New Year’s Eve…

There is kind of an old wives’ tale that says whatever you are doing at midnight on New Years Eve is what you will be doing for the rest of the year. If so then my year is going to suck because I was working all night. Damn.

I have always been proud of my associates as a store manager. I generally tried to make sure that my evening and overnight shifts were, if not as good as the day shift, then as close to it as possible. One of the biggest failings of my company is the lack of supervision on the evening and night shifts or any kind of follow-up after they have been told to do something. As a store manager I could directly affect their hours and paychecks and thus was able to get people to do what I wanted. Not only that but since I was there six days a week I could generally show them why doing a certain thing a certain way was to their benefit.

The biggest problem’s with me NOT being a manager is that either the manager’s under me feel like they have no control over their shifts. That may be because they are afraid to work the shift or that they just don’t give a shit. I don’t know. Either way all three of my second and third shifts pretty much suck balls. Some of the folks are better than others but for the most part they suck. It’s entirely a training issue.

New Year’s always hits funny in the restaurant business. On the third shift it comes in extremely late and drags over to around 7 am and the morning shift is dead until just before noon. When it does get busy you get hammered. Last night it hit about 2:30 and it hit hard. It didn’t take long before it got ugly and then I started getting ugly. I had to kind of take a step back and shut my mouth several times but I know the words “you can’t serve that nasty looking shit” must have come out of my mouth seven or eight times. The cook didn’t walk out though, so he will be OK I guess. At least two of the three waitresses don’t want to work with me again though. I don’t have a problem with people that actually do their job but I can be a bit of an asshole to folks that refuse to do things the right way.

I hate working graveyards shifts, so that didn’t help much. It always screws me up for several days with my sleep patterns. I got home around 9 or 9:30 this morning, went to bed by 10:15 and was up by 2PM. Hopefully I will be able to get to sleep tonight. I may fall back on the Benadryl just to make sure.