Now Playing: Manuel de Falla--"En El Generalife" from Noches en los jardines de Espana
I came dangerously close to snapping at my boss a couple of days ago, in a real-life "kitchen-sink drama." Ha! I'll continue my usual practice of leaving the location anonymous, even though many of you know where I work and some of you have even eaten there (sometimes with annoying co-workers yourselves). Our dishwasher has given us no end of trouble through my time on the job. It's a relatively primitive model, with a single washing "chamber" (I don't know if that's the actual term, but it worryingly pleases me to think of the dishwasher as a ballistic weapon) that can only fit one rack of dishes. Besides cooking soups and fixing up sauces and dressings, I also do most of the bussing and dishwashing (as Pacino or Kristen Bell might say, "just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in again!"), so I probably use the dishwasher most. When washing dishes in the sink before using the machine, I use a plastic standup colander to prevent most of the debris from draining into the plumbing. The latter possibility is more fraught with danger than in most restaurants, even in Ann Arbor. Our restaurant stands in an allegedly--therefore, officially--historic block of downtown Ann Arbor (the claim is that performing any sort of alteration whatsoever to the buildings will not only spoil the ambience but will also prevent "walkability," the sort of argument only someone who spends most of their time sitting in offices and driving cars and forgetting how to walk could make), along with several other restuarants, whith which it shares a complex, almost incestuous set of relationships, generally in terms of past or present co-workers. We're located directly above one of these restaurants, a particularly classy and elegant establishment which, though frequently pretentious, has a genuinely sweet happy hour, one I've often enjoyed. When something goes wrong with our pipes, they suffer.
The last time we had a major leak, the building manager took me (identified, once again, as the de facto "dishwasher expert") down below to look at the rather picturesque crusting and shit that clogged up one pipe they were trying to clear out. He wasned me to make sure no debris got into the system. I didn't tell him that I always made sure that was the case, and that once I wasn't at the sink, other workers, usually La Jefa, took over and acted like rabid children with attention-deficit disorder, throwing the colander aside like it was Play-Doh in which they'd lost all interest and doing ther same with the pots, pans, and dishes, until the latter were all gone, and one sink was stopped up and overflowing with scummy water (while doubtlessly leaking debris into the pipes below). I tried to warn my co-workers to use the colander or, if they resented that particular item for some reason (backsass, maybe), to use something else. After the eighth or ninth time I stopped caring. I'd get blamed for it in any case and I'm really not getting paid enough to take "ownership," as La Jefa puts it. This is hardly the worst restaurant I've ever worked (at my last one, one of the bartenders got actual shit all over his shirt after cleaning out an overflowing gutter in the basement). I just sat back, embraced the path of least resistance with grateful lust, and waited for the next big water crisis.
It wasn't really all that big, but it did strike home that I was basically living in the Flint, Michigan, of Wonderland. The pipe opening that takes in excess flow from the dishwasher somehow got clogged up and had been overflowing for the past two days. I showed her the overflow that day at about ten, and then she saw it again later. At the end of the day, she asked me if the overflow continued.
"Oh, yeah," I said. "It's been going on all day. Not anything catastrophic; I was able to mop it up."
"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked, with a manipulative, almost betrayed look in her eyes, of the kind I've learned to resist from any source, "forgetting" that I had showed her earlier that morning.
I opened my mouth and didn't make a sound; this was kind of a waste, so I closed it again. I should have kept it there. "Well, I did. It was overflowing yesterday, wasn't it? Were we able to get it fixed?"
"No."
"Well, see, it's overflowing today." Many will probably find this simple cause and effect stuff. I wasn't pissed off, mind you. I had just come off one of the best weekends of my life, as previously described. If anything, I found it rather funny. It was a bemused, wondrous exasperation--why wasnt' she seeing this? In my mind, I was rapping her sharply on the forehead and asking "McFly" if anyone was home.
"Okay, I'll call the guy and see if he can take a look at it tomorrow," she moaned like a hurt puppy, as if this had all been my fault. I just drifted off into the rest of the day, wondering at my circumstances.
The next day, of course, she advised me, among other things, not to let the sink overflow. I had the temerity to let the gargoyle "I cannot believe she just fucking said that" smirk in my head touch my face very briefly. She left off her admonitions, pondering my face for a second.
"You're looking at me real condescending." If there's one thing condescending people hate, it's people being condescending to them (similarly, if you negatively react to a person's snobbery or bigotry, you're apt to be called a snob or bigot yourself): real pot-kettle-black stuff I hadn't encountered in a long time.
I got out of it with "I just don't understand" (which was also true on a certain level where I might have cared), but should have said "that's condescending-ly." Under the circumstances, it might well have been the funniest thing I'd ever said in my life.
I expect it also would have gotten me fired, but I'm not that reckless. My spirits are still high, too. I just thought I'd give everyone a nice little service-industry snapshot before I go into partial hibernation this weekend in order to make up for last weekend.
Posted by Charles J. Microphone
at 4:40 PM EDT
Updated: 25 August 2006 5:26 PM EDT
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Updated: 25 August 2006 5:26 PM EDT
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