...at the current location of the (Irish-y) burger
joint in the first floor of a historic hotel where I now work, on this
parents-day weekend thing at the local university:
1) The one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) turns
the corner by "dish" with a big spoon covered in buffalo chickenwing sauce in his
hands, and he turns into my one (eccentric) (blonde) (semi-manager) coworker and
gets some on her, leading her to exclaim in surprise and me to be like, “And
just when I thought [her first name] couldn’t get any hotter!”
2) Later, since I am a “floater,” I am passing through a
room and see two ladies starting their full-size dinner-portion salads and so I
check if everything is all right and if they need anything else as I pass through
because it’s something else that I can take care of right then, and my one (eccentric)
(blonde) (semi-manger) coworker sees me and outside the room is like, “I just
checked with them! We’re overserving,” and she says it in a brusque tone of
voice.
3) When I go to get water glasses from by the bar
dishwasher because we’re running out of water glasses, I ask my one (affable)
coworker who was in the (military) if there’s any ready, and he says there’s
half a rack, so I’m like, “Half a rack is better than none,” and then I hear
what I say and I pause and I say to him, “That’s what you tell yourself
when your wife gets a mastectomy,” and later I repeat that joke to my one
(younger) (plumpish) (hair streak-dyed) (mid-Southern) waitress coworker, and
she loves it.
4) When the bar is full and I go to put glasses on the
edge of the bar where we keep them when the tray-rack below is full but not put
in the dishwasher yet, the one (athletic) (Asian-American) (semi-manager)
instructs me a bit snippily to put them on the bar mats on the bar island,
since we always do that “when customers are present.”
5) When I take a tub of dishes to "dish" and am sorting
them out, the one (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner asks
people to start running food out to a gigantic table because it’s all coming
out and there’s no room on the island, and I ask my one (white) (young)
(gay-ish) (ponytailed) coworker who’s temporarily on dish if I can leave the
tub there and come back to it, and he says yes and so I do and go help with
food, and I come back like five minutes later and he’s like, “Please don’t ever
do that again,” and he says that he didn’t hear what I said and I kind of
politely shrug and say I asked, and he’s like,”Don’t ever do that again,”
because I guess other people came back and started putting dishes down there too and leaving them or
whatever.
6) As we cut down shift, my one (skinny) (bearded and
balding) (pun-loving) coworker comes out with a big bin of silverware that he’d
folded, and I go to break it up into the staging baskets that we keep at
various locations throughout the restaurant, and then I point to the half-empty
bin and put on a voice like I’m f*cking with him and am like, “Excuse me, sir,
but this is not full.”
“Yeah it is,” he’s like, seemingly seriously. “It’s
beauti-FULL.”
7) At the very end of the night, I see the one (older)
(white) (tatted) (free-thinking) (female) cook step out from the grill, and I’m
like, “Holy fuck, you’ve been here all night?”, and she said that she had
noticed my name coming in on tickets but had never seen me, either.
8) After a lot of parents leave and it’s the end of the
night and the restaurant is quieting down and there's really no diners there, there’s a big group of “those white
lady” businesswomen in and they migrate from the bar where they’ve been
drinking to a table that we set up for them, and then without asking one of
them pulls another table to put it on the end and it blocks the aisle over
there, and I check if everything is okay and they say that someone else is
coming to join them, and one of them puts stuff at another table and another
one puts a menu she doesn’t need anymore on yet another table, so that’s one
moved table and two more tables they’re just throwing stuff on, and later other
people join them and they’re at another nearby table with chairs splayed out
blocking everything, and as I pre-bus stuff one tosses her head back and actually
hits my hand as I’m walking by her.
9) As we’re going to clock out one by one, they announce
the owner is buying everyone a free cocktail after work, and so I give my order
and then go down to get my stuff from the breakroom, and when I come back up,
it’s like this clique of four people – my one (affable) coworker who was in
the (military), the one (bearded) (bleary-eyed) bartender with (mental health
problems), my one (blonde) (make-upped) (college-age) coworker, and my one
(younger) (plumpish) (hair streak-dyed) (mid-Southern) waitress coworker – and
it’s like me and my one (short) (young) (bearded) (vaguely Jewish) (local)
coworker standing around the edges, and it seems like everything is breaking up
and the one (athletic) (Asian-American) (semi-manager) is mixing shots and so I
linger but nope, they’re for the clique and they're drinking them in front of us, and there’s mention of going to a bar
but neither me nor my one (short) (young) (bearded) (vaguely Jewish) (local)
coworker are really included, and so I kind of down my drink and excuse myself
and go to go home, because some people are like that.