There's been an unending stream of employees coming through the restaurant, they come, they go, often just here long enough to grab a cheque and then continue, thumbs out, towards the coast. For many the Kootenays is the dream, for others it's just another waypoint on the road to bigger and better things...
And every crew of new recruits the owners put through an "Orientation", a 2 hour introduction to house policies, regulations, etc, etc. Which is ridiculous if you consider that at best there's only another 6 weeks of summer, and 90% of these new recruits will be gone, and in 8 weeks it'll be the bare bones of the owner's son, another server, and 2 or 3 people covering all shifts in the kitchen...this "Orientation", it's more of a "Legal-cover-your-ass" sort of deal, and it's a chance for the Mother of Owner's Son to pontificate kindly upon her corporate sociopathy and abundant (not really, and largely irrelevant) experience in the industry. And, as I've heard from some of the recruits, apologize for my behavior, apparently I'm a kindly tolerated but necessary evil...
One of our more charming recruits was "Lex", a small-town Albertan former "Rig Pig" who had moved to the Kootenays on a whim to officially change genders and reinvent herself...
We get a lot of that...
"Lex", (not her real name), was your standard flamboyant, overly-dramatic drag queen. Not to cause any offense but lets call a spade a spade. There was nothing even slightly "Trans" about her, in Calgary, Vancouver, any bigger center she (he) would have found her (his) place and been content, but she (he) had never lived in a big (or bigger) city than small town Alberta and subscribed to this hopeless binary fantasy that changing genders would solve all her problems...
40 Years old, boyish, close-shaven face, nothing even remotely feminine about "her", no amount of surgery will fix this, more the over-the-top parody of femininity that drag queens do so well, this "girl" needs to find her niche...
She's a hard drinker, has hormones, surgeries scheduled for the next few weeks, and I'm wondering how on earth any reputable doctor would even consider reassigning someones gender when they're drinking a bottle of Vodka or more a day, but then I think of prescription drugs and the general state of healthcare and I get it...
A day off and she's drunk, drunk as I'm going in to work, and the evening takes a turn for the dramatic, she's mortified at her cheque, the deductions for housing, they're excessive, and she confronts the owners, they quarrel, she tries to push her way past, into her accomodation, she's thrown out, boot-fucked by Sr. in the parking lot, there's the police, drama, and then she's gone...
I hear all the stories, from the owners, each of them, from their son, from the Chef who lives next door, they all vary wildly, from "Lex started it" to "She was another victim", and if I had to side with anyone it's Lex, but I can't say, wasn't there, the owners are pressing charges...
I've seen this show before. And, regardless of anyones point of view, the fact that they continually find themselves in this position strongly to me indicates their guilt. They've a stack several feet thick of complaints upstairs from the labour board, from disgruntled employees, and a stack several meters high of rebuttals written by the owner, but I can't help but think if 20% of your daily workload is responding to government inquiries about your treatment of staff then you're probably doing it wrong...