Fired on Christmas Day

I hate to be the bearer of good news, so I’ll bear some bad news instead. I’m completely out of a job. A short while ago I had double employment, resulting in a brash overconfidence and a no good back-talking attitude towards my superiors. And make no mistake, they WERE my superiors. They were smarter, harder-working, better-looking, more creative, stronger, faster, and just plain better than I was in every way, which is why they’re the boss and I’m fired, once again. That’s the way the world works. The hardest workers are in charge. The 1% got there on pure determination and hard work ethics. Nothing more, so they deserve a much larger piece of the pie. I do not, because I’m lazy.

For the first time since 2006, I didn’t go on a 5-7 hour ride on Christmas day. I only had time for an hour spin on the trainer in the morning before heading to the hotel for a long shift (I got in another hour on the trainer that night at 11:30 though). So basically my day was ruined from the moment I woke up, but the capitalist in me wanted the cash, so I was actually eager to work on Christmas, which is the busiest day of the year at the Boulderado’s banquet hall. We served around 500 people that day. After setting up everything in the morning, we spent a solid six hours (from noon till six) seating, serving, clearing tables, and re-seating more people as they feasted on the bottomless pit of food from the buffet. Dear God, thank you for impregnating your mom with yourself so we can celebrate your birth by loading thousands of extra calories into our flabby bellies while a quarter of the world starves to death (the non-believers).

For dinner:
-chicken
-prime rip
-fish
-crab claws
-shrimp
-two or three greasy, delicious vegetable dishes
-potatoes
-salad (a waste of stomach space during a Christmas feast)
-buns and bread
-fruit, cheese, and cracker platter
-five kinds of cake
-pie
-a chocolate fountain with fruit and cookies

Okay, now that the important thing has been discussed (the food), feel free to stop reading. I mainly just wanted to write about the delicious line up. Now then, onto the firing.

Like any normal day, I was on bussing patrol. While everyone else had a section to seat and wait upon, I had free reign to do twice as much work for half as much pay, bussing everyone’s section, filling waters and coffee, and bringing odds and ends to the guests (Really, what the hell is a waiter supposed to do during a self-serve buffet? Am I missing something here?) I probably carried a total of 1,500 pounds of plates and silverware that day. But it was the type of work I enjoy, mindless manual labor and a little small chat with some of the guests, daring them to go for a third helping. I was busy all night and didn’t stop for more than a minute or two the entire time other than to grab some sodas for the the dishwashers (which I eventually got scolded for).  Half of my coworkers were put to utter shame as I SMASHED their hopes and dreams of being the hardest working employee.  I stormed away by myself into the headwind, dropping everyone like a bag of rocks on a long hike–because you’d drop a heavy bag of rocks pretty quick when you realized you had a long way to hike. Duh. That simile makes sense.

My roommate, Greg–who works at the hotel also, wasn’t working that night but came to eat with the staff and I after the guests left. My riding buddy, Philip, came along too for the free dinner, and the two of them had been waiting downstairs for two and a half hours in the lobby because Greg had mistakenly thought the banquet ended at 4, not 6-something. So finally we finished up and I went downstairs to get them. Back upstairs at the banquet, Philip and I loaded our plates with mountains of food and began our feast in celebration of winter solstice, just four days late. We were still finishing our first plates when the rest of the wait-staff started getting up to get back to work. There was still all the buffet equipment to break down and two more tables to clear, but it was all pretty minor stuff compared to the hecticness of the past six hours, and a dozen people weren’t necessary to do it.  I continued eating since I’d started 15 minutes after everyone else. Plus I was planning on eating my weight in gold, if that makes sense.

So by the time I finished my second plate of food and third plate of dessert, it was finally time to get back to work since I was getting some dirty looks from one of the mean-spirited women that has apparently had a problem with me ever since my first week, not that my taking longer to eat was any of her business since I wasn’t working for any of the tip pool.  As a “temp” and a busser, I was making an hourly wage which didn’t effect any of their pay.  I said goodbye to Greg and Philip and started cleaning up. I quickly found out there was very little to do and occupied myself with trying to look busy, something a few of them had been attempting all night.

Then all of a sudden while I was dragging the chocolate fountain into the kitchen to dump it, the woman who’d been giving me evil looks and harped on me about the sodas, though I had ignored her since the sodas are for everyone,–she came barging into the kitchen and told me to clock out and go home. “You’re done. You’re so done tonight it’s not even funny. You need to go home NOW.” She was super upset for some reason. I didn’t think she had the authority to tell me to leave, since she wasn’t the shift leader that night. I followed her out of the kitchen arguing with her and made her explain why I had to go home early (by about a half hour). She told me there wasn’t enough time to discuss everything right then. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin. There are so many things and we can’t discuss them here. If you have a problem you can talk to one of the managers.” But I was persistant and told her to give me some sort of idea what I had done.

Me: Was it that I ate for 20 minutes longer than everyone else?
Her: No that’s just one of many, many things.
Me: Like what? Like WHAT!? What did I do? I worked hard the entire night.
Her: Everyone here has a problem with what you were doing tonight. There isn’t time to discuss it now. (She tried to walk off. I followed her and stepped in front of her).
Me: What? That’s not true! I only heard compliments. Give me one example because I don’t believe you.
Her: Well, for starters there were reports that you were eating off people’s plates.
Me: Are you kidding me!? That is a complete lie. Whoever said that is a blatant liar. Who said that?
Her: I can’t disclose that information (as if she’s a CIA agent talking about a secret assassination).
Me: Well I can guess who said it and she’s completely lying because I didn’t eat off any plates tonight and there’s not even a chance someone could have mistakenly thought I was doing that. This is ridiculous. None of this is true.
Her: I don’t know what else to tell you right now, but you’re done here.  Go home.
Me: Whatever. I’ll be talking to the managers.

Basically the conversation didn’t go any further and she wouldn’t say anything other than, “You have to leave. Go clock out.” I know she didn’t expect me to argue with her in front of everyone like that, since the more reasonable thing to do would be to leave and keep my mouth shut.

The manager who had hired me stopped by my house the next day to drop off my last pay check and apologize for everything that had happened. (I’d written an angry email to him the night of the incident calling out all the lies).

From what I gather, there were two women who didn’t like me from the beginning since I’d argued with both of them at some point in the past couple weeks (Not angrily or anything. One had just tried to correct me when I wasn’t at fault, and I told her so. Plus I’d taken initiative and changed the way we handled the way we bring in and clean the dishes for the dishwashers in the kitchen, making everything much more streamlined and easier on the dishwashers and the banquet staff. It had really pissed her off since I told her that the old way was too slow. My roommate, Greg, also told me that both of them had been intimidated by my presence because I’m a hard worker (as opposed to the theme of my last post) and made some of the other people who work there look lazy. Apparently even my wiry cyclist arms are better-equipped at running dozens of 50-pound trays of dishes than the average middle-aged person. So while some of my coworkers gossiped amongst themselves and tried to look busy, I did their work for them, not realizing (or caring if) it made them look bad. This is why I got fired. I was doing too much work, usually the means for a raise. It seems hard to believe but that’s basically what the manager who hired me (who’s being “let go” this week) told me when he stopped by. I would still have my job if he wasn’t being fired as well. The new management is somewhat clueless and appears to just roll over for the two women that pecked me out.

I was ready to send off a slew of angry yet composed emails to the entire banquet staff, picking apart the two villains and their lies and laziness, but Greg was afraid it would get him fired since he was the one who helped get me hired. So I held back. I’m going to the hotel tomorrow to talk to the two new managers sometime this week, but I don’t expect anything will come of it.

Getting fired from that job is unfortunate, since I usually got to take home a lot of food, and also since there were people there that I liked and were fun to work with and who were hard workers. I feel bad for them since they’ll have to continue working with and being owned by the couple evil ones that they all listen to for some reason. It baffles me that those couple back-stabbing liars have any authority there. They aren’t managers and they aren’t paid more than anyone else.  They’ve been there for a long time, but not the longest, and even that shouldn’t grant them the authority to have any real say, in my opinion. If it weren’t for Greg’s worry of being fired, I’d just show up for work next Saturday like nothing had happened and see what they’d say.

Greg has been on my case ever since he met me that I’m too opinionated, too pushy, too intense, and have too much of an ego. I “just have too many of my own ideas (wtf?) and need to let things go sometimes.” “You need to see things from the other side and just let it go once in a while”.  “You know, what comes around goes around,” he says. I strongly disagree. If I ever become a mindless sheep who believes there’s any sort of benevolent being up in the sky dictating justice, I’ll consider myself an idiot and a failure. Strong-willed people with decent morals are too few and far between. The few conquer the many because the many don’t speak up.  And I’d rather make enemies than unworthy friends.

If nothing else, I do enjoy the irony of being fired on Christmas.