What's Missing

Recently PG13 has been running out of one or more essential supplies. Tonight's "86 list" (AKA - what we don't have ) included shrimp, rice, ice-cream, and bananas.

Last week we were out of strawberry ice-cream, but since we had strawberries we could generally get by. But no ice cream? Since servers at PG13 are judged partially on how many deserts we sell, this is not insiginficant. I had to disappoint two customers who wanted deserts and another who wanted shrimp.

But that doesn't bother me as much as the other item, not on the menu, that we are out of: server-order pads. That's right--PG13 is out of the order pads the servers use to write out customer orders.

Now I'm a writer so I've got pads of paper lying around everywhere. I chopped up a few 8-1/2 by 11" half-used note-pads and made workable substitues. Other servers are making do with stapled-together quartered sheets of notebook paper.

This strikes me as beyond incompetent. I mean, couldn't our GM walk over to Staples and buy a box of order pads? How hard could that be?

One of the managers is just comming off of vacation and he may have been the cog that kept the order process running smoothly. He just got back this week and maybe it will take a couple weeks for the pump to be primed and everthing to get back to some more reasonable approximation of normal.

I haven't posted in the evening before and perhaps I'm being grumpy due to a poor night of tipping. But there is something else at work here.

I was raised in a reserved, Lutheran household. We we taught to make sure that we took care of our responsibilities so as not to inconvenience others. And when others don't do what they are supposed to we find it distasteful and hard to accept. I was raised with an ingrained reluctance to criticize, prefering to look first to my own flaws and my own need to adapt to challenges and changes.

But when those in a position of responsibility fail to meet basic, simple requirements--when matters persist and get worse, I find myself unwilling to be quiet. And this is bad because there is a meeting scheduled next Tuesday and I'm likely to skewer management for these inadequacies in front of the whole staff.

That typically is not a smart thing to do.

It would be easier if I didn't respect the managers. I have come to like them, even the Grey Witch. If I didn't respect them then I wouldn't expect them to do their jobs. It seems that I either need to let go of my respect for them or my lapsed, Lutheran convictions of propriety and rectitude.

The truth is, I tend to be far too serious about things. Each day is another episode of the continuing soap-opera that is PG13. To the customers, we present a smiling face and the official illusion that everything is fine. Every day we wade through the placid waters of boredom and then surf the waves of chaos and back again.

Everyone complains, everyone has their histrionics. But I have the kind of careful, biting intellect that can lead others to skewer themselves. It wouldn't be hard to do. All I have to do is pose a couple of simple Socratic questions: Is it the management's responsibility to ensure that the servers have the materials they need to do their jobs? If someone has a responsiblity to do a job and doesn't do it, what does that mean for others that work there? How should we judge another worker that doesn't fulfill the responsiblities of their jobs?

In fact, I recently recieved a letter asking if I wanted to file a claim with a class-action lawsuit against PG13 for not getting proper breaks or not being supplied with the necessary materials to do my job. I threw it away.

Maybe I should have kept it.