April 11, 2007

Late Nights

One of the things that I was so upset about when I got home was the fact that due to my high food cost that I just can’t seem to get down lately I have to go in for drawer change every night. Those of you who have done anything in the restaurant business know what I am talking about.

The reason I dislike it so much is that I get up between four thirty and five every morning, and go work for eight to twelve hours. Then I come home and am busy for several more. I am tired and ready to be a vegetable by nine o’ clock or so but now I have to go back out and be in my store from eight thirty until nine thirty or ten and go back home. Just to be a presence. It is not necessarily a waste of time, but it is still a pain.

When I started with the company twenty years ago, that is what it was like. We worked six days a week and got an off day or two if we had the store covered, the money sucked, we had to be in for every single drawer change every single night. The burnout rate in restaurants was awful. I know maybe a handful of people that are still with the company. The last few years we seem to be heading toward a bit of an easier time. Managers are guaranteed two days off every week, although we still work six and then have two off so that we get an occasional weekend. I get three vacations a year, one of which is ten days. The money certainly isn’t terrible, above average for college graduates, of which I am not one, and supposedly the support from upper management has gotten better. That’s kind of a hit and miss proposition, it just depends on who you are working for.

This drawer change every night stuff seems like a return to the bad old days to me. I will do it, because I was told to, but I can almost guarantee that maybe three of us out of ten are actually doing it and there won’t be any repercussions against the ones who aren’t. That’s one of the bad things that has happened with changes in the business world. They are so scared to lose managers and keep retention levels high that when someone is actually doing a piss poor job nothing is done. It might take years before they are fired.

I figure if I can get my side jobs to the point where I can maintain an income level of at least $52k a year for at least two years, I’m gone. I am at least at 25% of that level right now and I have only been working hard on it since February. It is a lot more time and work than I realized it would be, but it will pay off in the long run.

Downtime

I received a call earlier this afternoon from my Internet provider. Automated of course, but cool nonetheless. Charter will be doing maintenance in my area from midnight until six AM tomorrow morning, so if you email or post a comment it is very unlikely that I will respond until tomorrow evening particularly since Thursday is my meeting day and I might not get home until late.

Goals Meme

I was tagged for this meme several days ago and just had several other things that needed doing, and then once I started writing completely skipped it. Vicezilla tagged me with this earlier in the week and I apologize for being remiss on getting it posted but here it is.

The premise of the “Gotta Get Goals” meme is to post 5-10 of your most over-the-top goals that you want to accomplish before leaving the earth. I’m not tagging anyone with this, but if you want to participate, just send me a trackback or link to my post.

As Vicezilla did, when I first started writing this I thought it would be easy but it’s not. For the last twenty years I have basically lived, or rather, made my living for my children as I will for the next twenty or so and as a result some of my goals are very selfish.

1. I want to take five or ten years and just travel the world. Heck, I could take ten years just to travel to all of the places that I have been or want to go in the U.S. I want to go to Hawaii and Scotland. I want to go check out Europe before it is overtaken entirely by the Middle Eastern societies. Europeans already dislike Americans anyway and it’s not going to get any better. I want to go to Tahiti and Australia. I want to see Japan. I even want to go hang out in the Great White North and have some brews with Bob and Doug, eh.

2. I don’t want to be filthy stinking rich, although that would be nice. I would like to not ever have to worry about finances or what I am spending this week and how it’s going to effect paying my bills next month. I suppose though if I were filthy stinking rich that would help along #1.

3. I want to be a writer. A REAL writer. I consider my brother a writer but I don’t know if I have the stick-with-it or even the ability to accomplish this. I really admire some of the bloggers that I read that just sock ’em dead with their posts. I read them and think “damn, I wish I could do that”.

4. I want to quit smoking. This is at times much more attainable than the other ones and at the same time just as far-fetched. I want to be able to run around and play with my children’s children’s children. My wife’s parents are both dead partially as a result of smoking and my father is the first male on his side of the family to live past 50 and I figure that is only because of the advances in medicine and awareness that we have made over the last 50 years.

5. I want to have a huge honking penis…Fucking Ron Jeremy huge…So that I can stand there and go Aaarrgghh like a pirate over my victim…Actually I couldn’t think of anything else but the mood around here has gotten much to somber and I had to lighten it up a bit. No, really. I’m fine with my teeny tiny white man penis…

…most of the time.

….no really.

Sick of Hearing About Don Imus Yet?


I don’t normally track-post entries that include foul language, but in this case I am submitting this to the open track-back alliance. I started writing this around five this morning before going to work, and have done a bit of reading tonight and returned with a few changed opinions. I started out ready to jump on the right-wing bandwagon, but now I think most of them have it wrong. I am leaving the post alone though, you can pretty much tell when the tone changes toward the end of it anyway.

I’m getting there, although probably not for the same reasons. I will be the first to admit that what he said about the Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team was inappropriate and ill-timed. Should he be fired? Probably but not because the biggest racist in America, Al Sharpton, says so. He actually should have been fired a long time ago. I don’t particularly consider what he said racist (probably because I am white) I just consider it stupid. He is a dumb ass who should watch what he says in public because he is a public personality.

I was surfing the web a little while after I woke up this morning and saw where he had been on Al Sharpton’s radio show and I read through the transcripts. For the most part it is Al and his cronies jacking their racist jaws not letting Don get a word in edgewise. Toward the end of the transcript Imus started getting really pissed off because someone insulted him. Tough tits there guy. What’s good for the goose needs to be good for the gander and all those other sayings. Pot. Kettle. Black. Oooh, maybe I shouldn’t have said black in this discussion, someone might get offended.

Joke ’em if they can’t take a fuck.

So who is the biggest racist in this picture anyway?

Don Imus, the moron who is a shock-jock and has made some inappropriate comments because that’s what he does for a living?

Or Al Sharpton (you know, Reverend Al who might be related to Strom Thurmond) who doesn’t seem to be happy unless he is stirring up a pot of shit. Once again I have to bring up Steven Pagones and Tawana Brawley. Think that wasn’t about race? Think again. Everything comes down to race with Al Sharpton. Oh, but he can’t be a racist can he? He’s black.

How’s this for a leader of civil rights? “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmuleks back and come over to my house.” Sounds like the very voice of racial reasoning to me.

Or in 1995 When a Jewish store owner in Harlem was having a conflict with a black rival he said “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business”. A protester in that one shot his way through the store and burned it down, killing eight people in the process. Damn, that’s some serious non-racial loving, although it helped launch Rudy Guliani into the office of Mayor defeating David Dinkins, New York City’s first black mayor.

What about the other loudmouth in the bunch, Jesse Jackson? The guy that hates Hymies (jews) and says they live in Hymietown (New York)? Oh, he couldn’t be a racist cause he’s black too. He denied ever saying it, then blamed it on a Jewish conspiracy. There’s only a conspiracy of one out to get you brother, and it’s your dumb-ass self. Then after Louis Farrakhan threatened the black reporter (as well as ALL jews) who had allowed Jackson’s statement to be printed Jesse Jackson stood by him. Because that’s what non-racists do.

I rarely agree with Oliver Willis although I do enjoy reading him, but one of his posts touched on something today. At first I was like “Oh no, you are all a bunch of hypocrites but once I actually thought about it for awhile I realized he was right. The point? Oh yeah, I will get to it eventually. Some bloggers, myself included say that it is hypocritical for Don Imus to be suspended and possibly fired for racial remarks but nothing happens to Chris Rock, Chris Tucker, and Dave Chapelle for saying worse.

Their language can be extremely offensive and vulgar (look who’s talking here) but racial? Nope (except for Chris Rock), at least not when they are talking about their own race.

If that were the case, then all of the white comedians that make fun of themselves could be accused of being racist as well. Watch the Blue Collar Comedy Tour sometime and see what I am talking about. Jeff Foxworthy makes fun of rednecks all of the time, hell I make fun of being a dumb assed redneck at least once a week myself. If he were to start making fun of black people the same way he does whites he would be out of work.

Most conservatives are using the wrong argument here, although Macsmind touched on it when he posted about Chris Rock and put the link to the Chris Rock Bigger and Blacker Script. If as a white person I were to go in and substitute “n_____” or “black” for cracker in this script it would show up 16 times and I would be labeled a racist. I don’t see anyone calling for Chris Rock’s head on a platter for racist comments, although they should. If Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were the progressive members of the Civil Rights movement that they claim they are, they would be at the front of the line. They are too busy worrying about diamond merchants and Hymie’s to police themselves I suppose.

So here’s the same question I asked above; who’s the biggest racist? I’m not asking whether they should be fired. I’m not asking who has done more to help others. I’m not even asking which one you hate worse. All I am asking is which one is the biggest racist. Don Imus (who needs to be shit-canned anyway) with several stupid comments over the years, some of them racial or Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who both have a lifetime of being victimized and judging from their words and actions have no interest whatsoever in equality or racial harmony? I would be hard put to say who is the biggest out of the last two, but the black KKK hat prize would have to go to the Reverend Al Sharpton as far as I am concerned.

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Trackposted to Right Pundits, Outside the Beltway, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Perri Nelson’s Website, Maggie’s Notebook, basil’s blog, Stuck On Stupid, The Bullwinkle Blog, Cao’s Blog, The Amboy Times, The Pet Haven, Conservative Cat, , third world county, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Planck’s Constant, CORSARI D’ITALIA, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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