Reasons to stay away from me

Thursday May 21, 2020 at 5:30 a.m. Alibi established

Eebie Deebie Dobbie Doba Sheeba Shoba Moba Froba (and junk and stuff.),

If you ever worked with the public you will understand everything I am going to say and probably could add your own stories to the list. I mean, working with the public every day for more than 30 years taught me three things that I still believe to this day.

1) Everyone lies about everything, hell I'm probably lying about this. It didn't take as long as they said it did, people did not say what they said they did, your staff didn't act like they said they did and no matter what they say it wasn't as bad as they are making it out to be. I still remember my neck and face getting red as I wanted to scream "LIAR" in some of their faces and your employer thinks you should stand there and listen to their crap.

I once had a man insist he was missing items from his to-go order from the last evening. If he had not wanted a cash refund I probably would have just given him the food to get him out of my hair and would have been done with him in 10 minutes. He insisted that he had to have cash though, so I went to the trouble of sitting down with the man and listening to his story. It took over a half-hour to calmly resolve because my employer didn't like it when I yelled at customers. I had already lived through that.

I then went and got the telephone. I calmly placed the telephone on the table in front of me and told him he had two choices. His first choice (and the one I preferred) was that he would go through with his threat to make a huge scene, yelling and screaming at me that I wouldn't treat him properly because he was a black man. At which point I would be forced to call the police and deal with the outcome and the media and the noise and the aggravation and etc. or he could exercise his second choice and just leave. I also told him he had only one chance to quietly discuss this as if he started the scene he made his choice. He looked puzzled and in a calm voice said "Why in the hell would I ever just leave if I got you on the ropes getting ready to hand me the money?" I told the man very calmly that the products he was alleging he was shorted were not on the menu and it was obvious he was lying, because at the time we sold neither Mushrooms burgers nor Onion rings. He said he was missing the equivalent of $20 worth of food. I'm sure he needed gas and I might have just given him the money if he would have just asked me for it straight up. We served them later, but right then? Wasn't even on the menu.

It was really the only time I ever got away with straight calling someone a liar to their face.

2) I hate eating out on Sunday afternoon after Church has let out. If I am given a choice either you can bring me a plate or a to-go order or I'll make my own lunch and eat it by myself, on a flimsy ass paper plate, outside on my front deck during a nasty windy and rainy thunderstorm using a weak ass plastic fork and no napkins. Folks who populate restaurants at this time have no spatial awareness and will block aisles, take up inordinate amounts of your time, are generally rude and clueless, and treat your staff like they are the Pharaohs and the servers or clerks are Hebrews.

I'm not kidding. It is not everyone but is a high enough percentage that somebody could get fired every single Sunday if I ever had to work. I hated working or eating anywhere on a Sunday. YUK. Never again. A very good friend of mine is a Sunday specialist and can make Sunday in a restaurant just hum, but me? I hated that day.

3) Anything can happen at any time. There is no such thing as normal and you should never expect normal on any given day. You will always be disappointed. You also should never, ever, and I mean never use the "Q" word under any circumstances. For example, Hush anyone who says "It sure is Q.... today". Stop them before they get the word out of their mouth or you will unleash the day from hell upon yourselves. The corporate inspectors will show up, the Regional Manager will pop in for a bite, you will get a visit from someone who wants to argue with you and your ex-wife (or ex-husband) may even show up to bitch about something. Usually all of these will happen at the same time and if you are in food service, the Health Inspector is getting ready to come in the doors right now, all because some self-righteous son of a turdball said the "Q" word. Don't let them say it.

Also get used to it, working with the public means you are on one side, and "they" are on the other, and yes, they are always (seemingly) batshit crazy. Always. Even the seemingly normal individuals will expose their bat-shittiness at some point in your interaction with them.

If you work in healthcare, it will be about the same time the batshit person begins to say "I googled my symptoms...", If you work in retail it will be when they say "I spoke to a manager last week and he said ...", and if you work in food service look for crazy signs of batshit when the words "The last time I was here...." start to form on their lips.

Right after you hear any of these phrases you will then begin to hear your own voice start to warn you of impending batshit crazy is going to start spewing from them at any minute. Excuse yourself from them if you can and pawn them off on an unwary underling or junior manager that you won't need for a little while because if you don't, you're stuck. For about the next hour depending upon how it goes and maybe longer if a congressional investigation has to happen to resolve the issue.

I've had multiple chances to observe and apply the Heimlich maneuver over they years, seen several guests have heart attacks, and sadly even once watched a woman die right in front of me at our front door. We used to regularly get "streaked" in the late '70s and early '80s (look it up). I've had staff members arrested right off the production line and no a Sherriff deputy doesn't care if a whole grill of food fries to a crisp in the process. I've had to break up fights between employees (and kept the employees, I ain't working harder because you are an idiot), between guests, between guests and employees, and also between managers and between managers and employees. Usually, it is over the stupidest shit you've ever heard of fighting about too. The trick is getting it calmed down before you are forced to fire someone. Usually if you have to go to the extent of firing somebody, your day is screwed because guess who gets to make up the slack? Yeah, it's great.

I once got the opportunity to broker a gang truce of sorts so that we didn't have shootings in the area. It wasn't a huge thing it just sort of happened. The only thing my boss commented was before it happened was he was glad the cops didn't have to be involved. I was like Man? The cops come after shots are fired, not before. Damn.

I once had a sewage spill back up into the whole store once, covering the dining room carpet with human waste. It was great. During lunch hour. While we were busy as hell. My boss's boss said we couldn't close. I closed anyway because can you imagine? Here is your salad with a side of turds? Luckily for me the Health department showed up and made sure we stayed closed until reinspected. They thought I was going to clean this up once the back up was solved. WE HAD A CARPET FLOOR for crying out loud! I did go to the local rental place and get an industrial vacuum of sorts to suck all the excess liquids and solids up so the carpet cleaning company I hired could clean up the carpet to be sanitary. Man they were pissed off about the bills but I was a restaurant manager not a poo cleaner. We had to have the whole store mopped several times, the excess liquids vacuumed and the carpet shampooed and then had to let it dry overnight. We reopened the next morning.

I had fallen leaves once cover an outside parking lot drain and had to figure out where it was and clean the leaves off of the top of it with a broom all while driving my car around the area with the door open. That is if I wanted the 5-inch high lake that had formed overnight to be able to drain away properly. That was fun. More than once in more than one store we've had customers drunk and sober drive through the wall of the building. This happened in three stores where I worked in two different states. We've had drunk customers fall asleep in our drive-thru. Once our boss went out, he opened the guy's door, shoved him over, parked his car, and turned off his car. Then he took his keys and threw them as far as he could into a big field beside the store. We've also had drunks arrested and people shot in drive-thrus. In TN where I was the DM, we had a shooting in a drive-thru where someone died over a perceived gang alliance. It turned out later to be a mistake.  Its a very silly way of life, working in restaurants and is an even stupider way to die. You name it, we've had it happen, saw it happen, or were right in the middle of it.

Once while running a store in Florida, I had a protest from the local college come right through the store into the dining room walking around chanting, and then as quickly as they came in they left. Guess what they were protesting about? Their right to go clothing optional at a local beach (that was 60 miles away). That's right, 250 college kids, boys, and girls absolutely nude. What a glorious day that was to be a man in his 20's, let me tell you.

So I could have been a machinist and if I was them look at what I would have missed? This probably doesn't scratch the surface, as I'm sure I forgot a bunch. After all this sort of stuff went on every single day and unless I would have kept a running journal, no way could I get it all in.

Now back to our regular program.

1. Wait a minute? What did that say? I do not understand this logic at all. A questionnaire developed by a county health department (I truly forget where this was) was given to all the returning employees at a local meatpacking plant and truly it makes no sense at all. It asks over and over if they have been exposed to someone with a high temperature or symptoms of Covid-19 before they can return to work. There were about ten yes or no questions on the form. At the bottom of the form, it says that any yes answer means you do NOT qualify to be tested for the coronavirus.
   
   So if you were exposed, had lunch with someone showing symptoms, worked next to someone with symptoms, or otherwise had contact with somebody who had been seemingly exposed, you don't qualify for a coronavirus test. Does this make any sense to you?
   
   
2. A scientist who retired from the CDC is currently criticizing the agency and admonishing them because it has allowed itself to be coopted by political forces and made its mission indistinct from the administration. He called it "Politically immobilized" which while a good term really means that it has been corrupted and cannot be trusted any longer. If this is true, and I am pretty sure it is, they may never recover from the effects of it.
   
   
3. I'm sorry in advance. This is a little bitching about basketball. Pro sports in particular however it starts at the backyard level and has become an indicator of sorts all its own. I grew up watching talented players at all levels from many different eras. I'm a Hoosier, so basketball is what we watched, in Texas you watch Football, in Indiana we grew up watching Bob Knight throw chairs and kick basketballs high into the stands. It's what you did, its what was on, and until well after the Colts moved to Indy in the '80s, it and professional wrestling were the popular things to do.
   
   We had here and gone Ice Hockey teams (The Ice, The Racers) and AAA Baseball (The Indianapolis Indians and Razzzzzooor Shines), and the Red, white, and Blue Ball of the ABA Pacers, who went on to NBA status. Everybody knew who slick Leonard was and Hockey Bob Lamey was the voice of a generation. If you were a kid in the 70's you knew you could watch the "Hick from French Lick", without getting into an argument when Larry Bird went to the Celtics. We knew all sorts of plays, styles, and gimmicks that different teams at the time used to overcome opponents. Some we didn't agree with but we knew it was coming. The Four corners of Georgetown was boring but led to a lot of wins. Kevin McHale under the basket led to a lot of put-backs and a lot of second shot chances, Nobody handled the ball like Dr. J did and so forth. The skyhook of Kareem Abdul Jabbar was emulated by every kid who bounced a ball. I could go on and talk about set shots and tons of boring stuff too however the point is that Basketball had style, a rhythm, and a grace to it that it just doesn't have today in my opinion.
   
   Today's game is something I can't really watch anymore and I just about know where my disinterest started to give or take a couple of years. Just about the time the league started to think about "Hack-a-Shaq" as a legitimate form of gameplay, I started to lose interest. Just about the time, they introduced the "Flagrant" foul, I started to stop watching basketball as much as I used to. Just about the time, they began to look for players the size of Manute Bol because he was tall, without regard for the fact that he couldn't bounce the ball if his life depended on it I started cussing. I knew I was done being a regular fan when LeBron James and Michael Jordan are mentioned in the same breath by people who think they understand the game.
   
   Somehow (and its money I know) the equation lost the element of talent. Competitive edge only means winning at all costs now. If  You made LeBron the same size as Jordan, he is a middle of the road player, who barely gets inside the three-point line. What gets him there now is his size and muscle. It is not his talent, because let's face it if he isn't within 10 feet of the basket and his opponent isn't worried about getting their face smashed in his shot is swatted into the stands, because he is just not that good at fundamental basketball. Basketball is about the player size and being over the top physical with your opponent now. It is not about strategy and even Reggie Miller wouldn't do well in today's NBA. R.I.P. Kobe
   
   
4. Have you looked at Cell Phone prices lately? My God! I did yesterday and was blown away. A top of the line iPhone 11 Max Pro with 512 MB of memory takes a month to get and is over $1500 once taxes are included. I now totally understand why people go to Walmart and buy the Smart Talk phone for $90 or less. These people are stupid. I cannot even understand this and I know I didn't even look at the really expensive models, because that was enough, believe me. I just cannot get my brain to brain it. Damn!
   
   
5. You know how much I love stupidity right? Well here is some absolute stupidity if I have ever seen it or talked about it. There are reports out of the State of North Carolina (Not going there now) that some people are physically going to "Covid-19" parties with the intention of getting the virus. On Purpose. For real. They are having "CoronaVirus Parties" and the logic (or lack of it?) is to intentionally be exposed to the virus, catch it, get sick, recover from it, and then they say they will be immune from having it again. I'm sorry please say that again?
   
   They have the belief that if you get it once, you will become immune, and then they don't have to take any precautions. Forget the facts that there is no evidence that you can become immune to this thing with antibodies, forget the fact that they have already proven that you can test positive for it more than once. What an idiotic concept. How completely irresponsible can you be?
   
   If you do this and you think this is a good idea, please also do me a favor and STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM ME OR MY FAMILY FROM NOW ON YOU IGNORANT DUMBASS!
   
   Have you ever heard of someone being immune from catching a common cold? 
   
   
   Have a seizure,
   
   BigMike