Monday, May 2, 2016

Twenty - Safely Motivated

I find the library sections in most restaurants, either Mexican restaurants that were formally fish tank themed restaurants, or the other kind (Italian I think), to be frequently underwhelming. 

They rarely have a good selection of books, often filling valuable shelf space with books with unenticing titles such as 'Restaurant Management Guidelines', 'Company Sexual Harassment Policy' and 'How To Run A Successful Restaurant', all of which often end up being thrilling reads, but they just don't hook me in with the titles.  

And some of the bookshelves themselves look more like filing cabinets than traditional bookshelves, and you look through them and instead of books there are files! Who wants to read those? 

The reading desk is usually covered in folders with things like 'payroll' and 'Produce Orders' written on them. 

Frequently some dick will have left piles of his unopened mail lying around, and next to a letter opener, which is like a knife, and so you're forced to write a list of people you'd imagine would have fun screams if they were stabbed, but then all the note paper you can find has the restaurants name printed on it. It's MY stab list, not the restaurants, those dicks. 

And there are often photos sitting on the desk of some weird guy with what look like his kids. 

The library computer is regularly password protected, and it doesn't matter how many of the files you pull out and scatter all over the floor, none of them seem to have the password written on it. So you try guessing the password, trying every dirty word you can think of, and there are LOTS, especially if you, like me, like to coin a new one every couple of days. Consider these ones I've coined in just the past week:

- Blug
- Jurp
- Muskartflupt

Disgusting right? And it's not pleasant having to type all these into the password spot. Then suddenly the computer tells you that you have guessed too many times, and the computer is now blocked for seven days.

And the door to the library for some reason doesn't say 'library', it's as if they don't WANT to encourage people to read? What dicks. Reading is great. Instead they'll try and scare you off by putting 'Managers Office' on the door. 

And sometimes when you're trying to read one of the books, the guy that's IN the photos will come in and yell at you. Like YOU'RE the one just leaving pictures of yourself in random places. And you try to say 'shhhh' this is a library, keep your voice down. But he never listens, that dick. 

And often he has a little tag on his chest saying 'manager'. What a weird thing to boast about. Who wants to just be 'managing'. That's what you do when you're recovering from a bad break up, 'I heard about Karen, how are you doing?' Someone will ask you. 'Oh, it's hard, but I'm managing' you'll reply. And what you mean is that you've just spent nine straight hours cutting Karen's eyes out of all your pictures and sticking them on a your sleeping friend Kev's face so that when he wakes up you can say with a laugh 'EYE, see you have a rash there, ha ha'. So being a 'manager' is something you should keep quiet about really. That's why I always wear a tag saying 'thriver'. 

Now as an avid reader I've checked out the library section in almost all the restaurants I've ever eaten in, and disappointment is something I've learned to just cope with. Besides I've discovered it to be a touchy subject with a lot of restaurants, some have even kicked me out for complaining. Seriously! 

Well this restaurant that I'm in NOW is a BIG restaurant, so I was sure that their library would be good, and good in a great way, with the greatness being in regard to how good it was. And it turned out this this library WAS great, except it was great in the sense of greatly resembling all other restaurant libraries that have disappointed me. It had ALL of the problems I've listed above. But it even had more than that. It also had the following horrors:

- None of the filing cabinets had six month old burritos in them for me to eat, and I was hungry. 
- On the wall was a motivational poster about how if you're on top of a mountain you probably only got there because you worked hard, and I thought 'well I'm a hard worker, I must be on a mountain' so I did all the things you do on top of a mountain, I peed off it, I stuck a flag in it and declared it mine, and I wrote a book about how hard it was to climb, and get this, some of the pee somehow splashed back from the valley below all the way back to my feet, my flag fell over, and my literary agent said 'we can't publish this because actually, based on your story, I think you may not have actually climbed a mountain, and may have been in the mangers office at a restaurant somewhere'. Yeah right. 
- The guy in the photos seemed to not just have kids, but also some form of parental figure of his own. Yeah right, those leave when you're six you dick, I hate lies in photo form. 
- One of the books was about 'The Economics of Restaurants'. I've already read that in seven different restaurant libraries, seriously guys, variety please. 
- After re-reading the chapter on how most restaurants don't need their own helicopter fleet I remembered one of the reasons that I had failed as a restauranteur myself (another reason was that I found out people don't want ghost monkey soup), and thinking of helicopters reminded me that those are another way to get to the top of a mountain, and riding those isn't hard work, making me think all my time climbing this mountain had been wasteful, AND that the poster was lying to me. 
- After bitterly pulling down the poster, ripping it to tiny pieces, eating those pieces, digesting those pieces, then pooing them out and wiping them on the wall, I discovered a safe where the poster had been. But I couldn't break into it because some dick had wiped faeces on it. 
- Having found a safe I was reminded that sometimes it's NOT the cloak room of a restaurant that hides the secret VIP room and other fun stuff, sometimes it's the library! So maybe I didn't need to feel bad that I didn't find fun stuff in the cloakroom after all. 
- But after digging up the carpet, and smashing holes in the wooden floor below with my bare hands, and finding nothing but some sort of car garage, I did now feel like I had to feel a certain way about not finding anything fun in the library, and that feeling was a bad feeling, because the feeling was bad. 
- Plus I got a splinter in my thumb somehow! What sort of restaurant keeps splinters lying around? 

Normally finding a library this bad in all the regularly bad ways and even other bad ways would make me complain to the management about how bad it was, and complain BIG, and right NOW. 

But I couldn't today, for today I was in danger, and this was BIG danger, and I was in it NOW! And I really needed a dictionary so I could look up what 'dilly dally' meant, so I could make sure I didn't do it in dealing with this danger. But on top of the other ways that this library was terrible, they also didn't have a dictionary! 

Yet of course they DID have a man from the photos yelling at me. But I wasn't going to just 'manage' with this today. This was too important. I had to thrive. I was going to have to force them to update their library, by adding a dictionary, and to do that I was going to have to do something BIG, and I had to do it NOW, but how would I do it? 

*The answer is on its way*

*Speaking of ways, the best way to get a splinter out of your finger flesh is to play a game of 'throw your finger at a pair of tweezers that have recently been eaten by a kid' the kid will eat your finger, the tweezers will eat your splinter, and your nub will scare the kid, it's the circle* of life. 

*A type of shape, kind of squarey, but in a more 'not very squarey' way.