Concentration

This week I'm working dinner shifts. Dinner shifts in a breakfast restaurant are very slow. They only have three of us working a dinner shift - two servers and me. There's usually one manager on duty that sits in the office and smokes, ignoring anything we happen to need.

My main task during a dinner shift is cleaning the bar and taking to-go orders. To-go orders piss me off because the managers take the tips for them. They don't do anything for the to-go orders...yet they get all the tips. These people think they are tipping me...I have to say thank you and smile like they are ridiculously generous. I never see any of that money.

Anyway, tonight was REALLY slow. Around 6:30 the restaurant was completely empty. The servers and I were just staring at each other and eating the mints. We stayed empty...for two hours. I wiped the entire bar down with bleach, organized juice by color, cleaned the windows, cleaned out the espresso machine...and after all of that was done I found myself standing up front alone, harmonizing with every song that came on the speakers. This continued for a good ten minutes until I turned around and looked at the lost and found. Someone had left their copy of A Picture of Dorian Gray at their table and had not come back to claim it. I haven't read that book and I love Oscar Wilde, so I figured I would give it a try. I mean I honestly had nothing else to do. I had looked for things to clean and there was nothing left. Reading a bit until a customer came in couldn't be too bad...right?

Well, I was twelve pages in when the manager on duty appeared from the kitchen. "Jordan!" I look over and remember that there is a camera right above my head that feeds into a monitor on his desk...oops.

"Yes?"

"Put that away! You need to concentrate!" He doesn't wait for a response and disappears back to his hole. I look around the restaurant and am quite confused. Concentrate on what...exactly? The masses of people banging at our door to get a table? Oh wait...there are no people.

I really dislike the cameras. He came back later to tell me to stop talking to the servers because we all had work to do. What that work was, I'm not really sure. I had done all of my side jobs. I had even rearranged all of the money in the drawer so that all of the faces were looking the same direction. Eventually I just picked up a menu and pretended to be memorizing it while I harmonized with the music some more.

Eventually a customer came in...and left five minutes later because the Wi-Fi wasn't working. I rebelled and made myself a latte. If I can't read and I can't talk to anyone, I'm going to steal the espresso. That's just how it goes.