Two steaks and a side order of humiliation. (897 hits)
Category: HumorRating: 1.18 on 21 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by jollydodger (View user info) at 2008-04-19 11:32:57 EDT
It was the summer of 1990 and I was 16 years old. Life was simple back then. Exercise was a foreign concept, yet I could still maintain an impressive set of washboard abs. My only real ambitions life lay in finding the 12or so currency units for a six-pack and trying to bone Shelley Stewart in Mrs De Bruin's class at high school.
Ah youth. How things have changed.
My parents weren't the type to simply fork over the necessary fundage for me to get loaded with my "Devil Worshiping" friends. So I had to work.
The only job I could find was as a runner at family restaurant called Mike's Kitchen. Two bucks fifty an hour baby. Two bucks fifty an hour for the most menial, degrading, soul-destroying work known to man.
For those of you who don't know what a runner is, he is the guy that carries food to your table, and cleans plates and glasses off your table when you're finished eating. He also wipes tables and mops floors and performs other hygienic functions. Basically he is the restaurant bitch. On the evolutionary scale, the runner occurs somewhere in-between the sea slug and a type of parasitic fly that lays eggs in your skull that hatch and devour your brain before coming out of your nose.
In short, welcome to the suck.
Now there isn't much that could make this job worse than it already is. However, one warm night back in 1990, I got a glimpse of just how bad it could really be.
The restaurant manager - a 25 year old dick named Warren - didn't like me at all. I'm not sure what his beef with me was. Perhaps it was the fact that I wasn't self-motivated. Or the fact that I didn't give a shit. I'm not sure. It could have been any one of a number of things.
I sometimes wonder what ever happened to Warren. On slow nights, when there's nothing good on TV, I like to imagine him, now a 40-something homeless person, working some nameless street corner somewhere. Turning tricks. Giving 5 bucks-a-pop blowjobs to twisted fat middle-aged men. Then I like to smoke 100 Dollar bills and have a money-fight with eleven hookers while snorting coke off the backs of migrant labourers.
It was a frantic night. Full house. Birthday sparklers, the works. Warren was barking orders like a meth-crazed chimp in the kitchen window. I was dashing from the window and back almost constantly. Ferrying prime rib steaks, surf 'n turf meals, racks of ribs in honey glazed sauce (Mike's specialty) and calamari starters to the hordes of hungry customers at each of Mike's 40 tables.
At about 8:30 there was a milkshake spill in Kate's section. Craig, the other runner, dutifully grabbed a mop and stepped into the breach. He cleaned and mopped and wiped that smooth wooden floor like a true champion. It gleamed in the soft steakhouse restaurant lighting. How it gleamed. It truly was a thing of beauty.
This was moments before Warren shrieked at me to take two rib eye steaks, one medium rare, one medium, to Table 16. I grabbed the plates from the counter. Medium Rare was slathered with monkey gland sauce while Medium was drenched in a generous helping of creamy mushroom sauce. Yum. The scene was set. The chamber was primed. I turned and set a cracking pace toward table 16. And my doom.
Later I calculated my speed at roughly 14 miles per hour as I hit the shiny surface of Craig's newly mopped floor. Now my problem is, firstly, I am 6 foot tall. And secondly, that I have fairly long legs. As a result, I don't plod along, or walk at a steady pace. I tend to stride, in long steps, the edge of my heel hitting the floor first.
The result of this was that as my heel hit the slick floor, instead of finding purchase, I instantly lost all traction. My leg simply carried on going. Very quickly I found myself doing the splits. At 14 miles an hour. With two heaped plates balancing precariously in my hands.
Such was my inertia that I was propelled like a Polaris missile toward my fate. Table 16 stared in horror as I careened toward them. Like a tasty asteroid on a collision course with an unsuspecting planet.
I collided with Table 16 with a resounding SMASH. The force of the impact was so great it forced both tables into the wall behind. Pinning the fat mother and burly father to the wall and scattering beverages and calamari starters to the four corners of the restaurant. I was driven under the table in a tsunami of monkey gland and mushroom sauce, ending up in a heap, covered in mushroomy goodness under the chair of Table 16's very pretty younger daughter. Medium Rare was stuck to the middle of my chest.
A hush descended upon Mike's Kitchen.
At that point, the only humane thing to do would have been for some kindly patron at a nearby table to pull out his Smith and Wesson and put a bullet in the back of my head. Alas, there was no such hero in the house that night.
Unfortunately after that I had to hand in my apron. I was discharged from Mike's Kitchen in disgrace. I later finished high school and went on to a successful career in advertising. This remains the low-point in my life.
And I never got to bone Shelley Stewart.
User Reviews
Submitted by Phallic_Cymbals (user info) at 2008-04-23 04:17:57 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This was 'well done'.
Submitted by Tictac12 (user info) at 2008-04-23 02:43:23 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
you went to the same highschool as me.
Shelly Stewart is now married...
Submitted by bigbabylons (user info) at 2008-04-21 09:40:04 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by CaptainThorns (user info) at 2008-04-21 09:35:27 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Submitted by CarterPFly (user info) at 2008-04-21 06:31:45 CDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Have to agree with berty on this one, pretty much all my teens and early 20's have been erased completly.
Submitted by BranDo (user info) at 2008-04-21 08:59:48 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Great stuff
Submitted by CarterPFly (user info) at 2008-04-21 07:31:45 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Have to agree with berty on this one, pretty much all my teens and early 20's have been erased completly.
Submitted by Berty (user info) at 2008-04-21 06:28:58 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
It has been a long, difficult road but I can happily say that I have succesfully annihalated all of my memories from age 9 to 17. Now it's just a nice big hole during which I can sleep soundly knowing that nothing good happened.
Submitted by redskieslookfake (user info) at 2008-04-20 07:04:43 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Lay off the similes a bit. You are over egging the pudding.
*mysterious hand gesture*
Submitted by redskieslookfake (user info) at 2008-04-20 06:55:42 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Funny
Submitted by Banjo (user info) at 2008-04-20 04:38:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
funny story.
Submitted by SunnyG (user info) at 2008-04-19 22:27:40 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Jeanneee (user info) at 2008-04-19 18:47:58 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I'm sorry about you being scarred for life, but it makes for a funny story.
Submitted by beer-turtle (user info) at 2008-04-19 15:40:07 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
need to punch up the ending somewhat...
Witty comment, snotty retort SOMETHING.
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2008-04-19 15:15:45 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Titus?
With a name like that, you just know a small dick is somehow involved.
Submitted by Val (user info) at 2008-04-19 14:23:57 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by jollydodger (user info) at 2008-04-19 11:53:25 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Haha. :) You're right. That would have been a much better story.
Everything you ever wanted to know about Titus
User id: 33384
Registered on or around: 2008-04-13 19:49:10 EDT
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# Reviews written: 26
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owned.
Submitted by X54 (user info) at 2008-04-19 14:08:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
That was amusing, although there didn't seem to be anything to separate it from all the other restaurant mishap stories in the world. Except for maybe Shelley Stewart.
Isn't it a pity that at the age of 16 it's impossible to appreciate the fact that no one really expects anything from you but stupidity and clumsiness, nor does anyone give a shit about you. Such accidents would have been a lot more enjoyable knowing that.
Submitted by Doodles (user info) at 2008-04-19 12:30:50 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
There really wasn't anything in this that made me laugh, or really even smile. Worth reading, I guess.
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2008-04-19 12:27:48 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by jollydodger (user info) at 2008-04-19 11:53:25 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Haha. :) You're right. That would have been a much better story.
Everything you ever wanted to know about Titus
User id: 33384
Registered on or around: 2008-04-13 19:49:10 EDT
# Messages posted: 0
# Reviews written: 26
# Times these posts have been reviewed: 0
# Hits: 0
Average rating of all messages: 0
Submitted by Titus (user info) at 2008-04-19 11:47:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
Started out OK, I liked the main character. 16 years old with great abs. Didn't end how I was expecting it to though, would have been better if you had ended it with you blowing your camp counselor on a canoe for the first time.
Submitted by experima (user info) at 2008-04-19 11:43:12 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment