Oh, it's my least favorite time of the week. Sunday night, and I don't want to go to bed because I know that when I wake up, I have to get ready to go to work. Although I don't think of it as a job anymore. I think of it as some kind of special Hell set aside for me to get through to see how tough I really am. This is my third summer there and I have to say, I didn't think it could get worse but it did. For a while, my boss was being cool, about six or seven months ago, I looked forward to going to work. Everyone was in a good mood, and it wasn't too cold or hot or anything. Occasionally my boss would stand around helping and talking to me and it wasn't horrible by a long stretch. He even bought me an iPod about a year ago. He'd gotten one and I had been playing with it and he brought me one one day from Sam's club and I was so happy.
Back then (it seems like eons ago) he gave me a raise every few months, and he'd give me a bonus here and there, you know, twenty bucks, or even ten, no matter, I was happy he was thinking of me. He made noises about getting insurance for us, fixing the air conditioning, buying us some floor mats.
Something changed dramatically and now when he comes in, he sits at his computer, reading e-mails and surfing the internet, buying stuff.HE's always buying something. He's got about fifteen E-bay auctions going at any given time, he's got fishing gear catalogs laying around. He flew out to California not too long ago to buy a Dodge Ram Hemmings Diesel Supercab Harley Davidson edition. I hear it was only fifteen thou. I hear it is only six thousand to fix the A/C unit at work.
He bought a bass boat not too long ago, and about a ton of fishing gear to go with it. He moans about how he was up late fishing until Midnight. And then he got severely sunburned last week from fishing without sunblock. Oh did I mention he also has a Harley Davidson? And all the gear to go with that as well.
Anyhow, the man rarely shows up at the diner until way later in the day unless he has to bring something from Sams' club. He won't leave us notes as to what he expects us to do each day, and unless it's a set special (we have set specials Tu, Thur and Fri but not Mon and Wed) then we have to guess what we're having. We text message him around seven a.m. and if we are lucky we hear from him about ten or so. (lunch is supposed to be ready by eleven!) Quite often, he doesn't bring the food needed to make the special until it's getting uncomfortably close to eleven. Quite often the regular customers will be asking what the special is (it's amazing how many people plan their day around what our diner is having!) and we can't tell them and they seem to really be let down by that.
I get to work at six forty five or so to start at seven. For about a year I got to work early and didn't clock in but started working anyway and clocked in on time. I stopped doing that about the time my boss became a pure dickhead. I gave him a lot of time, that's for sure. When the bonuses and the raises stopped, I stopped being uber employee. Now it's all I can do to get through the day. I walk in and the reality of it hits me and I lose my smile. I've hated the job since I started, since I realized right off the bat it was a dump, but... I had a vision of making it something. We won 'Best Breakfast in Northern Alabama' on an internet contest in the area. I never told my boss that I and another employee sat up all night voting over and over. I wanted us to get in the paper so my boss would be happy. I was still trying to impress him then. Get in the paper we did! And we were really swamped for a long time. Well into the next year, we had people waiting for a table. And I worked six days a week and paid off a lot of bills , but I began to get tired.
Eventually I got slower and slower and had to work five days a week. He opened up for nights, and the night crew never did a thing that resembled work. I would come in to find no prep done, they'd used up all my prep and left me to do prep again first thing in the morning. And the floor would not even be swept, and the fridges not wiped down. There was always meat blood in the fridge, broken eggs in there, raw chicken juice dripping onto the raw hamburger, because not one of the night time employees knew one thing about food safety, least of all the manager, who was a friend of the boss's who needed some extra money. His idea of being helpful was to rearrange all my spices so that I couldn't reach 'em, and to plant herbs out front, that no one ever watered or used.
So I was very happy when he shut down the night time shift. Now, Monday through Friday, if I prep stuff it stays prepped. And I get to keep my floor clean for five days. But when I come in on Monday, all hell is broken loose over the weekend. I dont understand how a growed-up man like the weekend dishwasher can't handle the volume a forty seven year old woman does all week. But he can't.
So I come in and clean it all up, get it back to rights, label all the stuff that is supposed to be labeled, get it back into ship shape because we are ready for the Health Department to come anytime. It's been three months since our last inspection. Usually when they come, I do a whirlwind tour and get everything set to rights quickly. I put paper towels in the kitchen dispenser (boss says not to use them, though, they are expensive!) (dont' ask me what he expects us to dry our hands on. I guess our pants) ... although since then the dispenser has been taken off the wall to put in the men's room. So I just have a roll sitting on top of the ice machine.
I throw away the (always) expired buttermilk he has in the fridge that he put there a long time ago for making Chess pie. He put Chess pie on the menu (his mother's recipe) but he never takes the time to come in and make it. We never have Chess pie. In the newspaper article it says to come in and ask the cook to make you strawberry shortcake biscuits. Because the boss made them for the newspaper reporter and said he loved making them for customers. Well, you just try to get the cook to make you one of those, I dare you. 1) we never have any strawberries except on Thursday and 2) the cook doesn't have the slightest clue how to make it. In fact the cook is just that, a line cook. Let me tell you that he did not know the difference between butter and margarine. I had to enlighten him.
So last Friday was another shit day, Briskets cooking in the oven at four hundred degrees because the boss didn't tell us to put them in earlier, so he comes in and rolls his eyes and grunts angrily at us because we are not mind readers and I get to work back in the back with the oven set at four hundred. And get this! the boss was getting set to cater a party on Saturday, for which he had cooked about fifty pork butts, ON THURSDAY, and PUT THEM IN A COOLER to sit until Saturday. He left a note (which I will post here) that was supposed to keep us from opening the coolers. Granted, they stayed pretty warm in there. (They were wrapped in foil) but I don't think that is a legal method of keeping meat for two days. At any rate, the note mentions one of the servers (I blurred it out to keep her anonymity) who I happen to really dig. She's only 19 and the boss gets on her like a tyrant about things. Also her sister who is 16 works there too. And the sixteen year old is in my opinion the best server we have! Anyhow, I didn't think it was a very nice note. I don't know why my boss can't just leave a note saying "Don't open these! Trying to keep the meat hot!" Also : I don't know why he can't leave notes for stuff we need to know like putting the brisket in early. Or what we're having for a special.
Recently boss man made it so we have to pay for our meals. Half price, which would be cool at say, Pizza Hut or something, but I refuse to pay for pure shit. And that is what that diner serves. Literally if Scatman is around, haha. Anyhow, I refuse to pay for that food, so I don't eat unless the cooks give me something they were going to throw away. Which they do! And when I walk in in the morning, the cook brings me a pan of oatmeal. Every morning. I don't pay for it, no one says anything, it's just the cooks paying homage to me because I save their ass on a regular basis. I do so much for them that they follow around behind me doing stuff for me too, it's pretty tough there and just like in an army, we recognize we won't make it through a single day if we don't have each other's backs. And that is how I look at it, like I'm in the military doing KP... I have to make a game of it. I know that when I go in in the morning, there will be a hundred flies and food on the kitchen floor and meat juice all over the fridge inside and out, there will be brown lettuce and wilted salad and wrinkled tomatoes and brown hamburger patties because no one seems to be able to wrap them worth a crap.
There will be waitresses who don't tip me out, who stand around talking half the day while I bust my ass. There will be the regulars, who I need to write a poast about, because they drive me straight up a tree all by themselves. There will be the same cars in the parking lot, the same nasty disgusting coffee brewing, and the same smell of red -eye gravy in the air.
And I'll have my tired feet, my headache that starts as soon as I walk in (I think the water heater leaks gas), everyone asking me what to do (because I'm the only who knows what to do! I dont know why a dishwasher is the only one who knows what to do but that's the way it is) and I'll start the countdown until I'm free again and can come home and take a shower. And do a shit load of homework wishing I wasn't too exhausted to put on some nice clothes and go fill out more applications.
Tomorrow I will lift that fifty pound sack of sugar that no one else will empty into the bin, I will rinse out that nasty mop that no one else will rinse, or hang up! I will take all the rotten and spoiled food out of the fridges, check the expiration dates, refill all the chemicals on the dish machine (no one else does that: when I leave, I suspect it will not get done, ever, and the dishes will come out looking like pure hell) and empty the scrap screens and clean the floor drain and sweep the store room and empty my boss's trash (full of Mountain Dew bottles and cigarette butts) (he recently lost all his teeth to drinking too much Mountain Dew but that didn't stop him!)(he got dentures) and wash his ashtrays (I have to do something nice for him every day. IT's the only way to balance the hate that builds!) and I will begin saying the serenity prayer over and over and over.
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