Oddball Update

As some of you might know, my wife Apple works at a restaurant. Since we moved to Florida she’s worked at several different local eateries, and like any other workplace, each of them has had its own unique brand of drama. But I’m not sure either of us has experienced anything like what’s been going on at her current place of employment during the previous six months. Last week, it all culminated in a big event that involved the restaurant owners, management, and even the local police. It all started with incompetent management, and so shall it end.

The story I am about to tell you has been assembled mostly via first-hand accounts from Apple. It begins about a year ago, when the restaurant hired a new manager. This new hire, a boastful woman whom I shall call “Connie,” bragged endlessly about her vast experience in the business and how she would work to bring as many customers into the restaurant as humanly possible. It sounds like the goal of a typical restaurant manager, certainly — but Connie’s execution was wildly over the top. During last winter’s tourist season, she took reservations off the deep end by overbooking the restaurant by as many as 50 or 60 people per night. “Undoubtedly some reservations will be no-shows,” Connie reasoned. Sure, but 60 people?

Predictably, on busy nights the place dissolved into mayhem, customers bitched and moaned about being seated 30, 40 or even 50 minutes late for their reservations, and Connie conveniently disappeared during peak times so she needn’t be bothered with the chaos. If you were a walk-in, you could forget about being seated — ever — but Connie would always instruct the hostess to take walk-ins despite the hopelessness of their situation.

And God forbid one of the muckety-mucks from the local luxury hotels should show up. The luxo-mucks don’t often bother to call ahead for reservations, choosing instead to show up on busy Friday nights with parties of six, ten or even more, no warning given. Connie, hoping to curry favor with the rich elites to the exclusion of all else, would immediately usher their group right in and put the rest of the staff in the awkward position of bumping some other guests who had already made reservations.

Add to this the fact that Connie was always gossiping behind the backs of her staff (”Oh my God, have you seen Susan’s husband? He’s sooooo ugly!”), calling everyone on her staff “incompetent” (as long as those people weren’t in earshot), not following the instructions of her superiors (the restaurant owners), and could often be heard saying things like “Oh well, it’s not my money” when funds would be lost or other wasteful mistakes made, and you’ve got a manager who commanded absolutely zero respect from the crew, the owners, or the customer base.

While the busy tourist season wore on, customer satisfaction dropped into the toilet. Diners were rushed and herded around like cattle, plates were taken away before they were finished eating, soup was presented the moment they sat down, and a general air of “get in and get out” was shoved into their faces. Check voids for dissatisfactory service skyrocketed, as Connie was just as flamboyant with voids as she was with reservations (”Not my money!” were her favorite words). Letters of complaint began pouring into the restaurant office each day, whereupon Connie actually took it upon herself to personally shred them all without a second glance. And so while customer numbers had gone up, profits were tanking. Connie continued to pledge success with the owners, but by now it was clear that her mouth was writing checks that her ass couldn’t cash.

Meanwhile, there were also a number of other unsavory characters listed on the restaurant’s general roster. They have included drunk bartenders nipping on the liquor stores (guzzling vodka and then putting water back into the bottles), servers treating their friends to hundreds of dollars at a time worth of food and drinks “off the record” (read: free), chefs stealing meat and kitchen supplies in bulk, and of course, slacking high school girls abandoning their work station for hours at a time to flirt with anything equipped with a dick. There have even been illegal immigrants hired by Connie, who would then dismissively tell the accounting staff to “just use somebody else’s social security number” on the books. (Perhaps as a result, the restaurant’s payroll records are being audited by the IRS this year.)

But by far the most unsavory characters of them all were the ones who, over the last several months, have engaged in what I call “the restaurant conspiracy.” A small group of employees ganged together and worked to rip off customers and servers alike by voiding checks after they were paid for, then pocketing the money. This escalated over the course of the spring and summer until tens of thousands of dollars had been ganked. In the meantime, these shifty employees — most of whom come from otherwise poor immigrant families — celebrated with mega-bling designer clothes, electronic gadgets and expensive parties.

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that it all started with incompetent management. During the course of this organized money grab, where was Connie? Looking the other way, is where. On the outside, and at a minimum, it can be said that Connie was derelict in her duties, never checking the nightly reports — for if she had, she’d have noticed an ungodly amount of checks being voided, and done an investigation. Since only the manager (Connie) is supposed to have the authority (and the password) to void checks in the restaurant computer system, and thus all voids theoretically should have gone through her, she would have instantly known if those voids were authentic.

Unless, of course, you buy into what some of the restaurant staff believe — that Connie was aware of the conspiracy and even endorsed it, as the accused ringleader of the guilty party was a friend of hers who she brought along from her previous workplace. She may have even deliberately given the offenders the keys to the kingdom by slipping them the password to the computer system. This is all speculation, naturally, but it’s not difficult to see where it comes from in light of Connie’s past actions (remember “Oh well, it’s not my money?”).

It took one of the other staff members, giving the computer records a cursory glance, to bring the fraudulent activity to the attention of the restaurant owner. Further piling suspicion onto herself, Connie immediately objected to any and all measures that were suggested to reign in this behavior. “Why bother changing the manager password when whoever did it is just going to find out what the new one is eventually?” was one of her actual arguments. Come on, what kind of sincere person says this? You’re telling me that if your bank account were hacked, you wouldn’t change your PIN because “the thieves will just find out what my new one is eventually?” What a crock of shit!

The computer records, when matched up with employee schedules, eventually exposed one of the guilty employees. The local sheriff was called, evidence was collected, a plan was laid out, and finally, the cops made the arrest. When she was caught red-handed, the girl rolled over on her accomplices — one being Connie’s friend, a man who was then revealed to be already making restitution payments to a previous employing for stealing their money! The dumb bitch who was caught said that Connie’s friend “told her to do it,” as if that was any kind of excuse, and was laughing it up like it was a gay old time. The joke was on her, though, for she laughed all the way to the unemployment line with orders to pay back all the money she’d stolen from the restaurant (possibly through garnishing of future wages).

Connie, meanwhile, went crying to the owner, apologizing and in complete shock that her friend could have been a party to such a thing. Her blubbery, soap opera-like fit, say the employees who witnessed it, couldn’t have been more fake, as there was not a single tear in her eyes the entire time despite her putting on a big show to the contrary.

Seeing the entire money-stealing conspiracy as preventable had the manager been doing her job, and fed up with all of Connie’s other abuses and mistakes, several other employees have gone directly to the restaurant owners to complain, and to formally request that there be a “regime change.” Whether they will be successful is for the future to know, but in the meantime, “get in and get out” has become a new mantra to live by — not for the customers, but for the employees.

Categorized as Life, Rants