Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America Read Online Free PDF Page B

and got knuckle tattoos. I’ve even fired someone for relentless creepiness. That was the one time I thanked God for at-will states. He wasn’t a terrible worker, and there was nothing to point to, but he did brush his groin with his hand once too often while looking at the girls up front.
    Idiot pranks are risky too. One kid I worked with got bored and built a castle out of cardboard boxes in the parking lot. They fired him a) because it made the company “look unprofessional,” and b) for “time theft.” I’ve seen someone get fired, no shit, because he didn’t want to wear buttons proclaiming him proficient at cleaning and other menial tasks. I barely made it through the day without mentioning TPS reports. (If you don’t know what those are, drop everything and go watch
Office Space
right now.)
    Mostly, I’ve fired people because they didn’t care about the things that do matter to me. I’ve never cared any more for the owners of the companies I’ve worked for than they have for me, but I will kill myself for my co-workers. A lot of us do that. When we work through fevers and injuries and bone weariness, it’s for the money but also because if we don’t, we know that we’ll be leaving our co-workers holding the bag. However bad the shift is, with a man down, it’ll be that much worse on whoever’s left. There’s a siege mentality in the service industry in particular; you go through hell together. If you tap out and go home, you’re leaving your co-workers to deal with more customers with even fewer hands. And that means that they’re more likely to get fired themselves—because if customers start complaining about the service, the boss doesn’t really care that you’re covering for someone who’s out sick. So you bet your sweet ass that if you work for me and I see you being dead weight, I’ll get rid of you.
    All of this is not to cast myself as some kind of paragon ofwork perfection. I’m a terrible corporate manager, every time I tried it. My employees loved me, but I made a lousy guardian of profit margins. My first loyalty is to my co-workers. Then the customers. And then, in a distant third, the company.
    For example, when I found out that some of my employees had themselves a fantastic gig pulling the expired salad and bruised or unusable produce out of the Dumpster and taking it home, I started making sure that the food was disposed of
next to
the trash rather than in it. This, you should know, was highly against the rules on everyone’s part.
    I figured if I got busted, I’d just say that I was trying to keep track of how much got thrown away to help me order properly the next time. I’m not sure what the company would have done if they’d found out; most companies simply don’t want to know about stuff like that because even they don’t want to be that harsh, but liability exists. No restaurant can knowingly allow anyone to eat expired food, even if it’s obviously still sound. With that said, companies also discourage letting employees eat unservable food because they assume that a worker would have bought food instead of just going without, and heaven knows it’s a sin to lose potential profits from workers! Only, most people don’t buy their food half-off at their own stores; most people just drink more on hungry shifts when they can’t eat. I always figured that my cooks would probably not be doing their best work if they were salivating every time some food finished cooking. And I just couldn’t live with myself letting these guys look longingly at the burgersthey were flipping as if they were Victorian street urchins lusting after a hot roll in a bakery window.
    If one of my people was hungry, I gave them food. I’d send parents home with boxes of expired chicken nuggets for their kids. My bosses, of course, generally hated dealing with me. It’s been a pattern. I don’t really blame them—their jobs sucked as much as mine did and I was a huge pain in their asses.