How I Unleashed The Homo Thunder

When I write, I make a point to change the names to protect the innocent. Bliss, (whom I still contend wins the Grand Prize for being the most inappropriately named person, ever. Really! I'm not even shitting you. She's an idiot.), is guilty and so her name gets published. More about her later.

I haven't written yet about my work. Waiting tables, once upon a time, was a job that I took pride in. That pride only came after years of waiting on insufferable pricks who drank their Dr. Pepper's like they just walked the Mojave. That pride only came after I ascended to the world of fine dining.

I was trained by two men who knew the intricacies of impeccable service; one Lebanese and the other French. And on staff, professionals from Italy, Morocco, Romania and Poland. The miracle of it all was that anyone knew anything about what the fuck anyone else was saying. Actually it was the best staff I have worked with. Our restaurant, The Mercury, was destined for greatness. The design of the two story, modern-minimalist restaurant was profiled in architecture and design magazines. Our chef, Chris Ward, was on a very short list as one of the top chefs in Dallas. Our FOH (Front Of House) and BOH (Back Of House) staffs had been drilled and tested, ad nauseum. We opened the restaurant only a month behind schedule on September 3. Then 8 days later, 23 fundamentalist jackholes decided to crash 4 planes. Now I don't want to make it sound like 9/11 affected me any worse than it affected anyone else, but it did. Our restaurant, like all fine dining restaurants that rely on business travellers using their expense accounts, suffered a huge hit. I couldn't even continue with my personal training. (For any Sarah Silverman afficionados, dig on that homage for a bit.) Without going too much more into this, I, after a month or so, saw the writing on the wall and transferred to our downtown Ft. Worth steakhouse. The Mercury closed. I returned to school. Katrina hit the gulf coast. I spent 5 1/2 months in New Orleans. I returned and started working for the Kirb (a decent steakhouse in the D/FW area) on January 16, 2006. The standards are less than what I was previously trained for but I adapted. We purged a few people that weren't working out there. The money was good.

Our recent two hires, now pretty much universally accepted by the staff as un-fucking-believable, have, in some sense, come to demoralize us all. Even the servers we thought were shitty before have said these two suck. Bliss is one of these hires. What she lacks in physical attractiveness she more than makes up for with her immeasurable incompetence. And that would bring us back to 'do' (pronounced "doh").

At the near culmination of a night upon which I was having my ass handed to me in a cocktail shift (11 tables, basically), I am busy working at the computer while my salads are ready to be run. I call down the line to everyone working on their closing sidework (shit you have to do to be able to leave unless your name is Kaylann), to run the salads. While one person steps forward to take one order down, Bliss continues polishing knives. I yell, this time much more agitated, for Bliss to "put down the fucking knife and run my god-damned salads". She moves with the speed of a Bliss. There simply is no better description. I am able to finish seperating 8 checks (did I mention I was having my ass handed to me?) when I turn around and see Bliss being a waste of space. It is at this time that I storm toward the salads (is that homo thunder rolling?) and rip the peppermill and soup out of Bliss' painfully ignorant grasp. This would have allowed the menacing clouds to pass by had Bliss not tried to interject some comment or another. But with that, the storm opened up. Operation Homo Thunder was a-go.

"Get the fuck away from me you waste of space," flew from my mouth and stunned Bliss, much the same as when I rattle a pair of shiny keys inches from her face. Her shock passed and only minutes later she was narrating the whole sordid scene to our bartender. She threw in, for emphasis, only after she knew I was within earshot, "He's such an asshole." Never one to let sleeping dogs lie, I sure as shit wasn't going to let her, either. I calmly but quickly walked back to her and, as professionally as you can tell someone, again, that they are a waste of space, I told her, again, that she was a waste of space. At some point, the sentence, "Go to fucking Chili's where they put up with this shit!", exited my mouth. (To any and all Chili's employees, this is not the slight it sounds to be. A few of us, in a later conversation, came to the conclusion that she wouldn't be able to hang at Chili's, either.) Suffice it to say, I think our friendship probably isn't going to last too much longer. But that was the day that I unleashed the Homo Thunder. Pray for yourself and your loved ones that you don't have the misfortune to get in its path.