I managed a couple of restaurants, in a previous life. It is thankless work, and hard to make creative. And if any member of the staff can't or doesn't make it in, guess what? The manager does it. In her manager dress and manager shoes.
So there is strong incentive to get and keep dishwashers. However it's hot, dirty, heavy work for low pay. Even the pleasure of working for ME (cleverly referred as Miss Manager... get it?) wasn't much incentive to accept or keep a dishwashing job.
And holy cow. The applicants that arrived when you were forced to run an ad for the position. Aye. I don't wish to describe, for fear of offending the many fine, upstanding, hardworking dishwashers. It's mostly the APPLICANTS who are scary and smelly and vaguely... felonious.
Imagine my relief when Terry arrived: lean, bespectacled, earnest, almost compulsive. Neat. Clean. Punctual. Early, even. He did smoke like crazy, but he could have sniffed glue right in front of me and I would still have been delighted with his job performance. What a relief. A reliable guy. Respectful. "Miss." Quiet.
And imagine my extreme dismay when he did not come to work one morning. I was dismayed not just because of the usual disgust at trying to plug the gap and make it through the lunch rush. I was dismayed because I was WORRIED. It was SO unlike him.
I actually DROVE DOWN to the place where he lived. It was a motel on one of the downtown, down-at-the-heels avenues. I knocked on his door; no answer. I was really worried that he was feverish in there or something. I went to get the manager and tell him something must be really wrong.
It was.
He said, "Lady, you better get yourself another dishwasher. About 4AM the cops come in here and got him. He'd escaped from prison in Texas but now they found him from the chemicals he was sending through the mail. So they hauled him outa there, cuffed 'im and stuffed 'im and threw 'im in the slammer for good."
um?
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