It must be painfully obvious by now that I'm doing a horrible job keeping this blog going.  Mostly this has to do with my wife's illness which is not something I'm going to post about, that's for sure.  While I'm no longer in survival mode, and things are looking up, I have a hard time motivating myself to write about my part time job.  Maybe that will change in the future, I don't know.  Maybe I'm still in a sort of in survival mode lite?  I don't know.  But I will ask you to take a look at the blog of a friend of mine, it is called My Descent into Maelstrom.  I've cajoled him into starting it.  Hopefully he'll keep it going.  He feels like he can be honest and candid about his experiences dealing with the same illness I've had to deal with, so please give him a read.

Long time wait for a lame post...

It's been quite a while since last I've posted, but life has a way of doing that (combined with laziness), but until I get my blogging legs back, take a look at this satirical post regarding civil liberties that I stumbled upon...

It's all a dream...

So I've not historically been a fan of The Office - when I tried to watch it Michael's character drove me crazy - but I am now (I just look past the Michael parts that annoy me and wait for the lines that make me laugh so hard I almost pee).  For the last week or so I've been watching The Office on Netflix every chance I can.  I am somewhat immersed.

Last night I'm waiting on a table of business men at a sales dinner, and I shit you not, the salesman had a pin on his lapel that said "I love paper."  For a moment I thought I was in a really realistic dream.  Turns out it was real though.  Funny story.

This is how to do it...

     I was not happy.  I had just been informed that I would be getting the two top who had reservations for roughly fifteen minutes before closing.  On a Monday.  When I had only a few other tables.  And as if on cue, they arrived not fifteen minutes before closing, but literally at closing.  On a Monday.
     I had little hope of things going quickly.  After all, anyone who knowingly shows up when a restaurant is closing can not expect to be an empathy filled mensch.  But being a professional, my only choice was to suck it up, do my best, and hope for the best - even while expecting the worst.
     I was however pleasantly surprised when, after putting on my most gracious and i-don't-hate-you-for-making-me-stay-hours-late face, they ordered quickly.  Even more quickly the kitchen cooked up their appetizer and I delivered it to the table.
     "It looks delicious," they said.
     Ten minutes later it still looked delicious as they had not yet begun to eat it.  Which, while annoying at that late hour, was baffling at any hour.   This appetizer, as with most food at most restaurants, was best when eaten hot.  In fact it was designed to be eaten hot.  And yet there it sat, the beautifully battered prawn becoming a soggy mess as it soaked up the delicious sauce it was served in.  I began to wonder if they were waiting for their salads to begin eating - which isn't to farfetched, because some people expect apps and salads to appear together, although I'm not sure why.
   After another five minutes of watching the prawns become sauce laden, I decided to just bring out their salads.  Normally I would never bring the salads before the apps were finished but I did because I wasn't sure what the deal was and because both the kitchen staff (who were as unhappy about the situation as I was) and I wanted them to eat and get the hell out.  So I brought the salads.
     I got to the table with the salads and saw the prawns were still totally and utterly untouched.
     "I'm sorry," I said.  "I'm brought the salads, but I'm really not sure if you want them now.  I can bring them back to the kitchen."
     "No problem," they replied courteously. "We'll take them now."
     So I gave them their salads and retreated to the kitchen.  The busser came in about five minutes later and told me they were done with the salads already.  Huh?  I walked out and saw they had indeed scarfed down the salads and yet still had left the prawns untouched.  I walked back to the kitchen.
     "I guess you can fire table five," I said.  The entrees were done before I even got the sentence out of my mouth.
     I brought out the entrees and tried to ignore the still untouched prawns.  I walked back to the kitchen puzzling over why the ordered the prawns and praying for them to eat quick, although to be fair, they had not dawdled at all, aside from not eating their appetizer.
   I checked in on them, asked if they were enjoying their food, was relieved to see they finally started eating some of their prawns.  They ate and talked and finally finished.  Mercifully they wanted no desserts.  All in all they were a pleasant and relatively easy to please if confusing table, and if it hadn't been an hour since the restaurant closed, I wouldn't have had any complaints about them whatsoever.
   So the moment of truth - what would the tip be?  I was hoping for average or slightly above, because if they were going to leave a shitty tip I was going to have a hard time not letting all of the air out of their tires.  It's hard to tell with people who deliberately come in late - they can be either self-centered douches who don't care that some plebeians had to stay late so they could eat, or they can be generally nice people who for some reason or another really could only come at the worst time ever.  I opened the book and my draw dropped.
    The busser saw my face and said, "Shit, did they stiff you?"
    "No they left a 40% tip."
 

Wisdom...

From the TV show, The Wire:

"A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It's the shit that happens while you're waiting for moments that never come." 

Finally a post...

Well it has certainly been a long time between posts.  I don't want to bore you with the details as to why it has been so long, but here is the short-hand version: 1) At Thanksgiving, my family and I moved - not to another town, just to another house.  In the midst of moving, my wife got sick and could do little.  Being a holiday, I had not even bothered to ask any friends to help.   So it became me and my 3 sons (two teenagers and one elementary age) doing all the moving.  If you know anything about teenage boys, you know that even the most contentious start losing their ability to focus after a few hours, so you can imagine how fun the move was.  And if you know anything about 5th grade boys, you know he is old enough to almost be helpful, and young enough to mostly get in the way.  Then, I had to clean the old place by myself because my wife was still sick.  Cleaning is not something I am good at (all the attention to detail eludes me, in fact when I was a Marine the weekly barracks inspections regularly caused me agida because I simply could not seem to see all the little things that needed to be cleaned...) so it was hard, especially since I had literally one day to do it.  That's all behind me, now we are just trying to get the new place to feel like a home instead of a cardboard box warehouse. 2) There is no two, I'm just recovering from one.

Hopefully, things will get back to my version of normal and I will get back to regular postings.  I've still got some things to say to Sous Gal, don't think I've forgotten about you :)   Seriously, I enjoyed your post and wanted to reply and still will!

Kitchen Issues

I do not as a rule complain our kitchen.  They are generally professional about their jobs and don't freak out over stupid things.  Generally that is.  And when there are freak outs, it is generally the head chef who freaks out - the other chefs/cooks are pretty chilled.  I can understand freaking out at servers or the kitchen staff, even if it isn't warranted - that is what crusty head chef's do.  What I can't stand is indignant outbursts because a customer asks for something a little different.  For example, the other night Dolly had a table with an eight-year-old girl.  The girl's parents politely asked if, even though we had no pasta dishes on the menu, if it might be at all possible for the girl to get some butter noodles.  Keep in mind we have no children's menu.  Dolly, assuming that since this was in fact a restaurant she was working in, and since boiling noodles is a feat many have succeeded at, and since there was virtually no one in the restaurant, that the chef might be amenable.  When Dolly asked the chef, she was treated to a ten minute harangue about how it would take ten minutes to find the noodles downstairs in dry storage, how it take another ten to boil water and another ten to get them cooked.  How, the chef asked, could he or his currently bored-to-death kitchen staff be expected to do that?  How dare the customers politely ask for something so crazy?!  I took a lot of will power for me not to chime in with the obvious observation that the noodles could have been found and the water already almost boiling by the time the chef was done with his tantrum.  I also wanted to point out that we are in the business of making people happy, and if you can do so without major disruption, than you should.  How this guy's attitude (and it is his general attitude, not just an isolated reaction) can be tolerated by the higher ups amazes me.  I think he can get away with this kind of attitude regarding customers because the restaurant is part of the software company and thus is immune to the typical stresses of making a profit that normal restaurants face.  Luckily, the rest of the kitchen crew does not act the same way - the second-in-command is always willing to do what he can to make customers happy.