Since the smoke, business drops off a cliff. JR is quick to exploit this, tacking another day off onto his two already, then showing up for the late shift Thursday, Leaving early on Friday and taking another extended 5 days off after.
It's his child's birthday after all.
He has 4 children, all of them born in the summer.
So he's around and about the restaurant, kids in tow, living his best work-free summer life.
He's very clearly on salary.
Everyone else can pick up the slack.
He's got a job interview, and his parents are excited, a "manager" for a courier company, pays $70, 000 per year if he gets it. They really want him to get the job.
He's excited about it, looking forward to the interview, but you know, you know...
This kid, he's never worked for anyone other than his parents. Or once, when he was a teen, but that's a short story. Since then, 14 years he's spent dodging work at the restaurant. Lists of things to do, updates to the till, that have been "on the list" for years now without doing.
a single thing about them.
He's a busy guy.
SO now, a job interview, for a job that pays him less in a full year than he'd earn in 4 months of the summer, if he'd show up.
If he'd show up.
Why show up? Clearly the salary is enough to pay his bills, he's 33, lives in his parents house with his wife and 4 kids, his wife, who doesn't work but nonetheless collects a cheque from the restaurant and EI every winter, as well as him.
Rumor is she wants to leave him, she's come to whatever few senses she has, but can't, not with 4 kids and a salary from a job she's never showed up to...
I've never met anyone more unprepared for the real world, and just shake my head and laugh, I mean, 70K is not a lot for a man with a stay-at-home wife and 4 kids, but doubtless he'll be kept on the payroll at the restaurant...
And I'm more than a little annoyed, not least at the fact that I'm working 10 hour days to enable his "staycation", that watching this gong-show of entitlement, this pretense of "get a job" and good citizenry, I mean, it's too much, and SR (JR's Dad), is done speaking with me, he knows, he knows, and his mother has a knack for turning the conversation onto other topics as soon as you humourously suggest that "40 hours a week? Birthdays off?", I mean, he's never worked forty hours in a single week his entire life and if ever he came close his bitchiness would be unbearable, let alone 40 hours a week for an entire year, but I imagine him showing up to the interview, references from both his mommy and his daddy in hand, smiling his syrupy saccharine smile, going through the motions, and then...
I've never wanted someone to get a job so badly in my life...
And you know, you think, well, this shit will never fly and then I recall the bosses' nephew from the old Italian place in Calgary, and how quickly he's risen through the ranks at CP rail, and you know, nothing's impossible...