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Got fired while waitressing at an A&W for dumping coffee on a patron (he asked for it, but that's another thread...).

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Well, Zoot, here's the other thread!

Okay. Picture a tiny, not fully-grown 16 yr old Zoot, bearing in mind that this is the year she hits puberty, a full 4 yrs after all her peers. 90 lbs at the most. Never had to deal with being leered at or hit on, as she's looked like a 12 yr old boy up to this point...

Anyway, I got a job waitressing in an A&W restaurant/coffee shop, part time. It's situated across the street from most of the new/used car lots in town at the time. So on days off from school and Saturdays, lots of sleazy car salesmen take their coffee breaks at the A&W.

Well, one sunny Saturday, there's a table of middle-aged car salesmen taking a break. To me, these guys look old, you know, like my dad. I wander over with the coffee pot for refills, and a guy at the far side of the table points to his cup. I have to lean way over to fill it, because I'm just little. The guy next to me, well, he grabs my ass. REALLY grabs it.

The look on my face when I stood up must have been something else. Like, "does not compute, such things do not happen to me". He starts to laugh. Killing himself. Thinks this is the funniest thing in the world. Head and arms thrown back, lap exposed.

I emptied the 3/4 full pot onto his lap. He screamed like a little girl.

Manager hustled me into the back and started to yell at me. I cut him off and told him what happened. Meanwhile, after running to the bathroom for cold water, Mr Ass-grabber comes charging in threatening to sue and to have me arrested for assault. I start yelling back that he'd better fucking leave town before my father finds out what he did because he'll have more to worry about than police and sexual assault charges when he does...

Salesman decides not to pursue legal action.

They didn't fire me for a few days, but there was a sudden and mysterious shortage of work, and they laid me off a few days later. They also started hiring again a week after that. So I knew why I was let go.

Zoot, that's such an unfair, sleezy thing to be subjected to, at any age, but at sixteen!

I was thinking about my sister and how I'd feel if someone pulled that kind of shit with her.

Me, I think I did enough damage (he really did get scalded, the pot was fresh) before papa-bear got wind of it.

Oh, I made some coffee today. I held my finger in it.

But fair.

Also proved to be an early warning for lack of a flight reaction in terms of the old "fight or flight" thing....

I've never been fired in a cool manner. Hard cheese on me...boo hoo.

I witnessed a pretty funny firing, though.

We wuz at the end of our afternoon tour on Tri-City Rig #1, hanging in the doghouse as the graveyard relief came on.

The roughneck on the graveyard crew was pissed to the gills. He was able to sit, but standing was a challenge. His driller kept asking if he was OK to work, to which Vaughn (the drunk roughneck-not always a redundant expression) replied in the positive.

The clincher, though, was when our unhappy drunk roughneck tried putting his legs through the sleeves of his coveralls. We were giggling at his efforts. The now-perturbed driller said "You're run off," and that was about it.

Years later, on Chase Rig #1, a green roughneck on his first shift unlatched the elevators on a test tool, dropping it down the hole, never to be seen again, as all our subsequent fishing was bootless in bringing it to surface. This guy ran himself off, retiring to the light plant with his head in his hands until his ride came to pick him up.

Given that even the head off a grappleyarder can run upwards of a hundred thousand dollars I imagine it was more than he could have made in a year - or three.

Crews are usually very careful with them, holding them in place with both slips and dog-collars (a pain in the labonza, as any roughneck will tell you).

This poor guy let his hands get in front of his head and pulled the elevator latch before throwing in the slips.

A driller told me a joke about how to hire a roughneck:

Go into a bar and yell, "Slips!"
Hire any guy who immediately bends over.

Don't hire the guys who hit their heads on the tables while doing so.

I found a site that shows pretty much what I experienced.

The jokes are even the same:

First was the standard prank; pizzas. Only so many, all the pizza delivery places in town eventually learned not to deliver to the supervisors address. Taxi's too.

Then one day a dump truck load of gravel was delivered-- right on the supervisor's lawn.

Another one was the obituary phoned into the paper. That's when things got a little serious, and questions started being asked.

The clincher was when the fire department was called in the middle of the night, and they actually broke down the supervisor's door in the wee hours of the morning.

The police got involved then, and the harrasement stopped. They questioned the prime suspect, but they could never prove anything, and the matter died.

Un-work related, my ex told me about an incident she had yesterday while getting gas.

She pulled into the pumps at about the same time as a cab driver. I guess thier gas tanks were on opposite sides, because she said they ended up nose to nose, with her where she wanted to be and the cabby not where he wanted to be, and so he had to wait.

I'm not sure how that worked. It could well be my ex violated some decorum; it is as easily believable that the cabby might have too.

But, he never should have said: "Figured you'd be a blonde..." when my ex got out to fill up her car.

She told him he better not say another word. Then she started to fill up her tank with the nozzel barely squeezed. Then she browsed through 7-11 very slowly, looking at all the fine product they had there. When she finally went to pay, she made a big visible show of letting two other poeple who came in behind her at the cash register go ahead of her.

Fed up with the many layers of bullshit at McDonald's (that I'm sure you're all aware of), he decided he was gonna go out with a bang. It was in the middle of summer, peak business period for a roadside fast-food joint. Shortly after the breakfast-lunch change over (about 11:00 a.m.), when it's relatively dead, he shut off all the grills and deep-frying vats.

Since there was nothing fresh being made, it was about an hour before anyone noticed everything was off. Just as hungry tourists started piling in for lunch, one of the managers discovered the imminent nightmare. It can take up to an hour for these things to heat back up, so the whole joint was pretty much up the creek. The dude responsible just turned to the manager and basically said "I quit. Have a good one!" and grabbed his stuff and bolted.

The next hour was hell. It sucked dealing with ravenous, fat, middle-aged dudes who were demanding Big Macs immediately, but you couldn't help but admire the dude who quit. It was one of the cleverest and most impressive "fuck you"s I've ever experienced.

[ October 31, 2002: Message edited by: themorninglight ]