Christ.
You ever get that fed up feeling after a particularly hard stretch at your job? The feeling that you would cheerfully watch most if not all of your coworkers slowly burn to death while a churning metal song plays at deafening levels so you don't have to be annoyed by their screams?
No?
Well golly. It must be nice to be less fucked up than me.
I'm about up to here (picture me holding my hand at about forehead level) with my workplace. The job itself isn't that bad, the stuff that's actually in my job description that is; you know, crazy strippers, drunk twats, drugged out people, assholes, puke, belligerent thong pirates, etc etc. It's the stuff that isn't or shouldn't be in my job description that's driving me all apefuck.
I've had a fair amount of occupations in my life, I haven't always worked at a strip club like I would sometimes have you believe. For a sample, here's some of the jobs I have used to pay my bills over the years:
Paperboy, Burger King, garage janitor, industrial maintenance, busboy, cook at 15 or so restaurants, delivery/collections/repo for a Rent A Center knockoff, warehouse, club security, more cooking, house painter, car salesman. I'm sure I missed a couple here or there, but you get the idea, I've labored in a lot of varied work environments before.
And I have to say I've never worked at any sort of job before where it is commonplace for me to do other people's duties for them. Or where the rules of my employment change enormously depending on what mood my manager is in.
For those of you who work in a stable, relatively sane line of work and may not understand what I'm talking about, let me illustrate it for you.
Note that at no point does it refer to a drunk stripper
attacking a patron with a rocks glass. Odd, huh?"
Bear in mind as you read the following that is has all occurred since my last post which was only nine fucking days ago.
1) "YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT! I'M GONNA SCREAM AT YOU, MAKE YOU LOOK LIKE AN ASSHOLE IN FRONT OF A BUNCH OF PEOPLE AND THEN LIE RIGHT TO YOUR FACE REPEATEDLY BECAUSE I AM A BADGER-STYLE MANAGER!"
This one got me so pissed I just went quiet and calm. I passed right over the stormy waters of Rage and landed in Fragile Serenity, which is where I go for souvenirs right before I snap and do something barbaric and regrettable.
Here's the tale:
I was working the door last Saturday just after 2 AM, when it seemed like 5 buses had pulled up and disgorged 200 drunk people who had no cash on them into our club. And since it was cold out and most clubgoers are far too cool to wear coats or even a long sleeved T shirt, everyone was trying to crowd into the lobby at the same time and the doors were wide open which quickly made the entire lobby as cold as it was outside.
I'd say easily 80% of these insidious morons had to pay the cover with a credit card, which makes the line move really fucking slow. The pressure in the lobby was building to critical mass and I was about to get overrun in the ensuing jackalanche.
So I called for another Floor Creep to help me with crowd control and I made a separate line for cash paying people to alleviate the weight of bodies keen to get out of the cold. I've done this many times before, frequently at the behest of the very same Manager who ripped me a new one for doing exactly that this time.
He screamed and raged at me in front of everyone, denied he'd ever let me, much less told me to do it before. "That's how people get fired!" he screamed, foaming at the mouth in indignant fury.
And to frost his shit cake for good measure he made the last group of seven people whose ID's I'd checked and who had paid their cover go back into the line and pay the Doorgirl, 'like they were supposed to'.
As if this were somehow their fault, like they had done something wrong, not me.
Total and complete shit show. Degrading for everyone involved.
Dynamic Management Team Alpha: Forward Without Foresight!
2) I am a bartender, yet somehow it's not my responsibility to clean my own workspace after my shift on night when there's no Barback scheduled. I'm not sure why this is but I like it because I am a lazy wretch. I used to tip them for their trouble, but since the Floor Guys aren't allowed to say "I'm not doing that", I recently made the decision to stop tipping. It's like finding $10 on the floor every shift!"
I don't understand this. Surely if there is somewhere that needs to be cleaned after a night at the bar, it's the floor behind the bar. All kinds of crap all over and everything's sticky. THAT'S how you get ants.
But at our club, even on a night when there's no Barback working, a Bartender need not worry about sullying her fine drink-serving hands by having to pull up her own mats and sweep and mop her own work-hole. Nope. The Floor Drools do it all! Now free of charge I guess.
You see a strip club is the epitome of a Tip Based Economy, perhaps no other industry outside of casinos rely so heavily on tipping as a way of keeping the dough circulating. Everyone tips everyone else for everything.
A waitress punches up a food order for me when one of our non-nauseating cooks is working, I tip her a buck or two. Sure all she had to do was punch four or five boxes on a screen, but I'm not allowed to put in my own orders and I appreciate her taking a few seconds from her day to order my grub. The I'll make my way into the kitchen and let the cook know that the order is mine and flip him a few bucks too.
Yes it's their jobs, but I appreciate their effort. A couple of bucks ain't gonna buy much but it at least let's them know that I understand how the system works and I'm goddamn well on board with it.
So, to me, when someone does something for you that's supposed to be your fucking job, you need to tip that magnificent bastard. This Bartender, until very recently, used to do that. But for one reason or another, she no longer does. Yet I still have to pull her mats up then sweep and mop HER floor every time I work with her.
3) "Since a certain security incident at the club, us Cooks are no longer allowed to to take the trash out on their own. So now we can't even be bothered to drag our trash cans towards the door or break down our cardboard boxes for the poor shitstains who are forced to do this part of our jobs for us. And by shitstains I mean the Floor Staff."
This is one of the many things you encounter in your life that don't bother you the first time, nor maybe even the tenth. Like Abe's asspaper that I used to have to brush into the toilet every day I worked. But this has been going on for over a year and now...
This motherfucking infuriates me. Never, in all the kitchens I've slaved in have I ever worked in one where the cooks could just leave their trash laying around for other people to clean up and it's OK. Management here can't be bothered to apply even the most minimalist notion of standards to our cook staff. As long as you show up for your shifts, all other failings are overlooked and ignored.
Let me cite you the prime example. For the sake of protecting his identity in case he ever wants to run for political office, I'll refer to him as Lout.
Lout had zero kitchen experience but could navigate the public transportation system, which was good enough for us! He wastes more water than the Ford Motor Company and has probably killed more people with his culinary weaponry than Mao. He just doesn't have a clue about anything food related, safety being right at the top of the list.
To give you an idea about how bad Lout is at his job, here's a few gems from my experience with him:
-Lout doesn't know what venison is
-Lout isn't familiar with the concept of cross contamination.
-Lout don't like sanitizing stuff.
-Lout not know how to thaw food properly, him like ranching bacteria!
-He doesn't use date stickers.
-Him no like to clean out the screen on the dishwasher, derefore the whole back of the club smells like leftover food that been allowed to boil for a day or so. It smells much less pleasant than it sounds, I can assure you.
-I watched him make a buffalo chicken salad today. Saddest thing I ever saw. The order called for chicken breast rather than tenders and Lout dutifully cooked a six ounce chicken breast and fixed the salad. Then, when the chicken is done, he pulls it off the grill and proceeds to dice it. He then takes the cubed bird and throws it into a bowl of buffalo sauce, stirs it around a bit and starts plucking individual cubes of chicken out of the sauce and painstakingly placing them onto the bed of salad.
Again, for those of you who've never worked in a kitchen before and maybe aren't so good at the art of cooking yourself, let me list all of the things that Lout did wrong just one this one salad.
1) He used the same tongs he had turned the half cooked chicken breast on the grill with to fish the meat cubes of of the sauce he had drown them in. Now not only was the chicken itself contaminated, so was the wing sauce and therefore everything that went into the wing sauce for the rest of the night.
2) He cut the breast before he dunked it in the sauce. Wrong, bad Lout. You dunk the whole cooked breast in the sauce and then you slice it, not cube it, and place it on the salad. By doing this Lout's way, the chicken gets cold swimming around in the room temperature sauce, the dish looks far less appetizing than if the chicken was thinly sliced AND it makes a puddle of wing sauce from where all the excess sauce in the tongs drips down into the salad. On top of all that, it's fucking slow as hell.
3) LOUT NO LIKE WIPING KNIVES OFF AFTER USE. RUINS FLAVOR.
He has the filthiest knives I've ever witnessed. Fucking crusted with dried bits of whatever culinary nightmares he's Krugered that shift. He also knows absolutely zero about knife handling and care. He and the other cooks regularly use their knives to cut meat on the surface of the grill. This will ruin not only your knife, but your grill as well. And Lout not understand why knife no cut anything anymore....
Utterly appalling.
4) He placed the completed salad under the heat line. Because intense heat is good for every facet of the salad experience.
5) After placing the salad under the salad destroying lamps, he sat his fat ass back down and went back to watching Superbowl commercials on his phone, completely indifferent to the fate of the unfortunate mess he'd just created.
***Subject Update***
This is new since I wrote the above content:
Lout has now mastered putting food into containers, ones without holes in them, when he thaws food products out. It only took twelve or so times and my Manager, Sir Whompalot Frenzymuff O'Smegmakin screaming at him for it to take.
Now if he could just learn to put thawed foods into the walk in instead of letting them sit in water for the entirety of his shift, we'd be making real progress against bowel distress.
Floor Team Logistics: A New Hope
The whole Floor Staff situation at the club is changing dramatically. First Strider got fired, then over the past week, Keen Kenny Dean quit and another unnamed Floor Guy landed a job with the gubbamint that starts in the Spring. This level of change is unprecedented at this particular club, which is fairly hard to get fired from and is attractive enough money-wise to keep most Floor Squatches around.
It'll be interesting to see how Dynamic Management Team: Blackbird handles the crisis. Do they hire a new guy? Spread the shifts around to some hungry B-Teamers? Make everyone work five shifts a week? Hire five new guys to replace three?
Anything is possible with their quantum management style. I have no idea what to expect.
The best solution of course would be to hire one new guy and move everyone to four shifts a week, us lowly bench team members included. That way, everyone wins and management comes our looking reasonably competent.
Personally I'm just hoping that it all ends up equaling a few more shifts for this good 'ole stripperherder. I know my attitude can be really crappy sometimes and that I lack the will to change it for the better, but I can still work a mean door and sometimes, when I'm in the mood, I can be a charming motherfucker.
That's it folks. Go to work.
-The StripperHerder
*1 No matter how many times I tried, this website would not let me change the color of this caption's font back to black. Just wanted you to know that. It's not an editing error.
