The last few days . . .
Oct. 25th, 2003 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasFirst off, this is the SECOND time in the past few months Comcast has shut off our cable modem service for several days, accidentally. They're trying to convince folks that high speed internet access is neccessary, the way phone service or electricity is, yet they don't ACT like a utility. . .
There's a chocolate party going on right now, which we dropped briefly in on. Our tenants couldn't go, and Lis was in serious "people eeek!" mode, so we just showed up, dropped off a pie I made and a cake Dave made, said hi to people, gave people hugs, then left. We went to a little Indian storefront restaurant near there to get some food, because Crash had made vindaloo for the party, which smelled wonderful, and was about two hundred thousand Scovilles above Lis's "spicy" threshhold (which is about seven Scovilles, I think. Weirdly, heat that comes from roots, like radishes, doesn't register as "spicy" to her, while, for me, radishes are uncomfortably hot, and I like peppers)
I've been working a fair number of shifts recently. Today I got my first solo shift at the Grill Bar, the downstairs bar at the Harvard Club (which has draft beer and food service and everything!)
I was scheduled today for 10:30 to 4:00, and everything went beautifully until 3:45 or so.
Before the bar had officially opened, and I was still setting up, a guy came in and said, "Excuse me, can my son get a Sprite and sit at the bar while I go do a couple things?" I said that would be fine, and maybe a ten year old boy sat at the bar, and I got him a Sprite, and some Goldfish cracker bar snacks, and, when his father had left, I asked him, "Look, do you mind if I turn on Saturday morning cartoons, and, if anyone asks, tell them that you're watching them? I normally watch cartoons around now, but I'm working, and there's a TV here . . . "
He had no problem with that, and we watched Yu-Gi-Oh together -- well, he watched while I set things up, and then X-Men: Evolution came on, which we both watched. His father came back before the end of the episode unfortunately.
Around lunch, another father came in, and asked me, "My daughters are too young to sit at the bar, right?" I told him not to worry about it -- they could sit at the bar and order anything non-alcoholic they wanted. They were probably around thirteen or so. They ordered Shirley Temples and cups of clam chowder. I asked whether they'd prefer a ginger ale base or a Sprite base -- they're both recognized ST variations -- and they went for ginger ale. I filled a mixing glass with ice, put about two shots of grenadine in it, brought out two chilled martini glasses and put cherries in them, filled the mixing glass with ginger ale, stirred gently, and strained it into the two martini glasses, and served. Look, if you're going to have a Shirley Temple, I say, do it right.
At quarter to four, there was nothing going on, and the waiter who'd been working the Grill bar said he was cutting out fifteen minutes early to go to his other job, and if anyone came in in the next fifteen minutes, did I mind looking after them?
You know the right answer to that question, right? The CORRECT response to that is, "I'm the bartender, and I'm responsible for mixing and serviing drinks, and for doing food service at the bar, and you're responsible for food service in the REST of the place, at all the tables, and you're not leaving early and sticking me with the entire place on my own especially on my first day working here, on a day when the manager's not here to help out if things get busy, and your feet aren't leaving this room before a) your shift is over and b) your replacement is here, and if you've got a problem with that, I will borrow a pneumatic nail gun from Maintenence and NAIL your fucking goddamened feet to the floor so you don't leave before your shift is over, and if that means that you've got trouble getting food from the kitchen while you've got your feet nailed to the floor, well, you should have thought of that BEFORE you tried to stick me with YOUR job in ADDITION to mine."
Right? That's what I SHOULD have said.
What I did say, of course, was, "Sure, go ahead."
So he left, and, within about a minute and a half, a party came in and sat at the bar and ordered a hamburger, and another party sat at a table and had a coupon for a free entree, and one of the people at that table was an eight year old kid who wanted pasta with absolutely nothing on it, and a chocolate milk, neither of which is on the menu, and a couple people came in asking for Earl Gray tea in to-go cups, and the phone rang and it was the bartender for the next shift letting me know that he'd just missed the train and he'd be fifteen minutes late (but he was actually closer to half an hour late, but I'm frankly not upset at him, because, hell, we all miss trains and he let me know as soon as it happened, and, y'know, that sort of thing happens) and a couple women came in and ordered a bowl and a cup of carrot soup (which was VERY good today, actually -- although the clam chowder looked even better), and the party that ordered the hamburger was getting annoyed because their burger hadn't shown up, and they were just about to leave, and the hamburger came out, and I told them that I wasn't going to charge them for their burger, and they started eating it and it was all but raw inside, and the man who had the free entree ordered a dry martini and I found out that there AREN'T any to-go hot cups in the kitchen, or, rather, there are cups but nobody could find any fucking LIDS for the cups, and Harvard won the football game against Priceton in overtime on a fourth down thrown touchdown, and someone came in and ordered a draft Miller Lite and a glass of water, and someone else sat down at another table, and another party sat down at another table, and someone came in and ordered a glass of wine, and I took the hamburger back to the kitchen and showed Vin that he'd screwed up cooking it, and he apologized and went to make another one, and the guy with the Miller Lite wanted another glass of water, and excuse me, but you said you'd get my son a chocolate milk, and I found the Hershey's syrup in the kitchen near where people make up the desserts, and I brought out the replacement hamburger, and I made up a chocolate milk, and I put whipped cream on top, because, hell, I was where the desserts were made up anyway and I thought it would be a nice touch, and I brought out the chocolate milk, and the ginger ale that the father had ordered, and it's really fucking hard to carry a dry martini to a table if you don't have a tray, which I don't, because I'm a bartender, not a waiter, and the kid mentioned that he didn't WANT whipped cream, and I brought out the replacement hamburger and the waitress for the evening shift showed up and started writing down the evening specials on the whiteboard, and Alex FINALLY showed up, and I went to close out all my open checks (because it's a members club, people just sign for their food, which means that you can put it in the computer quite a bit after you actually serve it), and discovered that I really had no CLUE how to enter in a free entree, and just entered it in and stapled the whole thing together and wrote a note on it explaining that I had no clue how to enter in a free entree, and I logged in as the manager and canceled out the entire order with the hamburger fiasco.
I left the floor, took off my apron, and found my coat. It was now five o'clock.
I'd told Lis that my shift was over at four, so I'd probably be out between four and four thirty. She had said that she'd pick me up between four and four thirty.
Apparently, to Lis, this meant that she was responsible for waiting for me outside the Harvard Club from four to four thirty. She went above and beyond the call of duty, and stuck around until after quarter to five.
Naturally, there was no answer at home when I phoned to find out where she was, and I kept calling every five or ten minutes. And there was still no answer. Eventually, at five thirty, I left a message saying that, if I was to have any chance to catch the commuter rail, I had to leave THEN.
I did, in fact, miss the commuter rail, and took the subway instead. I ran into![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lagaz on the subway. She'd been taking care of alcohol-poisoned college students all day (she works in an ER), because, among other reasons, Harvard beat Princeton in football by three points on a thrown touchdown pass on the fourth down in overtime. The Orange line leaves me two and a half miles from my house, while the commuter rail leaves me about two hundred and fifty feet from my house. I made a final call when I got to Oak Grove, and Lis WAS home then, having assumed that I'd left work by train at four-thirty since that's what we'd agreed -- that if it got to be four thirty and I hadn't been picked up, I was making my own way home (which is not what I thought we'd agreed, but that's the way it goes)
Lis picked me up at the train station, by which point we were both short-tempered and snappish, because SHE had been running errands she hadn't expected to run all day and hadn't gotten to the library to do the research she wanted to do until JUST before she had to LEAVE the library to pick me up at four, and so hadn't managed to do the main thing that she wanted to do this weekend, and we dropped by the chocolate party but left relatively quickly.
That looks like enough information for a livejournal entry. So I'll stop here.
There's a chocolate party going on right now, which we dropped briefly in on. Our tenants couldn't go, and Lis was in serious "people eeek!" mode, so we just showed up, dropped off a pie I made and a cake Dave made, said hi to people, gave people hugs, then left. We went to a little Indian storefront restaurant near there to get some food, because Crash had made vindaloo for the party, which smelled wonderful, and was about two hundred thousand Scovilles above Lis's "spicy" threshhold (which is about seven Scovilles, I think. Weirdly, heat that comes from roots, like radishes, doesn't register as "spicy" to her, while, for me, radishes are uncomfortably hot, and I like peppers)
I've been working a fair number of shifts recently. Today I got my first solo shift at the Grill Bar, the downstairs bar at the Harvard Club (which has draft beer and food service and everything!)
I was scheduled today for 10:30 to 4:00, and everything went beautifully until 3:45 or so.
Before the bar had officially opened, and I was still setting up, a guy came in and said, "Excuse me, can my son get a Sprite and sit at the bar while I go do a couple things?" I said that would be fine, and maybe a ten year old boy sat at the bar, and I got him a Sprite, and some Goldfish cracker bar snacks, and, when his father had left, I asked him, "Look, do you mind if I turn on Saturday morning cartoons, and, if anyone asks, tell them that you're watching them? I normally watch cartoons around now, but I'm working, and there's a TV here . . . "
He had no problem with that, and we watched Yu-Gi-Oh together -- well, he watched while I set things up, and then X-Men: Evolution came on, which we both watched. His father came back before the end of the episode unfortunately.
Around lunch, another father came in, and asked me, "My daughters are too young to sit at the bar, right?" I told him not to worry about it -- they could sit at the bar and order anything non-alcoholic they wanted. They were probably around thirteen or so. They ordered Shirley Temples and cups of clam chowder. I asked whether they'd prefer a ginger ale base or a Sprite base -- they're both recognized ST variations -- and they went for ginger ale. I filled a mixing glass with ice, put about two shots of grenadine in it, brought out two chilled martini glasses and put cherries in them, filled the mixing glass with ginger ale, stirred gently, and strained it into the two martini glasses, and served. Look, if you're going to have a Shirley Temple, I say, do it right.
At quarter to four, there was nothing going on, and the waiter who'd been working the Grill bar said he was cutting out fifteen minutes early to go to his other job, and if anyone came in in the next fifteen minutes, did I mind looking after them?
You know the right answer to that question, right? The CORRECT response to that is, "I'm the bartender, and I'm responsible for mixing and serviing drinks, and for doing food service at the bar, and you're responsible for food service in the REST of the place, at all the tables, and you're not leaving early and sticking me with the entire place on my own especially on my first day working here, on a day when the manager's not here to help out if things get busy, and your feet aren't leaving this room before a) your shift is over and b) your replacement is here, and if you've got a problem with that, I will borrow a pneumatic nail gun from Maintenence and NAIL your fucking goddamened feet to the floor so you don't leave before your shift is over, and if that means that you've got trouble getting food from the kitchen while you've got your feet nailed to the floor, well, you should have thought of that BEFORE you tried to stick me with YOUR job in ADDITION to mine."
Right? That's what I SHOULD have said.
What I did say, of course, was, "Sure, go ahead."
So he left, and, within about a minute and a half, a party came in and sat at the bar and ordered a hamburger, and another party sat at a table and had a coupon for a free entree, and one of the people at that table was an eight year old kid who wanted pasta with absolutely nothing on it, and a chocolate milk, neither of which is on the menu, and a couple people came in asking for Earl Gray tea in to-go cups, and the phone rang and it was the bartender for the next shift letting me know that he'd just missed the train and he'd be fifteen minutes late (but he was actually closer to half an hour late, but I'm frankly not upset at him, because, hell, we all miss trains and he let me know as soon as it happened, and, y'know, that sort of thing happens) and a couple women came in and ordered a bowl and a cup of carrot soup (which was VERY good today, actually -- although the clam chowder looked even better), and the party that ordered the hamburger was getting annoyed because their burger hadn't shown up, and they were just about to leave, and the hamburger came out, and I told them that I wasn't going to charge them for their burger, and they started eating it and it was all but raw inside, and the man who had the free entree ordered a dry martini and I found out that there AREN'T any to-go hot cups in the kitchen, or, rather, there are cups but nobody could find any fucking LIDS for the cups, and Harvard won the football game against Priceton in overtime on a fourth down thrown touchdown, and someone came in and ordered a draft Miller Lite and a glass of water, and someone else sat down at another table, and another party sat down at another table, and someone came in and ordered a glass of wine, and I took the hamburger back to the kitchen and showed Vin that he'd screwed up cooking it, and he apologized and went to make another one, and the guy with the Miller Lite wanted another glass of water, and excuse me, but you said you'd get my son a chocolate milk, and I found the Hershey's syrup in the kitchen near where people make up the desserts, and I brought out the replacement hamburger, and I made up a chocolate milk, and I put whipped cream on top, because, hell, I was where the desserts were made up anyway and I thought it would be a nice touch, and I brought out the chocolate milk, and the ginger ale that the father had ordered, and it's really fucking hard to carry a dry martini to a table if you don't have a tray, which I don't, because I'm a bartender, not a waiter, and the kid mentioned that he didn't WANT whipped cream, and I brought out the replacement hamburger and the waitress for the evening shift showed up and started writing down the evening specials on the whiteboard, and Alex FINALLY showed up, and I went to close out all my open checks (because it's a members club, people just sign for their food, which means that you can put it in the computer quite a bit after you actually serve it), and discovered that I really had no CLUE how to enter in a free entree, and just entered it in and stapled the whole thing together and wrote a note on it explaining that I had no clue how to enter in a free entree, and I logged in as the manager and canceled out the entire order with the hamburger fiasco.
I left the floor, took off my apron, and found my coat. It was now five o'clock.
I'd told Lis that my shift was over at four, so I'd probably be out between four and four thirty. She had said that she'd pick me up between four and four thirty.
Apparently, to Lis, this meant that she was responsible for waiting for me outside the Harvard Club from four to four thirty. She went above and beyond the call of duty, and stuck around until after quarter to five.
Naturally, there was no answer at home when I phoned to find out where she was, and I kept calling every five or ten minutes. And there was still no answer. Eventually, at five thirty, I left a message saying that, if I was to have any chance to catch the commuter rail, I had to leave THEN.
I did, in fact, miss the commuter rail, and took the subway instead. I ran into
lagaz on the subway. She'd been taking care of alcohol-poisoned college students all day (she works in an ER), because, among other reasons, Harvard beat Princeton in football by three points on a thrown touchdown pass on the fourth down in overtime. The Orange line leaves me two and a half miles from my house, while the commuter rail leaves me about two hundred and fifty feet from my house. I made a final call when I got to Oak Grove, and Lis WAS home then, having assumed that I'd left work by train at four-thirty since that's what we'd agreed -- that if it got to be four thirty and I hadn't been picked up, I was making my own way home (which is not what I thought we'd agreed, but that's the way it goes)Lis picked me up at the train station, by which point we were both short-tempered and snappish, because SHE had been running errands she hadn't expected to run all day and hadn't gotten to the library to do the research she wanted to do until JUST before she had to LEAVE the library to pick me up at four, and so hadn't managed to do the main thing that she wanted to do this weekend, and we dropped by the chocolate party but left relatively quickly.
That looks like enough information for a livejournal entry. So I'll stop here.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-25 08:33 pm (UTC)Funny, they don't act like a utility company....
Date: 2003-10-25 11:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-25 11:26 pm (UTC)I didn't get there until 9:30. I didn't know what time it was, asked over e-mail, then didn't check my e-mail until after 7 thinking it would be at 7 or 8. Oops.
The vindaloo would definitely have been too hot. I'd never actually eaten fire before...
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-26 04:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-26 06:21 am (UTC)*gentle restorative hugs*
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-26 12:16 pm (UTC)BTW, if you need a ride from the Orange line in the future and I'm at home, just call me. Seriously.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-26 03:42 pm (UTC)I don't actually have your phone number. . . .
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-27 08:27 am (UTC)And yipe: I agreed to have Comcast come in and put cable in tomorrow 'cause there was no wait time and that way I would have something while still thinkiing about other options.
And my company is paying for it anyway