Turkey Tipsters Lead You To The Gravy Train
The phones ring in a third-floor room in an office building in this Chicago suburb. The callers from around the nation are anxious and sometimes confused, nervous and occasionally upset - especially today.
Help comes from the soothing female voice that answers the phone. But don’t call this a hotline.
“Hotline implies crisis and we’re trying to avoid that,” said Jean Schnelle, supervisor of the 48 operators with telephone headsets.
The callers are trying to avoid that, too. But how will they know if the turkey’s done cooking? The guests are coming through the door and the bird’s still pink - what to do?
For 12 hours a day since Nov. 1 - and with increased franticness - operators have been fielding calls at the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line. It is owned and operated by the folks who produce Butterball brand turkeys, although one need not be a Butterball buyer to use it. (The U.S. Department of Agriculture operates a similar line.)
They have answered questions about when to start thawing the bird (this morning is too late) and how long to cook it (checking with a meat thermometer is best).
They have responded to a hodge-podge of queries on everything from gravy to stuffing (answers found in the three-inch Turkey Bible at every phone station) to how much turkey you need to feed five Great Danes (a lot) to whether you can FedEx a cooked turkey (not recommended).
The women - they’re all women, though male candidates are welcome - are home economists or dietitians or nutritionists with college degrees and additional talk-line training. Smartly dressed, they sit in rows before computer screens handling thousands of calls a day, looking like pledge night volunteers on public television.
The vast majority of questions are simple and the experts can answer them without consulting their trove of turkey data. Sometimes, however, they have to, uh, wing it.
“We had one man call and say that the wires on the back of his oven were smoking. That we can’t deal with,” said Carol Miller, a home economist who’s been talking turkey for 13 Thanksgivings. “I told him to call 911 and then call us back and we’ll help him do the bird on the barbecue grill.”
She recalled the nice young man who phoned because he wanted to propose on Thanksgiving and wanted to put the engagement ring in the stuffing.
“It’s probably OK,” she told him. “But the odds are against her getting that helping of stuffing and if she does, she might bite down on the diamond and be a toothless bride.”
xxxx TALKING TURKEY Butterball’s Turkey Talk-Line will operate from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m. (PST) today. After the holiday it will operate from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The number is 800-323-4848. On the Internet, access http://www.butterball.com MThe U.S. Department of Agriculture Meat and Poultry Hotline is staffed from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. (PST) today and recorded information is available around the clock. The number is 800-535-4555. On the Internet, access http://www.usda.gov/fsis