And in my absence, covering my departure, a variety of new servers. One younger, pretty, the nephew hired her hoping to throw a leg over but she's resisted him so far, perhaps her undoing, she's not a good server and without his patronage she'll probably get let go. The other 2, both older, my age-ish, one, a pleasant English lady with a substantial edge, not really fine dining, but a good worker - when she comes in, she's had a variety of issues, emergencies, family, personal, in just the first three weeks I was back she missed 5 shifts, last minute call-ins, there's something up, a junkie or an off-the rails alcoholic, the owner, he's begun to hate her, no one is sick there, no one, ever, and she's pulled off 6 days already in the busiest season of the year...and she breaks things, lots of things, glasses, plates, it gets worse as the day wears on, she needs to feed the demon...walking into the dining room with a couple of desserts, she stumbles, they fly onto the carpet, "Just put some more whipping cream on, they'll never know..." I yell loudly, the customers laugh nervously...
...and finally there's T***. T*** Baloney, career waiter around Calgary and the neighboring mountain villages, he knows everyone, maybe only a single degree of separation from any of our customers, he and the new waitress, they recall the golden days of serving in Calgary together, many a shared acquaintance or friend. But there's something up there as well, his hair, long, grey, slicked back to reveal a pronounced widows peak, blue eyes, goatee, he looks for all the world like a bad hypnotist in a worse nightclub, he's always asking about tips, the tip outs, this isn't going to wash, while I'm happy to divide things equally the nephew won't be so easygoing, I know. And he's a talker, no sooner than he discovers the degree of separation from the customer than he stands there conversing for an hour about his experiences at this restaurant or the other, prides himself on almost being a sommelier and when customers ask about a wine he goes into long discourses about "fruit forward or tanning forward? what year were you thinking?..."and a simple question becomes an opportunity to showcase his knowledge and one-up the customer.
Neither of them will last, but it's not my problem. A slower night, the nephew's taken a couple of extra days off while his uncle is on vacation, when he's back I try to grab the early departure, started at 10:00 AM, it's 9:00 PM now, maybe I can go..."NO way buddy, in a week you'll be gone and I'll get no days off...". He's hunched over his cellphone, reading the internet, facebook, texting, both similar and the complete opposite of Rodin's "The Thinker", Calgary's own equivalent, "The Idiot". So I suggest letting the others go, we've only a single table after all, and he dismisses this as well, we're all on the same salary, we can all hang out bored together...
He's made his bed...