburst. “Educate the staff on how medications have transformed over the years no longer causing that drop in blood glucose levels over night.”
    Jean snatched a piece of paper,