Tag Archives: Work

I’m sorry but, you’re fired

I just don’t think we have any room for you here, not enough room, not with these numbers. What are we supposed to tell the shareholders? Nobody wants to see you go, well, nobody except for Maggie, but her objections … well, I probably shouldn’t have said that. Let’s just say that … I can assure you that Maggie had nothing to do with … with this. And between you and me, Maggie’s not going to make the next round of cuts. So don’t think of this as Maggie over you, I mean, nobody’s winning here. Sure, it might be hard to walk out of this office and not notice Maggie sitting there pretending not to smirk, but just think …

You know what? Forget I said anything about Maggie. And please don’t tell her what I just told you. Because if she confronts me … look, I’m going to be real with you here. I’m thinking that we’re going to fire Maggie. But I shouldn’t have told you that. I see now how that was a mistake. But I can’t take it back, and I’m realizing now how you don’t have anything to lose, because we’re already letting you go, and so I’m sure getting in Maggie’s face and telling her what I just accidentally told you, I’d bet that would bring some measure of satisfaction. I can see her just sitting there, not looking up at you, but smirking, smiling as you pack up everything from your desk into those boxes.

I don’t know why they make us give you these boxes. I mean, do you really have many personal belongings here? At work? Sure, I guess I’ve got these photos, although, I’m not really attached to any of them. If I were in your position, I’d gladly leave everything here, “You get rid of them,” I’d tell whoever shoved a box in my face, telling me, I have to be out of here by the end of the day. Of course, if I were in your position, I wouldn’t be in my position right now, and so I guess they wouldn’t be my picture frames. Would they be yours? No, that doesn’t make any sense.

What I’m trying to say is, jeez, I really shouldn’t have brought up Maggie. Look, I’ll be straight with you here, OK, if you tell Maggie what I just told you, I’m going to have to deny it. All right, Maggie’s going to come storming in here, talk about lack of professionalism, because again, I really shouldn’t have said anything. Do you know that you’re one of my first firings? Not the first. But definitely the second. The first one was Charles a while back, but he probably knew it was coming. And in his case, I think I said too little. I’m not sure I got across the whole let go aspect of the termination. Is he still coming in? Regardless, that definitely went a lot smoother than this is going right now.

Basically, if you tell Maggie, I’ll deny it. And it won’t end there, OK, because I can’t deny it and then fire her next week. She’ll be like, “I knew it!” And I can’t take that, not from Maggie, jeez. And so I’ll have to keep her on, indefinitely, probably. And so do you want that? You want her to keep her job? Or do you want her to get fired?

Obviously we haven’t made any final decisions regarding Maggie, or any of the cuts really, I’m just thinking that, there’s no way she makes it past next week. Which, yeah, it’s just unfortunate, you know, the whole company is just resizing or rescaling, or restructuring, what do you call it? There’s a lot of rebranding. Like this is new for me, letting people go, that’s like a rebranding. Man, I hope this gets easier. For me, I mean, you seem to be taking it all in stride.

And who knows? I mean, it was a bad quarter, yeah, and it sucks that we kind of have to go quarter to quarter here, but what if the next quarter is good? What if it’s really good? We’re probably going to be looking at some un-restructuring, which, I think you’d have to talk to HR again, I don’t know if they’d make you go through the whole interview process. Did you interview with me? When you first started? I mean, so yeah, you probably wouldn’t get me again, not unless they re-rebrand me back to hiring. Right now it’s strictly firing.

Not firing, you know, let go. Man, thanks for being so cool about this. Like especially in regards to Maggie. I seriously can’t stress enough how much I shouldn’t have brought her into this, OK. And like I said, even though I’m pretty sure we’re going to let her go, she’s definitely staying if she confronts me with any of this. Hell, I’ll suggest she gets promoted. So yeah, just keep your chin up, all right. Do you need a box? Because I have all of these boxes if you need to … like if you want to carry anything out. Yeah, I don’t really get the boxes.

But just, you see her smiling, just don’t even smile back OK. Just have like an inside smile, the smile of satisfaction that you get from me telling you … I mean, I’m not telling you … but I’m telling you telling you, Maggie’s out. But only if you don’t even look her way. Because any sort of nonverbal communication, like even a knowing smirk, OK, and she stays. Cool? All right. Sorry to see you go. Best of luck out there. You’ll be fine.

Hey, we should grab drinks sometime, now that I’m not your boss anymore. Ha. All right. Can you send in Rich on your way back to the desk? You know what? I should probably get him myself. Don’t worry about Rich. All right. Great. Thanks.

Green olives, a lot of them

When I’m waiting tables, I try to tell myself to chill out, that whenever I find myself getting bent out of shape, it’s usually my attitude that’s the source of the problem. Like I don’t like getting bossed around, or I don’t like having to make an unnecessary trip into the kitchen. All of that stuff is my job, and if I can just suck it up and not take it as a personal insult every time someone asks me for a Diet Coke, I’ll get through the shift a lot happier, I’ll probably be genuinely more pleasant, all of that nonsense about well-being and inner-peace.

But every once in a while I can’t, and I feel justified in my anger. The other day I was in the dining room, and this party of four or five got sat at one of my coworker’s tables. I went over to get a drink order, which I’m happy to do, not only because it’s nice to help out, but because that’s a rule at our restaurant, that you have to go over and get a drink order even if it’s not your table.

For a while it’s a mostly painless interaction. Coke. Water. Coke. Diet Coke. But then I get to this lady at end, and she tells me, “I want a Diet Coke, and then I want lemons on the side, but a lot of them, OK, a lot of lemons, and also I want green olives, OK, and I want a lot of those too.” And then guy to her right was like, “Coke.”

But I couldn’t get past her order, because it didn’t make sense. “I’m sorry, you said you wanted lemons and … ?” and she replied, “Yeah, a lot of them. OK. A whole plate.” So I said to her, “Right, OK, but it was lemons and what else?” At this point I really wished I hadn’t had the misfortune of dealing with any of this. “Green olives,” she confirmed, “A lot.”

Like I said, I’m happy to help out, to an extent. But this was already getting a little crazy. And yeah, if it were my table, and I was maybe looking at a tip heading my way, sure, I’d probably be a little more inclined to accommodate crazy requests. But as it stood, this was just a difficult situation that I could tell wasn’t going end with me grabbing a few olives.

This was during the downtime in between lunch and dinner service, so even though the restaurant wasn’t particularly busy, the whole place was running on not much more than a skeleton crew of servers and managers. There was no bartender on duty, so I had to go behind the bar and fish around to find where they kept the olives. And then I had to skewer them on these little sticks. It was so annoying, all of this on top of their sodas, I had to cut up all of those lemons that she wanted along with her olives.

When I went to run everything out, again, it’s not like anybody was around to help me out, and so I had to make a few trips. On my first go, I had the drinks and the plate of lemons. I left the olives on the bar so I could come right back. When I went to set everything down at the table, the lady didn’t even give me a second, she was just like, “Excuse me? Can I get a plate of green olives? Like a lot of …”

And I just walked back to the bar, because I didn’t want to risk giving her a dirty look, something that communicated nonverbally, “Are you fucking kidding me lady? Do you see my hands totally full with all of these drinks? Can you give me more than maybe five seconds to satisfy your completely unreasonable demands?”

I came back and dropped off the plate of olives. There were three skewers with three olives speared to each. I didn’t even have a chance to set the plate down in front of her when she grabbed one of the skewers and started chowing down. Jesus Christ, I wanted absolutely nothing else to do with this table. What was wrong with this person? Why didn’t anybody else at her table tell her stop acting like a complete crazy person?

This took up way too much of my time, and I found myself immediately running errands for my actual tables. Maybe five minutes later, I had just bused like six plates and was heading back to the kitchen when the olive lady started waving at me from across a row of booths. She held up her empty plate and said in a voice that projected across half of the restaurant, “Can I get some more olives? A lot more, please.”And I just nodded, put my head down, dropped off the plates in the dishwasher, and I disappeared in one of the storage closets. I couldn’t deal with this. I was about to lose my mind over this lady asking for olives. And I didn’t want to do anything stupid, so I just hid. Hopefully her server would walk by the table soon enough and he or she could deal with these insane requests.

Because seriously, what the fuck? You want olives so badly? Is this because you’re crazy? Or are you just super cheap and you’re looking to get a free appetizer out of massive quantities of cocktail garnishes? I remember one time I had a similar experience where a customer kept asking for pickles, more pickles, a whole bowl full. Finally a manager told me,
“You know what? Tell her we’re charging her five dollars for pickles,” and of course the lady said no, but she was pissed, and she left me a shitty tip.

It’s not like you go out to a restaurant to eat olives. Just go to a grocery store and buy a bottle. Go to your house, make sure no one else is home to see what a lunatic you are, and have at it, eat the whole bottle. Drink the brine after you’re done. Everybody does crazy things, that’s fine, I’m not judging. OK, I guess I am judging a little. But leave the rest of us out of it, OK? I’ll get you a Diet Coke, I’ll run your food back and forth, I’m pretty malleable in terms of dealing with whatever you want me to do. But I’m going to stop what I’m doing to get you another plate of olives? Get lost, all right, you’re fucking nuts.

Grass-fed beef

The other day at work, one of the customers asked me about our hamburgers, specifically about the cows the meat came from. “Are they grass fed?”

“Yes,” I told her, immediately. My answer surprised me. It was one of those instances where my mouth acted totally independently from the rest of my body. As soon as I answered in the affirmative, I came to terms with what happened, which was, a word escaped my mouth that had no business being spoken in the first place.

Because the real answer should have been, “I’m not sure about that. I can find out for you if you like.” But no, in that split second before I had a chance to start a thought process that would involve me explaining my lack of knowledge of the hamburger’s potential grass diet, my tongue and my lips decided to ambush the chain of command. I just said yes, so much easier than having to force a whole dialogue, finding a boss, asking if the cows ate grass.

Maybe my mouth has its own brain, maybe it thought out what that conversation might have looked like. Me, walking over to the kitchen manager, the guy multitasking at the window, processing orders coming in, constantly moving, talking to the chefs, garnishing the finished products, I’d interrupt him with a question, “Hey, uh, boss, uh … are the hamburgers made out of grass-fed beef?”

And he’d look at me, only for a second though, because he really does have a lot going on. But he’d only need a second, to give me a look of both confusion and anger, like, are you seriously coming to me with this bullshit right now? The most diplomatic thing he would do is to tell me to ask someone else. So I’d have to hunt around the kitchen, everybody moving, busy, too busy for crazy questions about grass.

Or maybe he would know. I guess I shouldn’t rush to judgment, just assume the answers to questions I myself don’t even know the answers to. It’s a little arrogant to think that this question is completely unanswerable. There has to be a diet these cows were being fed, and maybe it was grass, and maybe the kitchen manager knew.

But it didn’t matter, because I had already told this lady that, yes, they were grass fed. I briefly considered walking back from my impulse response, something like, “Wait, I don’t know why I said that, I apologize. I’m actually not sure. Let me go find out for you.” In retrospect, yes, that’s exactly how I should have handled it.

But again, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t even have time to consider my answers. And besides, the minute I said yes, this lady’s face lit up. It was an expression of genuine pleasure. Whatever was going on in my head, there was something equally powerful at work inside of hers. It was like she was picturing herself on the farm, all of the cows were eating as much grass as they wanted. And in between bites, they looked up to her, they said, “Moo! Thank you for only buying grass-fed beef. Our lives are so much better than our grain-fed cousins. And it’s all thanks to you!”

She repeated, “Really? Grass-fed beef?” And I was locked into my decision. My head nodded up and down, “Yes, grass-fed. And we grind the meat here.” Which was true, we do grind our own hamburgers. Hopefully just by throwing out additional information, I was somewhat elevating the overall truth of the entire conversation, like if you look back at everything I told her, you’d say, well, he only made up about ten percent of the information. So I started talking about the seasoning, all of the stuff about which I was positive.

She ordered the burger, and I did the only thing I thought would have avoided any potential problems: I passed off the check to another server, and I steered clear of that section of the restaurant until she left, crossing my fingers the whole time, hoping that she wouldn’t bring up the whole grass thing to anybody else.

And, as far as I know anyway, I got away with. In fact, maybe those cows are grass-fed. After writing this whole thing out, I’m realizing that I never bothered to follow up with anybody. I could have waited until the dinner rush died down, looked for the kitchen manager when he appeared not to be juggling twelve tasks, “Hey boss, I’m just curious, do we serve grass-fed beef?”

But I don’t know. And I don’t know why sometimes I can’t just say that I don’t know. I’ve got to stand there and make up easy answers, just lying to people’s faces.

Open yourself up and get out there

You’ve got to be open to trying new things, lots of new things. You start getting complacent in life, doing the same old stuff every day, pretty soon everything’s boring, you’re sitting at your computer for four hour stretches at a time, the days are blending into the nights and you can’t remember off the top of your head what day of the week it is, what time you have to start getting ready for work, you’re getting all of these text messages from your boss like, “Are you coming in? You’re supposed to be here right now. Where are you?”

And so yes, text him back, tell him that you got mugged on the way to work or something like that, like they stole your wallet, luckily not your cell phone, because … OK, yeah, don’t text, just show up at work, maybe look a little purposefully disheveled, and tell him that the mugger stole your cell phone too.

No, you really can’t use a trick like this more than once a year. And so while you’re in the bathroom splashing some cold water on your face, staring at a reflection in the mirror that’s looking less familiar every day, telling yourself, all right man, just really, really make an effort to show up to work on time, just really make it a point not to be late again, also, at the same time, think about getting involved in some new activities. You’ve got to get out there and try some new things.

Lots of things. Like, I don’t know. Why don’t you take a cooking class? That could be fun, right? You can learn all sorts of different ways to prepare food. And then when you wake up in the morning, you can start thinking about going to the store, and buying all of those fresh ingredients. Do you remember what that okra looked like? Will they have okra at the regular grocery store? Actually, you probably should have gotten up a little earlier. You can’t expect to go to the grocery store, cook a whole meal, and still be on time for work. Just go to Subway, just grab a sandwich, just remember you’ve really got to be in on time today.

But don’t stop thinking about all of those new activities you’re going to get involved in. Life is what you make of it, right? Right. What about hockey? You used to play hockey in high school, right? Well, there you go, get involved. Or don’t get involved, I didn’t realize how expensive ice time was. And yeah, I didn’t really think about the cost of buying all new equipment. You sure you won’t be able to find any of your old stuff at home? No, I guess I don’t have a lot of my old high school stuff either.

What about tennis though? That can’t be as expensive as hockey. Just go on craigslist and find an old racket, nothing too old, but come, you’ve got to be able to find something decent online. Do you know how many people are constantly taking up new activities? I guarantee you that there’s got to be at least ten people within a five block radius that have made a commitment to get involved in a new activity, probably tennis. They buy brand new rackets, they sign up for a free intro lesson at the tennis center, and then it’s like ten months later and that racket hasn’t been taken out the case at all, it’s practically brand new still, just waiting to be plucked for a totally lowball offer on craigslist.

Look, I’m not saying it has to be tennis. It could be anything. Carpentry. Guitar lessons. Running. Gardening. Is anything sounding cool here? Anything jumping out at you? Painting. Bird watching. I don’t know man, you just keep shaking your head no, it’s like, what do you want to do? Huh? Because for me anyway, it’s like, I won’t really get into something until I at least give it a shot. And so what if you don’t like it after a while? Try something else.

You want to play video games all day? Well, I mean I guess that’s something. You could play online, right? You could talk with some of the other gamers. That’s an activity. Yeah. Making popcorn, sure, that’s something else. Think about people living three, four hundred years ago. I doubt they made popcorn. And if they did, they definitely weren’t making it in a bag in the microwave. No man, just count your blessings, don’t forget to look on the bright side. Is this helping? Are you feeling a little better? Just, after you’re done with that next level, let’s go for a walk, OK? Or tomorrow, sure, just, you let me know when you’re ready to get out there, OK? The world is your oyster, OK! Well, I was just speaking figuratively, there aren’t any oysters, not really. But if you’ve never had an oyster, you should definitely at least try it. Yeah it’s got a really weird texture, but I’m telling you, you get used to that briny taste, you start to really like it man, or you can just add some lemon juice and Tabasco until it doesn’t seem so weird just slurping it out of the shell like that.

I’d better update the resume

Every once in a while I’ll get this urge, something like, you what Rob? You’ve got to turn it all around. What are you doing here, waiting tables, writing nonsense on this blog? You’re losing it, man, you’ve still got time to make something of yourself, of your life. You’ve just got to get out there, you’ve got to get hungry. Are you hungry Rob? You better start looking, come on man, making some opportunities. You better update the old resume.

And then I get a physical reaction in my stomach, shit, my resume. Where is my resume? I look in the documents folder, scroll down to R. There are a few files, resume.docx, resume(1).docx, down the line, all multiple files that I’ve saved with the same title. Every time I do it, I’m not really changing anything, a date here, some made-up achievement over there, I click save and my computer tells me, “Rob, a file named resume already exists. Do you want me to save this anyway?” and I’m like, “Yes, computer, just save it, just save all of them, just push them under the rug, OK, stop judging me computer, I know, all right, I’m well aware of how many resume files I have, that they’re all basically identical, minor variations of the same baloney document.”

What am I doing in the documents folder anyway? It’s much easier to just head to my email outbox, just find the last time I’ve sent out a resume, that’s got to be the most updated version. March? Really? Yikes. I guess I’d better take a look and see what I’ve got to work with.

OK, everything seems … basically the same really. I’ve just to change all of the 2013s to 2014s and … and what? This is terrible. This is just a really, really bad resume. I can feel whatever it was that motivated me to find this resume in the first place start to die down a little. Like, maybe I’m not doing so bad, sure, I’m getting a little sick of the same-old, same-old, but it’s not that bad, not really, not worth going through all of this … this resume stuff.

Because man, college was a long time ago. And yeah, the Peace Corps, that was something substantial, that a pretty big shot of adrenaline to the heart of my resume. At least, it was back in 2011 when I got back. I think it’s started to look a little dated again. I can already see the interview in my head, “So Rob, what have you been up to for the past two and a half years?”

Ha. That’s funny. This resume would never lead to an actual interview. Even if I did manage to spruce it up. What would I do with it? I’d send it out. Where would I send it to? To a bunch of random email addresses that I found on the Internet. I’m sure that ten thousand other people aren’t doing the same exact thing. I’m sure that whatever’s inside of my resume will be just the thing that gets my name out there, prompts someone in charge of hiring to reach out and get in touch with me.

And for real, where am I going to send this thing to? What am I looking to do exactly? I browse all of the listings on craigslist and I’m left with even more questions. What are all of these companies searching for in an employee? You know, besides being a motivated, eager, self-starting go-getter who works great both independently and as part of a team.

Why is five years experience “a must” for a job that starts at less than thirty thousand a year? Why is everything on this job listing either “a must” or “a plus?” Ability to finish projects is a must! Knowledge of Microsoft Office is a must! Being open to work through the weekends is a plus!

I can’t even look anymore. You know, I guess my job isn’t that bad right now. Sure, I don’t want to do it forever, but man, I can’t make sense of craigslist anymore, everything’s blending together, all of these duties and responsibilities, nothing’s really explained, why do so many hiring managers write out their job postings IN ALL CAPS!!!!!! WHAT KIND OF PERSON WOULD I BE WORKING FOR THAT SEEKS EMPLOYMENT ON THE INTERNET WRITING LIKE THIS?????

And here I am, I’m just making fun of everything, I don’t have a current resume, I don’t think I’d be able to put one together, not really, not with out blatantly making stuff up, even more than the stuff that’s already on there. No, my job’s not that terrible. I have a pretty flexible schedule. I go to work and I’m running on autopilot.

Maybe I’ll go to grad school. That could beef up the resume. That could be something. Maybe I could make up that I already went to grad school and put that on my resume. I mean, it’s not like they’re going to ask to see my diploma, right?