How I got fired from Denny’s
I was the night manager and it was a lousy job. Way too much work and stress for way too little money. I probably would’ve quit had I not learned the art of delegating all of my responsibility onto the hired help. Of course that meant I had to give my staff certain freedoms.
For instance, I had a line cook named Steve who did all the food ordering and bank drops, but he was always high. It was easy to look the other way because he actually functioned a lot better stoned. Like one night just before bar rush Steve was fucking up orders so I told him to go have a smoke and get right, (wink wink) so he did. The bar rush hit and he turned into a machine that pumped out Moons Over My Hammy and Grand Slams like they were Eggleston photographs. When the rush slowed down I thanked him for pulling it together. He said it was no thing. And then he stopped me and chuckled. “Thats all reality is,” he grinned, “no thing.” “Yeah?” I sighed. “No,” he continued, “its not a grim kinda empty, ‘No Exit’ kinda no thing, its an alive, vibrant, always changing, no thing. There is no thing because it is everything and in a constant state of flux.”
“Its no thing,” became Steve’s mantra for the next two months. Then one morning I got a call from the GM, “What happened with the drop?”
As it turned out Steve never made the weekend bank drop because he skipped town with it. To make matters funnier Steve didn’t exist. It was a false identity. The feds actually ended up getting involved because “Steve” had done this twice before. Once at a Big Boy in West Virgina and once at a Waffle House in Atlanta. Needless to say I was fired for my failure to ensure the safety of company funds. Oh well, luckily it was no thing.
