July 1, 2007

The dude may have a right to free speech according to the first amendment that he was reciting but I highly doubt the framers of the Constitution put anything in there about using a frigging bullhorn. It doesn’t say in the article but I am assuming that the NYPD arrested him for breaking a noise ordinance, which is something that they have been cracking down on recently.

Sometimes I just want to bash this one manager’s head in with a heavy blunt object. When I am in a restaurant or when I was a manager if someone was late and had not called I immediately tried to get them covered. CYA. Our folks have to be clocked in and on the floor at ten minutes prior to shift change time, i.e. 1:50PM, 8:50PM, and 6:50AM. It’s very simple. If they aren’t there by quarter till I am on the phone with THEM and if they still aren’t there five minutes later I start looking for replacements. I spoke with this particular manager at 2:25 and his cook wasn’t there. I asked who he had called. Nobody. He said he didn’t have anyone to call. He has plenty of people to call, but rather than paying a few hours of overtime he will leave the restaurant understaffed. I told him he was going to have to work it if he couldn’t get someone in there and gave him a couple of phone numbers.

He keeps all these people around that don’t have phones or cars and just doesn’t want to replace them or doesn’t have whatever it takes to get things done THEN, when it’s needed, rather than his leisure. Thus the blunt object.

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As much as I hate it, it’s time to get off my ass and get ready for work. I can always tell when I have hit my 5th or 6th day of work. I just have a really hard time getting myself moving at all…

The girls should be home thins afternoon. It will be nice to have them back home. I missed them all. The house has been pretty quiet and boring for the last few days with them out of town.

As the tagline for my blog used to say “sleep is just a cheap caffeine substitute”. I actually did get a bit of sleep last night. About normal for me anyway. I finally hit the sack about 10:30 and have been up for almost 30 minutes now. Working on my second cup of coffee. The nice thing is that with all of the managers in I won’t drag in until about a quarter till seven today. I have a few things I need to do and I will end up cooking at that same store for awhile this morning. That is my most challenging one as well. It’s the one where they had that guy arrested for having hidden cameras, so right off the bat I have a public perception problem that is still there several months after the fact. It’s in a pretty upscale neighborhood which makes it a little harder to get my business back as well.

Couple that with the fact that half that guy’s employees were either using or selling drugs on the premises and I pretty much have an uphill battle there. My sales are down something like 28% over this time last year.

The guy that IS there managing now is a pretty good manager. I trained him a couple of years ago and he has plenty of experience. His only problem is that he is scared of losing people. He will keep shit around that doesn’t help his business even when there are replacements available. That’s OK. I will be helping him with his schedule today and some of that shit is going to find itself with about two days on the schedule. Hopefully they will just quit.

I have been reluctant to run anyone off from that store because it is harder to staff it than the other two and also because with my vacation next week I just didn’t want to jeopardize any chances of being off for a week. As a manager your time off is pretty much guaranteed but once you go a bit higher if your stores aren’t staffed you are pretty much shit out of luck. That’s why my days off have pretty much been cut in half over the last two months. I am averaging 5 days off per month over the first two months since I got promoted and don’t see it getting easier until the summer is over. I have one other guy that hasn’t had a vacation yet that will be taking it at the end of July and then I have a couple months of breathing room after that.