Not having anything intelligent or even mildly entertaining to say today, I present instead a series of outtakes – snippets of things that, for various editorial reasons, were not included this week’s presentation. Enjoy. Well, probably not, but whatever:
My apartment is still filled with unpacked boxes. I know it takes a while to unpack, but I’m getting tired of going home to bare walls and cardboard everywhere. And since I get home so late, I don’t really want to piss off my new neighbors by pounding nails into the wall and being altogether noisy moving stuff around at eleven-thirty at night (even though the dog upstairs barks when I put the key in my door and then proceeds to gallop up and down the apartment for about an hour). The kid has done a little bit of work, but mostly in his own room, and I’d prefer to set things up myself (he and I have entirely different aesthetic senses – he likes black, and skulls, and anime, while I . . . do not). I finally hung some curtains last night and put up a couple of shelves, but I think this disarray is contributing to the general malaise I’ve been experiencing lately.
Of course, this could also be partially due to the fact that I’ve been sick and pushing it a little hard with work and, despite my so-so efforts, have stopped quitting smoking. It wasn’t so hard the first few days, when I was mostly sleeping and when I was awake, coughing enough that the fear of more coughing outweighed my craving for nicotine. But now that the cough has subsided and I’m back at the restaurant, where everyone smokes and there’s really no other way to get a break, well . . .
For the first few days, I only bummed a cigarette here or there. And I’ve only had two or three each day. But yesterday on my way home, I stopped at the Sev to buy my own pack, and before I could even pay, some guy popped out of nowhere and said, “Want a free pack?” Then he ripped a coupon off his pad and pushed it toward the cashier who put a second pack in my bag, while I paid and the guy scanned my id and apparently signed me up for some RJ Reynold’s mailing list, though I’m deeply suspicious it was something more sinister. Anyway, I got my change from the cashier, retrieved my id, and thanked the man for his contribution to my inevitable cancer. He laughed. I wasn’t joking.
Damn free packs of cigarettes when I’m trying to attempt to quit smoking!
My son refuses to wear a pair of jeans more than once. This, despite the fact that he gets dressed at the very last minute before school and once he arrives home from school, a mere six hours later, strips down to his boxers. Maybe I’m alone on this one, but I don’t thinks it’s such a big deal for him to wear the jeans once more before washing them. I mean, they’re denim, and barring any spills or . . . well, other stuff . . . I don’t see a problem. Regardless, he does. And since he gained a couple inches and lost a few pounds over the summer, none of his old jeans fit him, and he only has the three new pair I bought him for school. So last night I ran to the store on my way home from work and picked up a couple more pair so I could get away with not doing laundry until Saturday.
My real point is this – there is no way he could do the reverse for me. I mean, first of all he wouldn’t. He can’t drive and is to afraid of getting lost to take the bus anywhere. And anyway, I couldn’t in a million years send him to the store with cash and ask him to pick up a pair of jeans in my size and expect that they would fit. “My size” would depend on the brand, the cut, the weave of the denim, etc. So why is it that I can pick up any old pair of 36” x 32” jeans and they all fit the kid the same (ie, they all hang off his backside in exactly the same no-ass-to-speak-of sort of way)?
So Wednesday night at the restaurant we were really short-staffed: there were only six servers on the floor (there are usually ten, sometimes twelve on busy nights) which meant that we each had seven tables, plus a couple in the smoking section. In the middle of our dinner rush, one of the newer servers asked another server if she’d watch his section while he had a cigarette. Most of the managers don’t allow us to take smoke breaks during dinner rush, and definitely not when we’re so severely understaffed, but the kid got pissed off when the female server told him she couldn’t watch his section. I was standing at the Micros, putting in an order, and I heard him grumble something to her and she responded that she had seven tables on the floor and just got sat again. She wasn’t smart about it; she just flat out said she couldn’t right then. So he headed to the back anyway, and as he walked past me, he said over his shoulder, “You can suck my dick, bitch!”
I wheeled around, and lucky for him a manager was standing behind me as well. I exchanged looks with the manager, who then took the kid by the elbow and said, “Come with me.” I went about taking care of my table, but when I came back into the kitchen, there was the kid still working, so I took the manager aside and told him how completely inappropriate that was, how it was much more than breaking our ‘no profanity’ rule, how it pushed the boundaries of sexual harassment, and how I thought it constituted a verbal threat against a female co-worker and that more needed to happen than just an informal talking-to. And I meant, like writing him up or something.
They ended up firing him for it. I feel slightly guilty. But only slightly.
So then we only had five servers on the floor. And minus the slacker, things actually ran a lot smoother.
I’m in charge of ordering supplies for the department at job #1, and rather than have fifty professors stop by my office asking for stuff, I have a sheet posted on the outside of the supply cabinet for them to write down anything they need and can’t find in the cabinet. I also check it every morning and restock anything that’s getting low – pencils, chalk, notepads, etc. – from the supply closet down the hall. I keep ten boxes of whiteboard markers of assorted colors in the cabinet, yet yesterday when I was in the workroom, I watched as one of the professors opened the cabinet, took one of the ninety-five markers from the shelf, then closed the cabinet and wrote on the supplies to be ordered list “lots of whiteboard markers.”
Uhm, what?
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