Some moments from the biggest sales day ever…

...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.

Preempted snippiness…

…from the one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) cook at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel where I work, now:

At the end of the night, I put the soup on the back kitchen counter and turn to go get the container that you dump it into, and he’s like, “Hey, don’t leave that there…!”, and at that I say truthfully but hyper-innocently that I was just going to get the container to take care of it, and he catches himself, and he says that he just wanted to let me know that you can put the lid on askew so it looks like a Star of David, that’s the best way to put the soup in the refrigerator to cool.

An evening of a storm, at my new job.

1) “Fucking lipstick,” I start saying as a schtick to my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military), pulling up dirty paloma glasses with the red spice still around a bit of the rim in a big blotch that somewhat resembles a gigantic lipstick stain.

2) Before I’m set to clock out as the restaurant is closing, the storm alerts go off on all of our phones, and then the sirens start, and the one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager asks me if I want to leave right away to get ahead of the storm and she can call me an Uber because she knows that I take the bus, but I think and I text the nearby bus stop for arrival times and there’s no reply and so I say it’s better to wait in the basement breakroom and I just have a few more minutes of work so I can finish it up and clock out and go wait there.

And, I do, and I chill out for like 35 minutes and do shit online on my phone as I eat some macaroni-and-cheese and Southwestern corn salad that had been left over from a reception and that they put out in 2 big trays for all of us.

Some of the building residents from the upper floors are in the basement social area, too, and I see the one (older) (Latina) (hostess), who turns out to live in the building, which I did not know.

She says she never knows when we have food “back there” (i.e. in "the server alley" when she's working), so I promise the next time there’s food, I’ll come up to her host-stand and let her know, I didn’t know that that was happening and I would have come up earlier that night and told her if I had known that she didn't know it was there.

3) When I come up and text info for the bus, it still doesn’t return info and I wonder if the bus lines shut down during a tornado alert or warning or whatever, so I walk over to the nearby transit terminal and what do you know, busses are running and mine comes soon, and the driver says wind might have made their system at the bus garage go out, and when that happens it cuts out stuff like the texting and this app that they use for paychecks or schedule or whatnot, too, so that's probably why I couldn't get arrival times on my phone.

A dream from this spring:

This spring, I dreamnt:

I’m doing all of my laundry completely in the basement laundry area in the basement of the front house and so I'm nude while I'm doing it because I have to wash all of the clothes that I"m in, too, and while I'm in the middle of this I realize that there’s all these black socks left in the bottom of the huge white-and-blue canvas laundry bag, and as I’m pulling them out to put in the washer, I hear voices, and so I quickly pull the bag over me to cover myself as the one (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner and the one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager walk by and glance over at me, confused, like why am I there, nude.

. . .

(. . .)

(I like never have nudity dreams.)

Two events, one day…

…at the (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel that I now work at:

1) A(n old) (white) lady says her grilled chicken breast is too tough and that her knife doesn’t cut well and when she tries to cut it her tray shakes.

2) My one (blonde) (make-upped) (college-age) coworker’s (young) (tight-bodied) dad is in to see where she works one more time before she transfers schools and leaves next month, and as I pass through “the server alley” my one (make-upped) (Eastern European last-named) (master’s student) coworker is “girl talking” with my one (younger) (plumpish) (hair streak-dyed) (mid-Southern) waitress coworker and she’s whispering that he doesn’t look like her dad, he looks like her boyfriend or brother, and I hear the word “hot,” too, as I pass by, it's like everyone wants the hot dad.

Some ribbing…

…to my one (half Asian) (just-graduated-college) coworker, when I see him at a coffee shop where I’m postering for an event:

“So unfaithful!”, I’m like, and he’s confused at first, and then is like, “Because I have a job here?”

. . .

(Like a week-and-a-half later, I realize that I don't see him anymore at the one [Irish-y] burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, and I realize that I must have just randomly showed up at his new job and ribbed him, thinking it was a second job, and not a job that he quit us for.)

Some pickiness and confusion from all of the different people at a large (South Asian from South Asia) table...

 ..at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I work now:

- Says to bring out water, then water is brought and decides on no ice.

- Says wants all vegetable toppings, then says no tomato, next says all 3 sauces, then says just mayo.

- Request to substitute special salad from different entrée, then nixes that idea.

- Special request for grilled onions, not raw.

. . .

($6 tip on a $60 bill – not bad.)