Halloween - 2011
Halloween is surprisingly busy at work. I mean, I know there are better parties out there, but nobody seems to be finding them.
We're now almost 50% overstaffed - 3 waiters per side of the restaurant, a hostess and expediter, and still things aren't going smoothly.
These new people, they have to be told what to do. "Clear this table", "Offer them dessert", "Bring bread and bruschetta", "have they been offered drinks?". There's no initiative, nothing gets done unless you tell them specifically what needs to be done. And don't think to try and suggest two things at once, like "Clear the table and bring dessert menu's" because that will just fuck things up. We've never had so many staff and yet, oddly, I've never been so busy.
Gypsy has taken over the position of hostess, I try and convince her to arrange the tags in some sort of numerical order, say from 1-100, she doesn't understand, I explain that it helps to find the coat when the customer is done their meal, she interrupts "I know where all the coats are". I point out that seldom is she actually at the door when customers are arriving or leaving, and so it would be a courtesy to the rest of the staff who have to help them with their coats. Eventually she begrudgingly acquiesces and arranges them in order, this to appease me, later, when the customers are arriving, she still stuffs the coats in wherever and all numerical order is lost....
It's true she's never at the front door, whenever customers arrive or go to leave she takes it as her cue to go hide in the bathroom, send a text from some dark corner of the restaurant, go find something to eat in the kitchen. She winds me up, several passes through the restaurant putting away glasses and cutlery and I stumble across her again and again texting, eating, talking, never, ever working.
"Guess what I was for Halloween" she tells me, lifting her shirt to show me some fake-blood scars: "A rape victim". She's not joking.
I get annoyed with her. "You're picking on me" she says "I'm a hard worker....".
People who tell you their hard workers never are. Just like people who tell you how much money they have are invariably poor.
Even the newest girl, her second night, she doesn't yet know what she's doing but she seems to be able to figure things out pretty good, she tells me she has a hard time not going off on the hostess, she would but she's new, I'd tell her to go right ahead but she's still too new, in a week or two...
There's some gossip, one of our regulars, an Asian fellow with gang ties, has been reported missing by family and friends, we all know who he is, the outcome is probably not going to be so good.
The hot water heater is broken and we have our handyman come in to fix it. And from 7:00 to 9:00 he huddles in a corner while the owner goes through his fits and tantrums, throwing things, yelling, the handyman says to me "Is he always like this? I've never seen him like this before...." and I assure him that every night when we're busy he's like this, just wait and it will pass, he's a look of terror on his face and I think now he understands why there's so seldom the same faces in here twice....
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- Category: Miscellany
Rocky Horror, Anonymous & Notables
Saturday night an early departure from work, have to join the boy at the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Which, while tamer than the last one we saw, was also better in a few key ways, namely that they used an actual film (not a DVD), it did, however, miss the crowd-urgings of that anti-Michael J Fox, and crowd participation was not what it should be.
That said, the boy had fun and that's all that matters.
Sunday we start in Kensington, Coffee at the Higher Ground where the boy recognizes a couple of his PDA classmates, a couple of cupcakes from Crave, then off to our film.
Anonymous is the pick of the day, not bad, long, an interesting premise - a rather speculative look at the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, three out of five bananas I'd say, upon further research I'm amazed it's by the same director as 10,000 BC - one of most laughably bad movies I've seen in the past 20 years.
After which we go to Notables - a restaurant of which I've heard some fine things, we start with the crab & shrimp bake and steak tartar, then follow it with Grilled Bison Flank and the Spragg Farms Porchetta.
Now the food is good, the restaurant is busy, there are a dozen staff members all on different errands, and for a moment - just a moment, the 2 hours it takes us to eat dinner, it's life as normal. By normal I mean as it was once upon a time, before moving to the NE, before the various economic tragedies, there's that sense of - well, normalcy.
This is all subjective of course, but since moving to the NE, since working at the restaurant, I've become a regular at some of the worst bars on earth, I know this, it's the demands and expectations of my co-workers, and so while dinner is slow - it's good food, after all, we sit and enjoy the atmosphere.
The boy's pleased, he assures me it's the best meal he's had in a while, the fact is (and this is underlined when the bill comes...) that young men between the ages of 14 and 21 should only be fed at all you can eat buffets. That said there is something about the atmosphere that comes with the food, the non-ethnic, European traditions of cooking that warm the soul, and it's worth the price just to get out of my box, if only for an evening.
It's been a great day, great dinner, I take him home afterwards and make it an early night.
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- Category: Miscellany
Goodbye Word...
Enough is enough.
The laptop is old, true enough, but it's failing in software related ways, not in any physical sense. Every day, 10, 20 times, Word crashes - even when it hasn't been opened, and I'm confronted with the prompt to send an error report to Microsoft and recover my documents. The documents I didn't open. There are the countless attempted overwrites of the normal.dot file, detect and repair demands I track down my installation disc (I have, somewhere, but these seems like a lengthy solution to what should be a simple enough problem...).
The hundreds of error reports I've already submitted have not resulted in any helpful Microsoft tips to fix it.
Should I actually attempt to use Word I find myself with time for a coffee and a cigarette while it launches - Photoshop launches quicker.
So I've switched platforms, downloaded Open Office, and while I've only had time to browse the GUI it's looking very promising.
It launches when I click on the icon.
It's easy and intuitive to figure out, and formatting tricks that took forever and seemed impossible in Word are proving surprisingly easy. My fear of learning has been quickly dismissed by how little there is to learn.
So, goodbye Word, I wish I could say it's been nice, but, really, it's been a load of shit.
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- Category: Rants
miscellaneous trifles and gossip
Payday and pa is grouchy, the nephew observes that he's always grouchy on payday, something about having to cut cheques to the staff rankles him to the core of his being.
Most of us just stay out of his way.
The nephew, he's in shit, I can hear it when I arrive at work, the yelling in Italian, and I gather the sense of the conversation from G's input, courteously in English for my benefit. The Nephew drove Gypsy home the night before, only they didn't arrive and Gypsies father began calling pa at home at 1:30, 2:00 in the morning, wondering where his daughter is. And as annoyed as Pa is he can't seem to shake the proud look off of the Nephew's face, finally he's had his way.
Which is a relief, as the unattainable has now been had we can perhaps begin working on a plan to dispose of her, surely he'll be getting bored soon....
We're still auditioning new servers, the new (but so very old) waiter must have the feeling that this will spell his demise, he doesn't let on. A rather homely girl, the Nephew tells me that Pa doesn't want to hire any more pretty girls for fear the Nephew or G will shag them, the hostess has stopped coming into work, her father forbids her, personal issues at home, and so it goes...
Gypsy has made it her personal mission to try and be liked by me. Now all she'd have to do is the tiniest bit of work, something to justify the money we pay her, but that's more trouble than she can bear and so she tries other strategies, trying to ask my advice on personal issues (and I laugh and with a hunched back and diminished stature try to impersonate her and the Nephew's love child...), asking me repeatedly if she's fat (I discreetly don't answer until finally she wears me down, "Not for a marine mammal you're not....but if I spotted you sunbathing on a beach I'd be calling Greenpeace....": Moral - don't ask questions you might not want to hear the answer to....), she tells me she doesn't eat Pork because it tastes like people ("And when did you last eat someone?" I query, and here she blushes and hangs her head...) ...
It's a circus.
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- Category: Miscellany
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