Goodbye, Restaurant

I finally put in my two weeks notice at the restaurant and I feel extremely liberated.

There was a situation last night over some salsa that nearly got me fired (how petty!), so I decided to save them the trouble and quit. A manager took me into the office and spent a few minutes telling me how juvenile I had acted, and how much of an asshole I had been. Then she refused to let me defend myself, citing that no excuses could make up for my misdeed.

The entire time, two thoughts occupied my head:

I am putting in my two weeks TONIGHT.
Are you fucking kidding me?

I was flabbergasted that she could stand there and tell me that I was exhibiting the exact behavior that the restaurant was trying to eliminate. I rang in 20 salsas that were going to be used within the hour anyway. Apparently a better reason to nearly fire someone is because they "made" the cook sell 19 extraneous salsas, not because they treat their co-workers and managers like shit.

All of our cooks are assholes. All of them. And 90% of them are illegal. Did they forget how badly they wanted to come to America while jumping the border? I can remind them when I call INS and have them deported. It is ridiculous how much they get away with -- not making a table's food, or intentionally making it wrong, coming into work extremely hungover, degrading both servers and managers, and stealing food and liquor.

And I am called the asshole.

Regardless, I've decided to work out the two weeks in the event that I should need a recommendation or some other bullshit from someone there.

In the event that any of the managers ask my reason for wanting to leave, I will simply refer them to the nine or ten other servers also looking for other jobs for information regarding my leave, or perhaps I will point out that the hostess sells Roxy's during her shift, or that on two occasions in the past three months four cooks were fired for fist fighting on the line, or even that we've had three other cooks that just straight walked out in the middle of their shifts. I don't understand why they can't see that the restaurant has gone straight to shit and nobody wants to work there anymore, let alone even slightly enjoys doing so.

So onward to a new and hopefully better job!

After the salsa incident, another interesting thing happened last night. A guy that I dated when I was...what, fourteen? came into the restaurant, sneaked up behind me when I was at a register ringing in an order, and (from what I can gather) intended to surprise me with his presence.

Other than the very brief moment that I saw him back in January (at the restaurant), I really had not seen or talked to Chris since...I don't know, I was fourteen.

I asked what he was up to, and he tells me that he's doing good, he just got a place on Madeira Beach, and he actually came in so that he could see me.

Uh. Creepy.

In any case, the reason I probably had this massive crush on him when I was fourteen was because he was seventeen. Now I'm twenty, he's nearly twenty-four, and I've considerably changed though he has not. He's still a shaggy loser, still on probation, still has no direction in his life.

And he hugged me. Twice. Then gave me his phone number and told me to call him so that we could chill sometime.

I don't know exactly what he wants (other than the obvious), but that phone number is still crumpled up in my back pocket and I have no intention of ever dialing it.