The Salty Waiter
This morning, a review calling me "Salty".
Which is true, last night, working with T***, who has the same abilities as the Mother in Law, only a lot prettier and infinitely more charming.
The owners had put their heads together and told me to just work until close and call T*** off for the night, and I reminded them that we've been busy the last few weeks, being the only show open and all, and that if it proved slow I'd send her.
It didn't prove slow, it would have been reasonably busy for 2 people. Only one comes in and does more damage than good, standing talking to one table while I seat three tables, expedite food for two, then bus two of her tables, then watch her run over to the ones I just sat and grab orders, making them effectively "hers". Her next visit will be at the till to chat them up while they pay the bill and tip.
She pours 6 glasses of foam then leaves them on the bar, complaining the beer won't work. I pour her beer. She complains of the fruit flies, as if she can't see them and pluck them out with a straw, the doors here, always open, it would be impossible to keep them all out.
I've become too much the donkey. The idiocy of dumping it all on me, or pairing me with T***, who will be a great waitress when we stop having tables...
So anyways, yeah, I'm a bit salty...
- Details
- Category: People
Thrift Shop Finds Passed
Unbelievable kitsch. This, in the back room where I volunteer, they have some caution about putting it out:
And this, in another thrift shop, and when was this ever funny?
- Details
- Category: Images
JR's Mother in Law
She's been here for 8 weeks to help us through the summer rush, a big mess of a woman with facial piercings, matted dreadlocks, tits pushed up through a bad hippy dress. She's a server, but to say she's a server does an injustice to the profession, if you sat in her section and had 3 courses, 4 rounds of drinks when you got up to leave every glass you touched, every plate, utensil and dirty napkin would still be on the table in front of you. She's fundamentally unable to run the glass washer, fill the ice well or refill waters, bus her own tables, every little thing, and so her help has become a little like carrying a 200 lb gorilla through the shift that takes an order then scoops the tips off the table and does nothing else.
Sloppy, sloppy. Or, as you might more gently say "Kootenay Style".
Anyways, she's tired of being here, the summers been long, she wants to get back to her life in Cranbrook. We all do, and her complaints that she's just there to make her son-in-law's life easier - well, that's what we're all here for. And we're all presumed upon and I'm getting a little tired of listening to complaints from someone who's getting days off left-right-and center; bloody hell just shut up and lets get on with it, there's a mere week, 10 days to go...
***
She'd suggested a few added benefits might keep her around, I was pretty clear that that wasn't an option. Doesn't stop her from trying. And - kindly, I can't say that I'm never that drunk so I just make up some stuff about workplace rules and professionalism and leave it at that.
***
Saturday morning, the night shift, I'm up and at-em, grab my coffee, gonna hit a few garage sales, check the thrift shops, I need a lamp, loveseat, bed, chair...the list is still far too long...but in the few hours before work I'm gonna get something...
Or not. 9:30 and my phone is ringing, I answer, and it's her, she's crying, family emergency, crisis, I have to get to work ASAP, she can't work, and I'm seeing red, I pull over, this *&#@!! of a woman, everyone, JR and his 10 family days off to go see the juggling squirrel in Revelstoke and 3 day work week, C* and her 5 day week-ends to visit her 95 year old dying mother who - predictably, is still alive, though I offered to go and finish her off myself, and now this, it's presumptive that my meagre life is subordinate to hers, free accommodations, all she can drink, nearly always drunk, ready access to a dive bar and all the bikers she can bring home, and I'm to give up my time, my life, so that she can "manage" the dumpster fire that's hers?
Livid, I'm screaming into the phone "Fuck You", it's gotten personal this presumptiveness, that since I don't have a life all summer long I don't mind giving up a bit more of it to her and this, fuck this. Fuck this.
Mentally I'm doing the math - she has 9 children. 1 of them has a job, the rest of them - to varying degrees, are wards of the state, 2 with full time caregivers, her life - best life, a dumpster fire of drunkeness, stray bikers, unreared children, is costing us the taxpayers to the tune of a million dollars or more per year.
She's a living, walking, talking argument for eugenics.
***
I go to work, she's not there, and the place - it's soon enough pandemonium, filled with tables, inside and out, only me and JR - the heydays of summer, and I'm regretting he didn't have the pleasure of working with his Mother in Law in this insanity...
***
Sunday it's the opposite. the taps - on, now suddenly off, and a restaurant that would have been short staffed with 5 servers the day before is now overstaffed with one.
...and now to today...
- Details
- Category: People
JR gets a job
Since the smoke, business drops off a cliff. JR is quick to exploit this, tacking another day off onto his two already, then showing up for the late shift Thursday, Leaving early on Friday and taking another extended 5 days off after.
It's his child's birthday after all.
He has 4 children, all of them born in the summer.
So he's around and about the restaurant, kids in tow, living his best work-free summer life.
He's very clearly on salary.
Everyone else can pick up the slack.
He's got a job interview, and his parents are excited, a "manager" for a courier company, pays $70, 000 per year if he gets it. They really want him to get the job.
He's excited about it, looking forward to the interview, but you know, you know...
This kid, he's never worked for anyone other than his parents. Or once, when he was a teen, but that's a short story. Since then, 14 years he's spent dodging work at the restaurant. Lists of things to do, updates to the till, that have been "on the list" for years now without doing.
a single thing about them.
He's a busy guy.
SO now, a job interview, for a job that pays him less in a full year than he'd earn in 4 months of the summer, if he'd show up.
If he'd show up.
Why show up? Clearly the salary is enough to pay his bills, he's 33, lives in his parents house with his wife and 4 kids, his wife, who doesn't work but nonetheless collects a cheque from the restaurant and EI every winter, as well as him.
Rumor is she wants to leave him, she's come to whatever few senses she has, but can't, not with 4 kids and a salary from a job she's never showed up to...
I've never met anyone more unprepared for the real world, and just shake my head and laugh, I mean, 70K is not a lot for a man with a stay-at-home wife and 4 kids, but doubtless he'll be kept on the payroll at the restaurant...
And I'm more than a little annoyed, not least at the fact that I'm working 10 hour days to enable his "staycation", that watching this gong-show of entitlement, this pretense of "get a job" and good citizenry, I mean, it's too much, and SR (JR's Dad), is done speaking with me, he knows, he knows, and his mother has a knack for turning the conversation onto other topics as soon as you humourously suggest that "40 hours a week? Birthdays off?", I mean, he's never worked forty hours in a single week his entire life and if ever he came close his bitchiness would be unbearable, let alone 40 hours a week for an entire year, but I imagine him showing up to the interview, references from both his mommy and his daddy in hand, smiling his syrupy saccharine smile, going through the motions, and then...
I've never wanted someone to get a job so badly in my life...
And you know, you think, well, this shit will never fly and then I recall the bosses' nephew from the old Italian place in Calgary, and how quickly he's risen through the ranks at CP rail, and you know, nothing's impossible...
- Details
- Category: People
Page 39 of 997