Work…

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

1) At a big chaotic table of (white) women and their (white) daughters, my one (white) (young) (gay-ish) (ponytailed) coworker steps in to help them when they need to-go boxes, and he asks them how many, and the one (mom) says “Oh, just bring a stack,” and so he brings a stack of 6 for the like 8-10 of them at the table, and they end up using just one.

So, when I clear the table, I’m asking them if I can clear food, and when it’s clear that they’re not taking any more food with them, I’m like, “Because these were on the table, we can’t reuse them now. Would you like to take them with you, or would you like me to throw them out?”

(Some people... That was at least a few bucks worth of stuff, which really cuts into the profit margin from the table, besides being so wasteful.)

2) At  a small chaotic table of like four people, the one (Asian-American) girlfriend who picks up the tab slips a giftcard behind her credit card without telling me when she hands me the bill, and so I run the bill on the credit card and it’s only then that I see the giftcard, so I have to go get a manager to void the transaction so I can re-run the bill with the giftcard.

And, when I bring it to the table along with the receipt showing the voided transaction, she says she knows, since credit card transactions show up on her space-age internetted watch and she got notices for both times that I ran it, and she says this a little bit suspiciuosly, like wondering why I wasn’t on top of my job to see that giftcard there in the first place.

3) Everyone is kind of mopey at work from how the local university lost in the big recent athletic tournament, so I’m like, “You know, we should really call it March Sadness,” and multiple coworkers comment to me that that’s a joke like my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker would make, and he does in fact love that joke when I get around to telling it to him.

A recent-ish dream:

A number of months ago I dreamnt –

I’m opening this container of leftover aglio-et-olio spaghetti or whatever the f*ck you call it, some that I’d kept in a glass container for serving and then for keeping in my fridge for reheating later, and as I wash out the stray pieces of spaghetti from the side of the container, it becomes clear that there’s entire layers of spoiled spaghetti still left at the bottom, somehow, and it’s like spaghetti that had stuck together in the pot during boiling since I didn’t stir it up enough or add enough oil to the water or whatever when I boiled it, and as I go to get it out it becomes clear that there’s more and more of it just there at the bottom of the container, just wasted, and somehow I never knew that that much of it had gone bad.

 . . .

(. . .)

A problem worker…

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

Digging through my work bag, I find a menu that had been given to me so I could look through and memorize it somewhat, as well as some tax withholding paperwork in the center of it that I had filled out and never returned.

So, the next time that I work, I ask about the paperwork and they tell me to duck into the office where liquor is kept and put it on the desk of the one (short) (perky) (daytime) manager, and then I hand over the menu to the one (introverted) (white) (tattooed) manager since the menu by now is slightly different in the salads section and needs a new sheet, and she just sighs and gets this exasperated look on her face and is like, “Ugghhh, I already swapped out eighty of these!”

A problem customer…

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

This one (darker-skinned) (Jewish?) (Latin American) (Latina) is known from a past table where we had brought out the two (smaller) plates of french fries and the requested number of ketchups only to be informed that the ketchup wasn’t enough, and when we ask how many more they need, she’s like, “Bring one for everyone!”, which would be 18 cups of ketchup since they had a huge group, and so we check who still wants some from the people who are eating the two (smaller) plates of fries which are only sitting at one end of the big long table, and it ends up being that they only need 2 more cups of ketchup.

And, this time around she’s there as part of another large group although not quite as large, and it’s her birthday, and people are drifting in and drifting in, and when I go to fill water and pre-bus and ask if they need anything, she says imperiously that someone hasn’t ordered yet, and so I go and take their order right away, and then I check with the point-person for the table and I find out that that person had just only gotten there a few minutes ago.

And, when I return with other stuff for the table, that lady makes a point of pointing out that this person never received any water, even though I had just been at the table checking if people needed anything else and had even gone so far as to take the dinner order for that particular person right away, at which point I could have gotten a water for her, too.

(It was one of those tables that was so big and with so many waters sitting around that you just didn't know which one was whose, especially because in situations like that friends tend to get waters for their other friends before they arrive and they just sit out there for them.) 

Later, too, she sends back her burger, and since she’s full on salad, she has the new one boxed up to take home with her.

“Please can you take over this table,” my one (middle-aged) (white) (remarried) mom coworker asks me with just tiredness in her eyes, since she was the point-person for that table.

And, I tell her that our one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker had helped them last time when the ketchup thing happened, and he had said it was a table where you just “smile and say yes," a phrase he said with this big put-on shit-eating grin on his face.

(The next time I work with him I mention that table and I tell him that "that ketchup lady was in here again," and he’s like, “Oh yes, I remember her!”.)

During the last part of the night, too, I am back at their table to refill water, and I reach out to get a glass and one long curly wisp of her hair that was sticking out way way away from her head gets caught between my fingers as I reach out to get the glass of the person sitting next to her, and she kind of startles and looks but doesn’t say anything and I just keep doing what I’m doing and try to ignore it, hoping that it doesn’t turn into “a thing.”

(It doesn’t, fortunately.)

Addendum.

I've had customers ask me if we make the pre-made desserts there.

"Actually not," I'm like, with a small and discreet side-grimace of my mouth,"We get them from a bakery," judiciously finding a word for whatever factory they came out of, since that factory indubitably involves baking at some level and thus I'm not really lying, I don't think, am I?

Some work food…

…at my new job at the (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I now work at:

1) Pretty much all our desserts are premade food-service things that we plate up and maybe dress up a bit, but we don’t really make them there in any real sense of the word, and they’re all in this little side fridge in “the server alley” with saran wrap over them and stickers with freshness dates and bright red "USE FIRST" warnings that we must obey or we have to throw them out.

2) The breaded and deep-fried brussel sprouts have this blue cheese dipping sauce, but they’re also served over greens onto which house vinaigrette is poured, so you can try dipping the fried brussel sprouts in there, too – it’s the better sauce, in my opinion – and plus you get like a free third of a side salad at the bottom of your plate, if you choose to eat it.

The bigger ones also have more interior texture, too, since they probably don’t cook all the way through and get mushy like the smaller ones do, although the breading is always crisp and the taste is always good and so the mushy texture of some is more a neutral fact about the dish than a deal-breaker.

3) For some big birthday party where they had a special cake and leftover slices were later brought back and divvied up among all the workers, the one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager asks me what I think of it, and I say the frosting is amazing but the cake is a bit dry, and then she tells me that the cake was made special in-house – which I did not know – and that the one (short) (perky) (daytime) manager made the frosting, while the one (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner made the cake.

“Oh damn,” I was like. “I didn’t realize this was a test.”

Addendum:

At the t-shirt place, I wanted just the classic logo in the color scheme that would look good on me, but even though they had a gazillion shirts, of course they didn’t have that one, the closest they had was the classic logo in the inverse color scheme where the color that would make look like sh*t predominated.

It also isn’t a surprise that I made that mistake with the …MOM t-shirt, because it was one of those days when I was tired… I also stopped by a Target near there to pick some stuff up and use my $25 and $50 giftcards that I had gotten for being part of a follow-up health study to some research study that I had done years ago in college, and even though my purchase was like $40 and I wanted to use up the $25 card first so I could throw it out and then get into the $50 one, somehow I used the $50 card first, and it was too late in the transaction to go back and so there I was, still with two cards and unable to throw one out.