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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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Back to work this morning, the boon of the unexpected 3 days off is over, and - well, I'm figuring 5 weeks left, let's get it over with.
But I'm not happy.
Arriving early, there was rain earlier in the week, intending to search for arrowheads.
SR is outside the basement, on the phone, he's earnestly talking to someone...
As I get out of my car he tells me - "S*** killed himself!!! I just found him in the basement...".
S*** was the head chef, he lived in the basement. And SR describes how he found him, on the couch, slouched over, black, the stench...
So, no suggestion he killed himself, rather an expression of SR's annoyance that he won't be coming to work. From the sounds of things this probably happened after work Sunday. I wasn't there.
Now they're looking for Mister Tickles, the other Chef, doing a "wellness" check and wanting to ask if he wants to work today in S***'s place. Of course they would.
After a spell the ambulance shows up, they confirm he's deceased, minimum 24 hours, now it's time for the RCMP, then the coroner....
SR's wife, in shock, C**** is horrified, JR is in shock and crying. It's a gong show. SR and his wife, they want to stay open, "Life goes on...".
I'm doubting that's going to happen. Eventually Mister Tickles shows up, he's a little calmer about it all than they are, he knows damn well they want him to work, nothing stops them, they're demons...
***
It starts to come together a bit. S***, native, without family, had worked 14 hours Sunday. A big guy, he was exhausted. Dead exhausted. And the Mother in Law, she's worried - she gave him a package to hold for her brother, his meds, morphine. So maybe that was it? She blames herself.
Maybe. S**** liked to party, and his "girlfriend" was also his dealer, talking to him once he mentioned she stopped dealing when her best friend OD'd. A bad batch.
And occasionally she was seen 'round his place. So maybe he didn't stop using, maybe tried to curb his exhaustion...
Maybe, maybe, maybe. Or maybe it was just they worked him to death. That place would do it to you. It was a busy day, by all accounts.
***
Talk to another Kitchen worker, A****, who confirmed she'd last received a text from him Sunday night, by Monday morning he wasn't answering.
***
I'd often joked the place was built over an Indian Burial Ground, and now - now it is. Let alone the winding up of the chefs at the beginning of the season, when I told them about the OD's in the staff housing...and I want to ask, if only to cast levity on the situation, if they found any sign of Curtis down in the basement, that chef who went missing under mysterious circumstances in May...but it's too soon. S*** would have laughed.
***
Enough is enough and I want the season to be over. C*** won't make it, will probably quit within the week, the kitchen girls, high school students, they're not going to take it well, we're wasting time until the season is over, the season, this season, the longest one ever, and every one wants it done.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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This morning, a review calling me "Salty".
Which is true, last night, working with T***, who has the same abilities as the Mother in Law, only a lot prettier and infinitely more charming.
The owners had put their heads together and told me to just work until close and call T*** off for the night, and I reminded them that we've been busy the last few weeks, being the only show open and all, and that if it proved slow I'd send her.
It didn't prove slow, it would have been reasonably busy for 2 people. Only one comes in and does more damage than good, standing talking to one table while I seat three tables, expedite food for two, then bus two of her tables, then watch her run over to the ones I just sat and grab orders, making them effectively "hers". Her next visit will be at the till to chat them up while they pay the bill and tip.
She pours 6 glasses of foam then leaves them on the bar, complaining the beer won't work. I pour her beer. She complains of the fruit flies, as if she can't see them and pluck them out with a straw, the doors here, always open, it would be impossible to keep them all out.
I've become too much the donkey. The idiocy of dumping it all on me, or pairing me with T***, who will be a great waitress when we stop having tables...
So anyways, yeah, I'm a bit salty...
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She's been here for 8 weeks to help us through the summer rush, a big mess of a woman with facial piercings, matted dreadlocks, tits pushed up through a bad hippy dress. She's a server, but to say she's a server does an injustice to the profession, if you sat in her section and had 3 courses, 4 rounds of drinks when you got up to leave every glass you touched, every plate, utensil and dirty napkin would still be on the table in front of you. She's fundamentally unable to run the glass washer, fill the ice well or refill waters, bus her own tables, every little thing, and so her help has become a little like carrying a 200 lb gorilla through the shift that takes an order then scoops the tips off the table and does nothing else.
Sloppy, sloppy. Or, as you might more gently say "Kootenay Style".
Anyways, she's tired of being here, the summers been long, she wants to get back to her life in Cranbrook. We all do, and her complaints that she's just there to make her son-in-law's life easier - well, that's what we're all here for. And we're all presumed upon and I'm getting a little tired of listening to complaints from someone who's getting days off left-right-and center; bloody hell just shut up and lets get on with it, there's a mere week, 10 days to go...
***
She'd suggested a few added benefits might keep her around, I was pretty clear that that wasn't an option. Doesn't stop her from trying. And - kindly, I can't say that I'm never that drunk so I just make up some stuff about workplace rules and professionalism and leave it at that.
***
Saturday morning, the night shift, I'm up and at-em, grab my coffee, gonna hit a few garage sales, check the thrift shops, I need a lamp, loveseat, bed, chair...the list is still far too long...but in the few hours before work I'm gonna get something...
Or not. 9:30 and my phone is ringing, I answer, and it's her, she's crying, family emergency, crisis, I have to get to work ASAP, she can't work, and I'm seeing red, I pull over, this *&#@!! of a woman, everyone, JR and his 10 family days off to go see the juggling squirrel in Revelstoke and 3 day work week, C* and her 5 day week-ends to visit her 95 year old dying mother who - predictably, is still alive, though I offered to go and finish her off myself, and now this, it's presumptive that my meagre life is subordinate to hers, free accommodations, all she can drink, nearly always drunk, ready access to a dive bar and all the bikers she can bring home, and I'm to give up my time, my life, so that she can "manage" the dumpster fire that's hers?
Livid, I'm screaming into the phone "Fuck You", it's gotten personal this presumptiveness, that since I don't have a life all summer long I don't mind giving up a bit more of it to her and this, fuck this. Fuck this.
Mentally I'm doing the math - she has 9 children. 1 of them has a job, the rest of them - to varying degrees, are wards of the state, 2 with full time caregivers, her life - best life, a dumpster fire of drunkeness, stray bikers, unreared children, is costing us the taxpayers to the tune of a million dollars or more per year.
She's a living, walking, talking argument for eugenics.
***
I go to work, she's not there, and the place - it's soon enough pandemonium, filled with tables, inside and out, only me and JR - the heydays of summer, and I'm regretting he didn't have the pleasure of working with his Mother in Law in this insanity...
***
Sunday it's the opposite. the taps - on, now suddenly off, and a restaurant that would have been short staffed with 5 servers the day before is now overstaffed with one.
...and now to today...
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Since the smoke, business drops off a cliff. JR is quick to exploit this, tacking another day off onto his two already, then showing up for the late shift Thursday, Leaving early on Friday and taking another extended 5 days off after.
It's his child's birthday after all.
He has 4 children, all of them born in the summer.
So he's around and about the restaurant, kids in tow, living his best work-free summer life.
He's very clearly on salary.
Everyone else can pick up the slack.
He's got a job interview, and his parents are excited, a "manager" for a courier company, pays $70, 000 per year if he gets it. They really want him to get the job.
He's excited about it, looking forward to the interview, but you know, you know...
This kid, he's never worked for anyone other than his parents. Or once, when he was a teen, but that's a short story. Since then, 14 years he's spent dodging work at the restaurant. Lists of things to do, updates to the till, that have been "on the list" for years now without doing.
a single thing about them.
He's a busy guy.
SO now, a job interview, for a job that pays him less in a full year than he'd earn in 4 months of the summer, if he'd show up.
If he'd show up.
Why show up? Clearly the salary is enough to pay his bills, he's 33, lives in his parents house with his wife and 4 kids, his wife, who doesn't work but nonetheless collects a cheque from the restaurant and EI every winter, as well as him.
Rumor is she wants to leave him, she's come to whatever few senses she has, but can't, not with 4 kids and a salary from a job she's never showed up to...
I've never met anyone more unprepared for the real world, and just shake my head and laugh, I mean, 70K is not a lot for a man with a stay-at-home wife and 4 kids, but doubtless he'll be kept on the payroll at the restaurant...
And I'm more than a little annoyed, not least at the fact that I'm working 10 hour days to enable his "staycation", that watching this gong-show of entitlement, this pretense of "get a job" and good citizenry, I mean, it's too much, and SR (JR's Dad), is done speaking with me, he knows, he knows, and his mother has a knack for turning the conversation onto other topics as soon as you humourously suggest that "40 hours a week? Birthdays off?", I mean, he's never worked forty hours in a single week his entire life and if ever he came close his bitchiness would be unbearable, let alone 40 hours a week for an entire year, but I imagine him showing up to the interview, references from both his mommy and his daddy in hand, smiling his syrupy saccharine smile, going through the motions, and then...
I've never wanted someone to get a job so badly in my life...
And you know, you think, well, this shit will never fly and then I recall the bosses' nephew from the old Italian place in Calgary, and how quickly he's risen through the ranks at CP rail, and you know, nothing's impossible...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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At the liquor store, the pea soup night of smoke makes for a surreal evening, there's an old hippy, long beard, in a full on gas mask, 2 hoses running to a mask strapped to his face, holding a transistor radio blaring punk music, loudly, buying a bottle of the cheapest gin, not to laugh because if ever you needed a respirator, gas mask, full apocalypse regalia, now would be the time, but he is perfect, the haze visible even indoors, bottle of Gin in one hand, Radio in the other, he's the poster boy for the Armageddon.