Oh, the glories of working at a dining establishment! This week was full of amazing moments. Most of them involving large insects and me being cursed out in a dramatic monologue by a woman with a thick Soviet Block accent.
So Wednesday night I was called into work. This is fine with me seeing as I have no other source of income (gigolo business aside), so I’ll take whatever hours I get. My boss has a way of making every night seem like it’s going to set records for number of patrons. She called me Wednesday and made it sound imperative that I come into work because there was SOOOOO much to do. So I get there and, of course, there’s absolutely nothing to do. She ended up throwing me into the bar and making me do inventory – an intricate intellectually strenuous activity that involves counting beer bottles. After that was over, I was again bored and moved into the dining room to bus.
At the end of the night I have to replace all the candles in the dining room, so I was reaching into this drawer to take out the candle box and let’s move into SLOW MOTION: My hand grips the handle of the drawer and slowly draw it open. Reaching into the darkness my fingers grip the soda canisters, they run gracefully over the box of larger candles before stopping on the squat, quadrilateral form of the table candles. With confidence I withdraw the box and gently raise the flap. Then…this is a moment lost to history, as I have no idea how large the roach actually was, the little insect jumped out at me. My initial judgment was that it was a good two feet long, with razor sharp pincers and wearing one of those German helmets with the huge spikes on them. Whatever the size, it scared the crap out of me and caused me to yelp like a kicked puppy and swat the roach across the room.
After this incident, I thought it would be better to tell my boss that there were roaches on the loose. So I walk into the bar and discreetly tell her that there are many ‘little friends’ in the soda cabinet and they should do whatever they do to take care of them.
Which…evidently is making me do it. As I’m leaving for work that night my boss grabs me and is like, “Tedd, can you come in early, wear dirty clothes and clean out the soda cabinet? ‘Kay, thanks!” Then she like vaporized. I was not thrilled about this prospect at all. It’s not that I’m really afraid of roaches, but I really didn’t want to stick my hand and a rag soaked in Clorox into a dark cabinet that I knew was probably overflowing with a Cucaracha Fiesta. Roaches I’m okay with, but it’s the unknown of shoving an appendage into a nest of small creatures that makes me uncomfortable.
Anyhoo, the next day I go into work in my dirty clothes and kind of stand in front of the cabinet in a heroic pose. With as much masculinity as a drag queen in San Francisco, I managed to open the cabinet and gingerly start taking out the boxes of soda. I leapt back about twenty feet when I saw five little roaches scurry farther into the recesses of the cabinet. When I finally got all the soda containers out, I saw that there was a ripped up magazine in the shadowy region in the back of the cabinet. I managed to lift it up and realized that there was a drain in the back that all the roaches had been scurrying into. This kind of made me relieved since I knew that there wasn’t going to be some undulating pile of roach bodies hidden in one of the corners. With renewed confidence I grabbed some bleach and scrubbed everything out. Then my boss rolls up and asks me if I sprayed. I had no idea where the spray was, so I gave her a nugatory, and then she told me that it was probably a good idea, which I concurred because spray = dead roaches.
But…my math was off and spray does not equal dead roaches. It actually = drugged up roaches fleeing crazily into every corner of the restaurant. So I spray into the drain in the bottom of the cabinet and go change and start setting up the dining room. About 10 minutes later the Roach Exodus began. In the space of a half hour I killed three, while the bartender slayed three in a single trip to the bathroom. The kitchen was evidently worse as I walked into the back and saw a huge, beauty of a roach, crushed to pieces in the middle of the kitchen, at the same time as my boss was screaming because another one was running in front of her.
The dining room fared a lot better – only one was seen by the public, and it was by an old man who just kind of pointed at it as it stumbled across the floor. “Hey,” he said nonchalantly. The waitress crushed it and I swooped in and picked it up to put it in the trash. Over the course of the night there weren’t many problems, but my boss kept coming back to the servers’ station and eyeing me suspiciously. I think in some corner of her mind she blamed me for the whole mess; like Moses I was raining down plagues on this Turkish restaurant (second Book of Exodus reference…random). By the end of the night everything was back to normal, and to date I haven’t seen a single roach since.
The other great story was from Friday night. I was the host, so I get to seat people and then assign waiters to each table I seat. George is like the head waiter, so he always stops by the host station and tells me what to do – who to seat where, and which server should get the tables. At the beginning of the night he told me to seat him with two tables before I sat the server who came on the shift later. I thought that was fair, but we were pretty slow, so it was like 630 before I had a table come into the restaurant. I didn’t want to ruffle George’s feathers because we get a long well and he lets me go home early on slow nights, so I sat him. It was another ten minutes before anyone else came in…so I was starting to feel bad for the other waitress.
About an hour later we got slammed and I was seating people like crazy. At the end of the rush I sat a table for the waitress who I had kind of sold out for George. Anyway, I sat the table and went over to tell her that she had a new table. She suddenly like turns to me and slams down her server’s plate and starts going into this huge dramatic monologue. I have to mention that this lady is foreign – she speaks good English, but she never really makes conversation or engages anyone directly. So, honestly I had never heard her get angry or raise her voice…
Well, she slams her server’s plate down and starts this big speech. It literally sounded like she was auditioning for some Off Broadway play entitled, “Servin’ in the USSR.” She looks at me and waves her arms.
“How many tables will you seat me?! How many? You seat me one table! You seat me another table! Now you seat me third table? I seat all these tables and I am serving them!” (If you’ve seen West Side Story the movie, imagine the last scene where Maria waves around the gun and screams, “How many bullets are left, Chino?! Enough for you!!! Enough for me!!!”)
At this point she looked at me and I was having a hard time not laughing. So I just put my hand on her shoulder and try to talk her down from the edge of the Kremlin.
“Look,” I said, “I’m following a rotation. If you don’t want another table let me know and I’ll skip you.”
She kind of backed off at that point and left me alone. Then twenty minutes later she rolled up to the host’s station and looked at the reservation book. After she looked I asked her if she could handle another table in the next fifteen minutes. Her response to this was putting a hand on my leg and laughing sweetly. “Oh, course, dahling! I am fine!”
What the eff? A half hour ago you were going all Stalin on my ass and now you’re Miss Cool and we’re BFF?
I don’t even know…
Also randomly, for another update, I’m headed back to Korea next month. My buddy called and I’m going to sub for him while he goes on vacation. I’ll be back at the end of May, but it seemed like a good chance to see some of my friends and make some good money. I’m actually going to make the same for a month in Korea as I would a whole summer at the restaurant I work at… Go figure.
No comments:
Post a Comment