Nicole Johnson was just settling into her daughter’s dance recital when her phone rang. Somewhere, she knew, a cook was in trouble. Turkey troubles respect no boundaries. “Is this really what you do? It really exists?” a grateful mom asked when Johnson took the call.
At this time of year Johnson, a co-director of Butterball’s turkey hotline, expects interruptions. One of the key staff members at the help line operated during the holiday season, Johnson is used to the mix of gratitude and panic. She’s expecting a lot more as the US prepares for Thanksgiving this week.
The recital took place exactly two weeks before Thanksgiving but the phones at Johnson’s workplace were already ringing off the hook. “We are busy. Ooh, we are busy today,” Johnson said the following morning. “A lot of people are calling in already – it’s a good thing.”
Turning a 12lb bird into a meal for 10 while juggling friends and in-laws is a task that would have a St Lawrence, patron saint of chefs, reaching for the Xanax. People need help. Last year, about five million home cooks reached out to the talk line through 1-800-Butterball, butterball.com, live chat, email and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. On Thanksgiving day alone, the talk line answered more than 10,000 calls.
In the weeks leading up to the big day, the phone lines at the Chicago-based center are busy with callers wondering what type of turkey to buy, how to prepare it and most often how to defrost it.
People can get quite creative with their thawing solutions, said Johnson.
We received a phone call one time where a father was put on toddler duty and he was also put on turkey duty. So, he needed to thaw his turkey and bathe his toddler twins. He decided he was going to multi-task and do all three in one shot. We could hear the water splashing in the background and turns out he has his kids and the turkey in the tub all at the same time. And he wanted to know if that would be an acceptable way to thaw his turkey.
Thankfully, the multitasking dad did not throw out either of the babies or the turkey with the bathwater.
“We have heard everything from the bathtub to jacuzzi,” said Johnson of other creative ways to thaw a turkey. “People have hung it on the clothes line, they have tried to thaw it in the dishwasher – the cycle method.”
One woman’s turkey woes began long before the thawing process. While on the phone with a Butterball operator discussing how to thaw her bird, she realized she had misplaced it. She had stored her turkey in a snowbank outside but forgot which particular mound she buried it in.
Sometimes the panic really shows. Asked what state of defrost her turkey was in, one worried caller replied: “Florida.” Another confessed he had used a chainsaw to chop his bird in half and wanted to know if the oil from the chain would adversely affect the taste. One man found a turkey in his dad’s freezer from 1969 and wanted to know if he could cook the 30-year-old bird. The answer was no.
The questions are fielded by about 50 operators, five of whom are men.
“It’s not that we wouldn’t have welcomed them in the past,” said Johnson. In 2013, the hotline made an effort to recruit male operators with an ad asking: “Are you the man we’ve been looking for?” No man had applied for the position prior to that. Now, two years later, 10% of its staff are male. “It adds really fun dynamic to our group and we have a lot of men callers. They call the talk line. It’s nice for them to hear another male on the other line.”
Once hired, aspiring operators undergo a week of training at the beginning of the season. The training takes place in the talk line’s test kitchen and involves cooking and tasting turkeys all week long. When they are not talking turkey November through December, these operators usually work as dietitians, nutritionists and cooks. The average tenure of a turkey talk-line operator is 15 years.
“One of my graduate dietetics professors was also a staff member here and referred me,” said Johnson, who joined the talk line in 2001 when she was a grad student. “I applied, got my foot in the door and several years later, here I am. Married since then, with four little butterballs and still talking turkey.”
The talk line runs from 2 November until Christmas Day. The designated turkey cooks, who have a day job, can rest easy as the talk line is open until 8pm central standard time.
“We are also open a couple of weekends in November and December – the weekend before Thanksgiving and the weekend before Christmas to go ahead and field all those questions,” said Johnson.
While the talk line has been around for 35 years, its real claim to fame is an episode of West Wing that aired on 21 November 2001. In that episode, President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, places an anonymous call to the hotline in order to find out the proper way to cook his stuffing.
“I think this is a wonderful service you provide,” Bartlet tells a Butterball hotline operator.
“Wasn’t that cute? That was so many years ago that that aired and we got a lot of calls and a few comments about it,” said Johnson, who re-watches the video at least once a year. “People still remember that.”
The holidays can be stressful - let the experts that have been there for you for 35 years help #tbthanksgiving pic.twitter.com/AE8q0xOdD9
— Butterball (@butterball) November 10, 2015
Despite being a co-director of the talk line, Johnson still mans the phones sometimes. Especially on Thanksgiving when the staff work eight- to 10-hour shifts.
“Thanksgiving is our busiest day. We need to have as many folks here helping us out as we can. That includes myself and Sue, the other co-director, answering phones or answering emails,” said Johnson.
If she is manning the phones at the hotline, who cooks the turkey at her house?
“That’s always the question. How do your kids feel about it? That’s really all they’ve ever known. My husband is on turkey duty,” she said. Does he do a good job with the turkey? “He does. Of course he does. Because I am instructing him.”
