“No! Just leave us a phone number. We’ll call you if you win!” he says.

“You have a great chance,” pipes up his helper. “No one in the Keys wants to spend $25 on a raffle ticket, even if it is for a paid trip to Hawaii.”

Really. I can sell anything to anyone: Space heaters to South Floridians in July? No problem.

“How many tickets have you sold tonight?” I ask them both.

“Yours,” they laugh.

Love the odds, but feel a need to make it legit.

“If I can help you sell at least two more tickets, the karma alone should guarantee my win,” I laugh back.

Of course, I help sell three. And then two more.

“You’re really good!” says the organizer’s sidekick.

I know. Trust me, everyone at my tables wants dessert even when they don’t–and buys one–every shift.

“I await your call,” I tell them. We all laugh.

A week later, I report for my slowest shift of the week. The busser, per usual, announces upon arriving that he’ll be leaving within an hour. My coworker, a sweet girl who’s always in turmoil, says she’d love to be cut first, to which I agree. Both are gone by 8 p.m., which nets me $100, thanks to a late push.

It also nets me a ton of sidework to do by myself.

Roll the silver, scoop the sauces, bleach the cutting boards, and so on–for about a half hour longer than I should have been on the clock.

Because I am pretty much a dumb ass, I follow the rules at work. Everyone else keeps their cell phones in their pockets, their aprons, beside the computer, charging. I keep mine in my purse, locked away and hidden in my car, far away from any potential to distract me while I’m on the floor. Seriously, who needs to hear a Facebook update ding when pouring wine or slinging wings?

Yeah. Perhaps rules really are made to be broken.

An aside: My great guy has a premature bucket list, of sorts. Because he is a great guy with a great job, he has knocked off quite a lot on his list in the past year, and always with a twist. Take his golf outing at one of the nation’s best courses, for example, when his buddy somehow managed to hit the course’s designer, Pete Dye, in the foot on a green with a second shot. Photos all around and laughs and pats on the backs later, my great guy tries to buy Pete a beer in the club house. His answer: “Hell no! That guy hit me with a golf ball!” So what if it wasn’t my great guy who hit him? What a great bucket-list story!

More on the aside: My great guy wants to play golf in Hawaii, on any or all of the islands. What better way to thank him for all the financial and emotional support this past year than to “give” him an all-expenses-paid-winning trip for the two of us to number 7 on his list? I have been to Hawaii many times; I don’t care if I ever travel there again. But I’d love to give my great guy the trip of his lifetime. And I have a pretty decent shot at doing just that.

Except I don’t keep my phone handy while working. Because I am, clearly, a dumb ass.

When I get off work, my great guy and a recently relocated great D.C. girlfriend pal of mine are at the bar waiting for me. I love it when they come into work just to hang out until I get off. It feels as great as they are. Because they are the great people in my life here in SoFla.

I grab my purse from my car. I order a drink from the nice bartender with whom I work. I chat with my great guy and girlfriend for a few minutes.

“Gotta go chain smoke outside after my shift,” I laugh. “Oh, yeah, and check my phone. Except you’re both here, so God knows no one has called me.”

Uh huh.

One missed call from an unknown number. One message from said unknown number: “Hey RG, I’m calling from the Keys to say you’ve won the trip to Hawaii!”

OMG. I love a raffle. My great guy and I have won all kinds of stupid stuff in raffles–makeup for me, a spa robe, Florida Gator cups and jerseys. That’s right, we’re winners! And now, Hawaii. Life is SO GOOD.

Ha ha ha. Maybe I should listen to to the rest of the message.

“You have ten minutes to call us back or we give the trip away to the next winner!” Which was 20 minutes ago.

What? A time limit? What? WHAT?

I run inside to my restaurant’s bar and scream at my great guy to call the Keys bar we had enjoyed so much a week ago. “We won the trip!” I say, doing a modified up-and-down jump.

“Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. Sure, yeah. No, I understand,” I hear my great guy say into his phone.

Okay we can upgrade our seats? Sure, it’s all good? You understand…what the hell do you understand?

“They gave the trip away,” my great guy says to me, nonplussed. “You didn’t call back in time.”

In time? You mean, the time I took to cover my coworkers’ early exits? The time I took to look at my cell phone at the end of my shift because I am the only dumb ass in the entire world of serving who doesn’t break the “No Cell Phones on the Floor” rule? No. And no. This is my time. Or, at least my great guy’s time to go to Hawaii.

Yeah, no.

“The organizer said that if it’s any consolation, the trip went to a combat medal winner who served in Afghanistan,” said my great guy, still calm.

“But, I won!” I say, almost crying.

“But you didn’t call back in time.”

“If I’d known there would be a time limit, I’d have given them my work number!”

“They called everyone they could think of to reach you or me,” says my great guy. “Why didn’t you give them my number?”

Because I am the dumb ass who thought if I won, I won; who thought a call to my number to tell me I won was good enough; because I am the dumb ass who never breaks the rules, but probably should start doing so. Except it’s too late. For Hawaii, anyway.

“Fight it!” say many commenters on my personal Facebook page when I regale the sad tale.

“Was it printed on the ticket that there was a time limit to respond?” say many more.

“Sue the bastards,” say a few more.

Yeah, no, again.

See, it’s the Keys. Kind of like “Chinatown.” I know the organizer. I know his sidekick. I know their past, their present and future baggage and sad stories and all the rest that makes them tick in Keys time. You don’t fight a damn thing in the Keys. It’s all that close to home, no matter where you call home.

“My parents have a timeshare they never use in Hawaii,” says my great girlfriend.

“You never know when good fare will come up online,” says the astounded bartender hearing all this unfold, who barely knows me although we’ve worked together for a month.

“Yes! And then you and your great guy can go!” says my great girlfriend.

We all consider this in silence as I sip my drink.

“This is why we don’t live in the Keys,” my great guy finally says.

“But…” I start to say.

“Let it go,” says my great guy. “It’s just a Keys thing. It’s just the Keys.”

I won. I lost. My mother. My sister. Only Chinatown. Just the Keys.

The frickin’ Keys.

“Have you heard from Kevin?” everyone, from the bell hops to the room service staff, would ask me every day.

“No, not yet,” I’d shrug.

“That’s too bad,” everyone agreed.

Yes, yes it was too bad. Very bad.

Every afternoon after I work, I take a nap. I have never been a napper, ever, until I started my a.m. serving job that starts at 5 a.m. six days out of seven. And when I say nap, I don’t mean a 15-minute power snooze. I’m talking about a three-stage, deep sleep, complete with vivid dreams and an agonizing reawakening that takes hours to shake off. Don’t bother trying to call me during my naps. I put my phone on silent until I can cope with the land of the living again. Even then, the chances of my returning your call are slim. I am pretty much a groggy mess until I give in and call it a night for good.

On this day, I did not turn off my phone. And on this day, Kevin called me.

“Kevin!” I shouted into the phone, my voice still raspy from sleep.

“How’d you know it was me?” he asked, his deep voice sounding a very long distance away over a very good connection.

“Oh, well, you know, caller ID. Saw your name. But forget that. How the heck are you? I’ve been so worried.” My sleepy raspy voice now sounded uneven, breathless. My heart pounded a little. I was so happy to hear from him, and yet I was so nervous about what to say and how to say it right.

“I’ve got some demons to battle,” he said. “I’m working on it. But listen, I just have something I want to tell you.” He sounded tired.

“Okay.”

“I apologize for leaving you, all of you, like I did. But I really feel bad about leaving you.”

“Oh, Kevin, it’s okay,” I started to say.

“No, let me finish. I really regret that. But I want you to know that you get it. You get what it takes to do the job well, and everyone knows that. So please, hang in there.”

“Well, um, thank you. That’s incredibly nice of you to say, but…”

“Look, my phone’s about to die. Call me back tonight or tomorrow, or just when you can. I know your schedule is crazy, so whenever is fine.” He almost laughed when he mentioned my schedule. His used to be so much crazier, peppered always with three or four doubles in a row and rare, if any, days off. He preferred it that way, he always used to say.

I didn’t call him back that night. I didn’t call him back the next, either. My quiet life was suddenly busy with concert tickets and comedy club reservations, and on one night a stint in the casino that garnered me a $105 win.

I called him back three days later. The call went straight to voicemail. I kicked myself for not calling back sooner, then I left a long message, apologizing for getting back to him so late, begging him to not let our friendship go away the way so many work relationships do when work is no longer a common denominator. “Whatever it is I can help you with, you know I am there,” I ended the message.

I never expected to hear from him again. Until he called a few days later, on a day I decided to give up a nap in favor of getting a little more of a life, and instead embarked on a journey through the hazy nether land of one who has lost his home, his income, and most, if not all, of his very life’s identity.

I met him at the Burger King on this side of the ‘hood. He was nervous. I answered his nerves with a stand-up comedian side of me that comes out when I am very much on the edge of succumbing to my own demons that bear no relation to his.

I bought him a lunch he wouldn’t eat. “I’ll save it for later,” he said, because, seeing me, as great as it was, had prompted the perpetual knot in his stomach to pull tighter with the realization of how much he had thrown away. I asked him if he minded if I ate my bun-less Double Whopper with Cheese with the chain’s flimsy plastic fork and knife. He smiled the smile I coveted every day we worked together. “You enjoy that burger,” he said.

As I ate the burger I did not enjoy, Kevin told me only a little about his depression that he couldn’t address because his efforts to help himself were necessarily punctuated, nay overwhelmed, by the pressing, constant need of seeking “shelter and food.”

I swallowed the last bit of my burger and felt sick. My current life of wallowing in my own misery of a broken bank account verging on bankruptcy, a dumb job serving expensive eggs, a cute house run amok with big bugs, and a great guy I never see who tolerates this–the life I spent napping away on my Pottery Barn sofa because I was wallowing just that much on a daily basis–seemed extraordinarily perfect. And I, I now knew, was nothing more than a spoiled brat.

“But a friend of mine says the restaurant where he works has an opening and will hire me if I can come in on Tuesday and meet with the manager.”

I looked at Kevin’s thin face, his coal black skin as smooth and beautiful as I wish my sun-damaged tanned face could look. I watched him hug his tote bag close to him on the orange plastic booth seat. I wondered where he had washed his electric blue aloha shirt that perfectly complemented his coloring. I wondered how it was that I was blessed enough to know this man.

“Look,” I said, “I won a little money the other night.”

Kevin laughed. When we worked together, he loved to hear my stories about making more in ten minutes at my “second job” playing casino slots than I had in two days at the egg-slinging hotel.

“No, really,” I told him. “Let’s get you a place to stay for a couple of nights until the interview.”

I was struck by what Kevin didn’t do at that moment. He didn’t decline my offer knowing he wouldn’t, couldn’t decline it twice. He didn’t say, “I’ll pay you back.” He didn’t thank me in that uncomfortable way we all do when we have to accept desperately needed help.

Instead, he said, “I know a place. It’s in the ‘hood, but it’s only $35 a night.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “Consider the next three nights a gift from the Hard Rock.”

I expected scary. I expected the big bug motel. It was a little of both, but giant live oaks draped in Spanish moss–the likes of which I have not seen outside of South Carolina, much less in SoFla–gave shade to an expansive front yard. A vintage neon sign welcoming visitors with “Color TV by RCA” harked back to a time when Lucy and Ricky and the Mertz’s would have stayed here en route to some whacky SoFla adventure. Okay, then. I gave Kevin all the cash in my wallet.

“Do you have a way to get to the interview?” I asked him.

“Yeah, no problem. My friend is taking me,” he said, almost relaxed now that the “shelter” question mark was answered for three nights.

“Call or text me and let me know for sure,” I said.

“I will,” he smiled.

“Okay.”

He reached out to hug me. “Love you.”

I hugged his too-thin frame. “Love you, my friend.”

The next day at the fine-dining egg factory, the biggest bitch I have ever had the displeasure of working with, asked, “Can I give you some advice?”

Can you just shut the hell up and evaporate before my eyes?

“Whatever,” I mumbled as I scooped butter into perfectly round balls into tiny butter-ball-sized dishes.

“Save your money for a new dress for yourself. Or maybe that daughter of yours could use some extra cash.”

Talk about a Conch Telegraph. Talk about a real bitch. Talk about don’t you think I already thought about that and all that goes along with giving money I don’t have to spare to someone I really know nothing about outside of this stupid, stupid, miserable non-paying-but-great-benefits job?

“I mean, I’m just saying,” she continued.

“Gotcha,” I answered in junior-high kind.

“You know, this reminds me of my uncle,” said my great guy as we had a few minutes together before he went to work. “Everyone tried to help, and he just kept doing the same crap.”

Yeah. I know. I know this. I grew up with this. I lived this every single day of my youth and young adulthood. But maybe this is someone who can be okay. Or maybe I’m just an idiot. Yeah, I’m probably an idiot.

Three days and three agonizing shifts later it was Tuesday. I snuck off the floor every half hour to check my phone to see if Kevin had made the interview. Not a word.

By the time I was finally done and walking to my car, my uniform shirt untucked and unbuttoned and the first smoke of the day hanging from my mouth, I called Kevin.

“Hi RG, how was work?” Kevin asked.

“Work sucks here, as you well know. Did you go to the interview?” I asked, impatient.

Silence. Then, “Well, my friend never called. I never got there.”

Well, shit.

“Where is this job, exactly?” I asked.

“A little west of here,” Kevin said.

Okay.

“Okay, I’m coming to get you. I’ll take you.”

A “little west” turned out to be almost an hour north and west. A “little west” turned out to have hired two people in the last few days and didn’t have any openings, but thanks for coming in. A “little west” sucked.

With $45 in my wallet, Kevin in the front seat of my car, and an off-season payday four days away, what the hell to do?

Kevin was four thoughts ahead of me. “There’s a place. They might have a bed.”

Okay.

Back through the ‘hood. Back out of the ‘hood. Back to the edge of the ‘hood.

“I’ll wait here,” I said. “I’ll be the one chain smoking in front of the “No Smoking” sign.”

Kevin smiled when no one should have been smiling.

He was back within minutes. “No beds for two days. But don’t worry. I have some calls I can make.”

I chose to believe that because I had no choice. And later, when I’d had two glasses of wine while sitting on my Pottery Barn sofa and wondered how and when I could ever write about what was becoming one of the more subtly enveloping yet most life-changing experiences of my spoiled-brat existence, Kevin called.

“Can I dial 911 from my phone?” he asked, sounding frantic.

“Yes, everyone can, but what’s going on? Do you need 911 help? I mean, do you have that kind of emergency” I asked, now thoroughly confused and at the same time trying to figure out which of my credit cards was still good for another night for Kevin someplace.

“There’s gonna be,” he said, angry. And then he hung up and took no more of my calls all night.

I figured the worst. I tried to sleep and dreamt instead about his nightmare. My help, I now knew, had done nothing but prolong the worst of his worst.

I called him the next day after work. Voicemail. Voicemail again and again. I decided to drown my fear in rum and a slot machine and kiss my $45 goodbye in the process. If I won a dime, however, I’d give it to Kevin, if I ever found him again.

When I was two stop lights from the tightest casino in SoFla, Kevin called.

“Can you take me to Powerline?” he asked, like it was a trip to the dry cleaners.

Sure. Powerline and where? Where the hell?

“I just got released from Broward General. I have papers.”

Papers?

“To get into a place,” he said, reading my mind swirling with seven thousand questions.

“Where are you now?” I asked him, pulling a U-turn that would have made my great guy proud, painfully timid driver that I am.

“Downtown.”

“Give me 10 minutes.”

Twenty minutes later I saw Kevin waiting patiently on a street corner clutching his tote bag in which he held everything he owned, dressed in yesterday’s wrinkled electric blue aloha shirt.

And, for a brief moment, I considered driving right past him. Because maybe my great guy was right. Maybe the bitch was right. After all, I had never gotten it right before when I’d done all I could.

So, I drove right past him.

And circled the block.

“Did you just pass by here?” Kevin asked.

“No, just got here,” I lied, even though I knew he knew I was lying. Which he completely understood, and knew that I understood, and about which we said nothing more.

“We have three places to try before 2:45,” he said.

Great.

“What happens at 2:45?” I asked.

“I have to be at the tree by then,” he said.

Right. Of course. The tree.

It was then that I figured out what my very religious and incredibly wonderful older sister had already figured out. What was meant to be, what He meant it to be, would happen very soon. On this very day.

As Kevin carefully placed his tote bag in my back seat, I said my first prayer in a long time for something and someone other than myself and my kids. I prayed for guidance, for enough gas to get us where the right guidance actually existed, and for proving the bitch and my great guy and all my doubts wrong–that this pathetic, dollar-less effort of mine was, in fact, going to save a life.

The first place wouldn’t open the three gates that kept them safe and us out. We spoke through intercoms and I was referred to as “You” when asked to take him somewhere else called “there.”

“There” also turned us away, as did the other “there.” You could say, as I did say, “Everywhere is nowhere. What the hell?”

All the while, Kevin sat calmly and patiently through the rejection. All the while, I wanted to cry as much as I wanted to be done with it all.

“What time is it?” asked Kevin.

Oh, shit. The tree.

“Oh shit, 2:50,” I said.

“Then let’s get to the tree.”

Which would have been easy enough had Kevin known where the tree was.

“I think it’s over there,” he said, but it wasn’t. “Maybe a block over?” he asked himself while I pulled out in front of every type of traffic to go a block over.

Right, about those prayers.

At 2:55, ten full minutes past the time a van was supposed to be at the tree and a mysterious someone would call the names of the lucky ones on a list for a shelter, I had no van in sight and certainly no tree.

“Maybe we should ask someone,” Kevin said, as calm as if he was asking directions to a movie theater.

I screeched to a halt on a street lined by abandoned lots and a few store fronts. I eyed two scraggly guys sipping from paper bags. Perfect.

“Hey, you!” I screamed at them.

“Yes ma’am?” they answered in unison.

Ma’am? This was good.

“Do you know where the tree is? You know, for the homeless?”

Kevin sat stoically looking straight ahead through my car’s front window.

“Yes ma’am. You need to go three blocks that way, make a right, go two more blocks, and you can’t miss it. The van’s there already.”

SHIT.

Kevin waved thank you to them in my dust.

Three blocks that way and two more blocks, we were there. The tree, it turns out, is a pretty huge, amazing tree. It dwarfed the van and the cop car parked underneath it.

“I’ll get in line, now. You don’t need to wait,” Kevin said, slowly gathering his tote bag. “Thank you so much for this.”

“I don’t need to wait? After all this, I’m just going to leave?” I said, sounding like I was scolding a kid. “You get in line. I don’t leave ’till I get a thumbs up from you.”

An hour later, as I watched lines of women and men continue to swarm the van under the cool shade of the mammoth tree, Kevin emerged from the line.

No. No, no, no. We have no place else to go.

“It’s going to be another hour or so. They’re processing the women first. Go on, go. I’ll call you and let you know how it turns out.”

“Okay, because I can just charge a hotel if you…”

“No, it’ll be fine. I’ll call you. Love you.”

Love you, you pain in my ass that I am so worried about.

I did gamble that early evening, promptly losing $20 of the $45 in my wallet and wondering why I had bothered.

Kevin called me just as I was ready to leave Hard Rock. “I was the second-to-last name called. But I’m in. It’s a good place. Thank you for everything.”

Well, now, that calls for some karma, I decided. I promptly won $95 on a 60 cent slot pull. I swear to God.

Kevin is doing well. He is living and working a program that is as first class as the facility he is calling home for the next few months. I could not believe the change in him when I visited two days ago. He looks fit and healthy. His smile is warm. His eyes are clear. He still worries that I am struggling at work and tells me to hang in there.

Love him.

Perfect? No. What workplace is?

Money still terrible? Yes, but I can deal with that with a lot more patience when the work environment is positive and everyone is at least cordial and respectful.

Am I looking for another job? Only a part-time second one. I am determined to make this crazy place work out. Perhaps we all needed that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day to wake up and try a little harder to understand each other a little more.

Here’s to hoping it continues.

With full credit to and incredible admiration for Judith Viorst for writing one of the best children’s books, ever: “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”.

I woke up two hours before my 5:02 a.m. alarm on Monday morning, after tossing and turning for hours and tossing some more, and, finally, never really going back to sleep. I watched a third repeat of Piers Morgan’s CNN show, willing myself to find the elusive peace that only deep slumber could offer, which never happened. I knew, then, that it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

I was the first one in at work, as always, and found it impossible to prioritize the zillion components of opening sidework, knowing my coworkers would be late as always, and once they arrived at work, late, as always, they would leave every sidework task incomplete that they took on, as always, which would set me up, as always, for a weed-fest at the opening bell.

When I couldn’t find the butter ball scooper because the in-room dining staff had hidden it too well, and I broke a half-full wine glass left by the night staff in our breakfast supply “cage,” and then realized we were also out of Frosted Flakes and sugar packets in said cage because the night staff had apparently been starving for an overly sweetened case of cereal, I knew it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Maybe I’ll just move to Seattle, where the air is cool and crisp, the evergreens are just that, and it’s sunny and bright and perfect weather three months out of twelve. Well, not until my shift is done.

When my first table was a nice lady from Denmark who spoke perfect English, and who wanted the most expensive breakfast Benedict we offer, plus a side of bacon and a mimosa, and who sat alone at my four-top for two and a half hours working on her laptop, thereby preventing me from turning said four-top, and who tipped me exactly nothing at the end of two and a half hours, despite the multiple refills of coffee, a free side of multigrain toast, and some great conversation that I provided, I knew it was but the start of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

When I offhandedly pointed out to my manager who arrived an hour into the shift that my coworkers had disappeared to God knows where to sleep, eat, put on makeup, do their hair, and sleep some more, and that although the sidework wasn’t complete, it wasn’t my fault, and she asked me why we had no ice, why fresh iced tea wasn’t brewed, and did I realize the juice glass on table 104 hadn’t been polished even though the table wasn’t in my section, I knew it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Maybe I’ll move to Montana to be next-door neighbors with my best-sister-friend and savor the cool mountain air and forget that winter exists there 11 months out of 12.

When I didn’t have another table for an hour and then a server from the night shift was called in because, said the manager, “We are supposed to be very busy,” and I had already written a third check on a zero-percent interest credit-card offer in so many months to make ends meet because I make less than half in two weeks what I used to make in four days in the Keys, but at least my Great Guy makes great money because they auto grat 18 percent on every single check at his place, and I told my manager I’d had it, and walked off the floor and smoked three cigarettes out back while waiting for HR to open its doors, I knew that what was already a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day wasn’t looking good for improvement.

When the HR lady opened her doors to find me waiting for her, and I couldn’t utter a coherent word to tell her all that was so very wrong with my job, with my finances, but mostly with the life that I had so excitedly set out to live four years ago, and she told me “disciplinary action” would certainly be taken against me, and I agreed that it should, and she said how surprised she was because she’d heard such great things about me, but policy was policy, and I told her do what she had to do and that I would write it all down for the F&B Manager because I could write ever so much better than I could speak about it all, and she simply nodded while jotting down notes, I knew that while some days may seem terrible, this was, in fact, the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day of all days, and it had not a whole lot to do with why I’d waited for HR to open up that day.

Maybe I’ll move to a place I’ve never seen.

My Great Guy tells me he’ll pay the rent and take over my car payments. The F&B Manager tells me I am not fired; quite the contrary, would I please make a detailed sidework list and mention to HR that we are working on a solution for me because that will help him. My one friend here tells me better things are in store. My manager says she thought we were friends and asks why I went to HR, and from now on she’ll be more careful about sharing her feelings with me (huh?). My coworkers snicker and speak about me in Spanish, which I pretend not to understand and understand very well.

Today, when I researched a small delivery of Sephora makeup items that cannot be gotten in the Fort Lauderdale store because they stock their store like a Soviet Union market of decades ago, and then realized that the delivery had been made days ago on the day when I found my locked mailbox wide open and empty–on the very day I walked off the floor at work and didn’t get fired–I surrendered to the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Maybe I’ll move to a place I’ve always dreamed could exist, where bad days are simply bad and not terrible and horrible, where work sucks but at least you make a living wage working for a manager who gets half of it and doesn’t accuse you of making her day more terrible and horrible.

I had terrible nightmares that scared me last night, well before my Great Guy got home from his always opposite shift to mine at 2 a.m., and long after I had stopped counting the days until we might have a day off together again, because contrary to being fired, I am on the schedule for 9 days in a row, call time 6 a.m. for the foreseeable future, as others are granted later start times and vacation when they choose it. Disciplinary action wears many disguises.

I think I’ll move to Australia. And when I don’t, maybe I’ll just take a hard look at the sum total of where I am and vow to finally move on, if only in spirit. A girl can dream, right?

This server oozes gentility and manners as well as finely honed skills to genuinely and appropriately serve you. This server is never overbearing in his efforts to make sure you are well taken care of. Rather than annoy you every five minutes by asking you how everything is, he knows exactly how the meal is going and adjusts accordingly. He offers a comped appetizer when the kitchen is slow, but before you realize how long it’s been since you ordered; he refills your water glass without having to be asked or brings another round at just the right moment; he senses when conversation with you is better left unspoken, but always manages to hack through his weeds to chat about where you are from and how adorable your toddler is when the time is right for you.

You may not remember your mediocre meal, but you likely will never forget “that server” who pampered you without ever crossing the lines of uncomfortable familiarity and forced cheerfulness, who deftly presented your entrees and cleared your appetizers with a smoothness that cannot be trained, who made you forget that you were in a dining room full of other guests because this server gave you 100 percent of his attention even as other guests demanded 100 percent of him for themselves.

You will go back to a place with semi-forgettable food if the service is impeccable. And, if you are fortunate enough to experience this kind of excellence, you will wonder how it is that such understated professional service has become a mostly obsolete commodity. You will, for the brief two hours you are breaking bread with friends or co-workers or loved ones, appreciate that this is what the dining out experience should always be and rarely is.

When you are lucky enough to be trained by one from the old school, you hope a little of what he is all about will become a part of your work persona, even though you know you will have to work hard to hone what is intuitive to him. He patiently answers your questions, even those asked for the third time in so many hours. He backs you up with all the behind-the-scenes details that make you appear to be a better server than you really are.

He applauds your successes on his slow days. He gives away a table to you when he knows the host seems to have forgotten to seat your section, pretending he is too overwhelmed to take it himself. He senses your frustrations with lazy co-workers, thoughtless managers and unforgiving needy guests by quietly saying, “Go grab a cigarette out back; I’ll watch your tables.”

He always smiles like he means it. He listens to you rail against the lousy tips and brutal schedule and tells you he hopes you hang in there because you are a pleasure to work with and you’ve even taught him a few things.

You won’t ever forget the in-season shift when everyone but you and he called out, and you and he successfully handled the unending stream of the hungry with a silent communication and understanding that you thought was only possible between twin siblings.

You couldn’t be less like his unflappable self. You vow every work day you will try to be. You cannot thank him enough every single day.

As I puzzle over and worry about his two-week, no-call/no-show absence, I wonder if the standard of perfection to which he holds himself and of which we, his co-workers, take for granted, took some sort of great and horrible toll on him. I don’t think I will ever know. He hasn’t taken any of my dozens of phone calls or responded to my worried texts. His voicemail box is full. Clearly, I am not the only worried one. Nor am I the only selfish one who is so very anxious for him to come back to work to make my work world bearable is this unbearably slow and mismanaged off season.

I always viewed my blog category titled “Beloved Co-workers” as a sidelong sarcastic wink. Until he left without warning, without a word. Damn.

For months and months, I have been in touch with SallieMae to straighten out my six-plus student loans taken out over the past 8 years so that my kids could attend the college of their dreams. When you have undiagnosed-but-surely-have adult ADD, SallieMae is not a realm in which to wallow.

Because wallow is all you will do in the SallieMae miazma, through umpteenth forbearance attempts, through faxes sent of your pay stubs and income tax returns to gain that promised forbearance status, through phone calls numbering more than 20 in two weeks that garner a different response that is “the final say” each time, but never is. Just when I thought I had it fixed for a year so that my payments would reflect my “income sensitive” status for six loans, another two loans reared their hideous heads this morning–totaling more than my bi-weekly income. It will be all I can do to muster the focus, the patience, the reigned-in frustration to contact this awful organization for the trillionth time to straighten it all out, AGAIN.

On a positive note: Both kids seem to be following some sort of dream as a result of attending the expensive colleges of their dreams, and I am very, very proud of them for this. But if I had to do it all over again, I’d save more money from the first diaper change through the last teenage grounding for some now-meaningless infraction and point out the virtues of community college as a very real stepping stone to those same dreams.

Prom Theme Haunting Me

I have been invited to a birthday party in the Keys that has a “1950s Prom” as its theme. I love a theme party. I love a costumed event. I look great in pale pink tulle. Now, I only have to find the perfect dress for this silly but great event I cannot wait to attend. Every day before work, at 5:30 a.m. while munching a gluten-free and somewhat tasteless muffin, I peruse the Web for the perfect dress. Which has made me almost, but not quite, late for work these past few weeks, because I cannot focus on the tulle at hand when Etsy and its never-ending links and any number of other “vintage reproduction” Googled dress sites lure me deeper and deeper into their layers of fun, frivolity and unaffordable chic.

Kill Me Before the Kitchen Crashes

Today: Saturday. Fully booked hotel. An over-priced, profit-garnering breakfast was just the ticket for everyone staying in the hotel today. Too bad our great cook was out at the last minute, and I truly hope all is okay for him, because he never calls out–never–and he just celebrated decades with the hotel that mean he was cooking these same eggs for the same place when I was in high school a world away in D.C. wondering how to be a hippie as the hippie era was winding down. Wow. But he called out today. Uh oh.

To say the fourth string cook wasn’t up to the madness is, well, not worth saying. That’s a nice way of saying that from 6 a.m. on I banked my tips on this one phrase: “I hope you will give us another chance tomorrow, and breakfast is on us.” It sort of worked. But I have to say I had a moment I have never had in my entire hospitality career: As a charred French Toast was delivered to a table by my food runner–a plate of a burned-to-a-crisp mess that I mistakenly described to the doubting guests as “caramelized sugar”–a dining room mutiny ensued. Mind you, I was handling a 12-table, 48-plus guests section alone and being quintuple sat every 45 minutes. My busser had vanished, and so it was just me and the food runner feeding and turning tables for the hungry when the blackened French Toast landed on table 22.

“I can’t eat this,” complained the guest. No, you can’t, I thought.

“Excuse me,” piped up table 46 diagonally across and two rows over. “I ordered that, too. I want to change my order.”

“Miss! Miss!” shouted table 53, “Please make sure my eggs are not overdone!”

“Or my pancakes!” screeched table 15.

Which resulted in a ripple effect around every single one of my 12 tables that sought me out of my neck-length weeds to tell me to change their orders to cereal or fruit plates or toast or muffins so that theirs would not arrive as undistinguishable, burned-to-a-crip remains of something they all wanted to amount to today’s perfect fast breaking.

Which was when I watched the host unset two dinner tables and re-set them for breakfast and seat two more four-tops–all mine. When you have undiagnosed but oh-so-real adult ADD, that’s all it takes to send you running, scurrying, crawling into the kitchen, where you tap one of your favorite co-workers on the shoulder and say,”All that is getting me through the next three hours is the vision of us all done and smoking that first post-shift cigarette as we laugh about how horrible today was.” Except he was so weeded in his own far-away section, he couldn’t acknowledge me, except to mumble something about room service crashing, too. And that, I figured, was a great time to swill a quick glass of juice and refill the industrial-sized coffee filters with a bag of coffee that takes me three weeks to go through, but last approximately 32 minutes here. Which made me forget who changed their order to what, and then made me laugh aloud to no one, because the stress, the frantic pace drowned out my adult-ADD-denial two-second laugh break.

Make Time for Best Friends

“I’m coming in June, but I only have these days here and those days there,” emails my best sister friend. I request and get them off. I am broke, but I will pay anything, forgo anything just to see her. So I will drive three hours there then, and three and a half hours to the other there a few days later. I’m okay with that. Road trips force this adult ADD mess that I am to focus.

Oh, Geez

Clean the house, anyway, now that you are home after the worst day of your hospitality life. Then you won’t have to clean it Wednesday when you have your one day off. Yeah, no. It’ll just need cleaning, again, Wednesday. So I’ll wait until Wednesday.

Train your dogs to sit and stay, really stay, so they can pass the upcoming evaluation to become volunteer service dogs, because if you don’t get a life soon and volunteer to bring smiles and cheer to those who have so little, so that your life means something beyond serving eggs and slinging drinks at weekend weddings, what is your actually life worth?

Wait, isn’t the world supposed to end at 6 p.m. today, anyway? Maybe I should drain the $200 in my bank account that won’t last me ’till next pay day and play 25 red on a video roulette wheel at Hard Rock. Hey, the extra points would get me platinum status and preferred parking, right?

Sit. Stay. STAY!

Vacuum, even thought it’s not next Wednesday and your day off, just because. Hmm. I might as well wash the bath towels.

“I won something on the Preakness,” texts my Great Guy, whom I live with and never see, much less connect with anymore, except for tip-toeing around his sleeping, snoring profile that I try very hard not to wake up each morning at 5 a.m. when I dress for work. He got off at 1 a.m., after all.

Great. Guess the world didn’t end.

Did I put the laundry in, because I only have two work shirts and work six days a week, so laundry is as important as flossing. Actually, more. I never floss until two weeks before I am due to see a dentist.

Crazy Shackleford just took a race at close to the precise moment the world should have imploded–a horse with a sure case of ADD as I watched him prance and worry and sweat and fret as he timidly entered the gate to race, and I laughed that his name was that of a very long-ago, very nice boss of Mr. RG. Figures. If I had bet my last $200 on him, then I would have made…right, no more gambling.

Sit. Stay. Please stay. Please be the old dogs who can learn old tricks so that I have a chance to get a life beyond the couch onto which I fall every day after work, exhausted as I always am, with energy only for watching “Sex in the City” reruns that are, happily, all new to me because I was always too busy with my “real” D.C. life to watch them the first go ’round so many years ago.

Bugs in my house. How many times do I have to spray something that is supposed to last 12 months, but never lasts more than 30 days?

“It’s SoFla. Bugs are a way of life,” says my great guy. Really? Never had them in the one place I can no longer afford to live in SoFla because I have $200 in my bank account that won’t last ’till next paycheck.

Stop training the dogs to sit and stay. Stop looking for prom dresses. Check Craig’s List for rentals for bug-less places, just because I can after a two-hour nap.

What? Move again? No can do. And so I spray the useless poison again and again and again every day. And truth be told, bugs aside, I really like this old house.

Sit. Stay. STAY. STAY!

Set the alarm on the iPhone to wake up at 5 a.m. so I can press the “snooze” and sleep five minutes more. Sleep all the rest of the afternoon away on the couch. Wake up groggy, and wish it was 5 a.m. so I could call it a night over.

Shop online for the perfect prom dress. Figure out a way to take on another job. Vow to quit slot machines and casinos, unless the world really is ending.

Remind self that great guy is still great. Don’t think about D.C. Don’t think at all, because one thought cascades into another and another and another, and never a one is complete. So goes the wandering brain of one with adult ADD.

Sit. Stay. For the love of God, please stay. You dogs represent my next best hope to do something bigger, better, beyond my scattered self.

And with that, they stayed.

Before anyone feels sorry for a Restaurant Gal who was left home alone on one of the crucial archetypal moments of passage in a teenage gal’s almost grown-up world, understand that I spent my senior year of high school at a then-groundbreaking alternative program once known as “The Early College.” And, being at the end of the hippie era, holding such a prom was never even considered at such a groundbreaking-ly alternative school.

Last night, however, I unexpectedly and unwittingly attended my first prom. I styled my hair myself, tying its fly-away untrimmed length into a tight ponytail while pinning my layered bangs off my forehead with gold clips. I hadn’t seen the inside of a nail salon in weeks, but, oh well. Who could see my nails, anyway, my toes enclosed as they were in clunky black non-skids, and my exposed hands a wreck as they always are from serving and tending bar.

I wore an all-black ensemble identical to at that of least 20 others wearing the same. But in a crowd of 600, no one noticed this prom faux pas.

“Okay, listen up!” our captain shouted at the Darth Vader-esque-clad army of which I had been recruited to be a part at the last minute.

“Remember your prom?” he smiled when we had all quieted down. “All the things you did and didn’t do, and all the things you did that you weren’t supposed to?” The band of soldiers laughed, as I did, even though I had no prom memories of any sort. “Well, it’s all about to happen here tonight, and we’re here to make sure it goes smoothly and that everyone has fun.”

With that, I was assigned to a team of two in charge of placing bread-and-butter plates next to forks, and polishing and precisely placing fancy butter knives on said plates.

My first prom had begun.

“Spring rolls?” I asked impossibly thin, beautiful girls clad in floor-length, jewel-tone gowns trimmed in sparking rhinestones as I passed hors d’oeuvres.

“No thank you,” most shyly smiled into their laps.

“I’ll take one,” most of the guys said, flagging me down every time I passed by.

“Chef doesn’t want to see any leftovers!” barked the captain at one point.

Don’t give me a sales challenge, because I’ll win every time. I made sure to revisit every handsome young man who had eaten more than one of my spring rolls, encouraging them to “take as many as you want.” By the end of the “mocktail” hour, I had them grabbing the tiny rolls by the dozens off my tiny tray. Chef was pleased with my first prom’s first memory–winning the spring-roll maven crown.

Dinner was a somewhat rushed affair, but only by formal banquet standards. To the all-dressed-up-wth-every-place-to-go teenagers longly ready to dance and romance and launch themselves into one of final events of their youth, the pre-set salads and dessert, along with a plated chicken dish, amounted to nothing more than a final hurdle to cross into young adulthood–the sooner the better.

“Are you ready to dance at your prom?” shouted the DJ.

Screams.

“Are you really ready” shouted the DJ.

Louder screams.

“Let’s dance!” shouted the DJ.

It took roughly 4.5 seconds for the dance floor to fill with all 600-plus attendees.

“Clear, clear, clear!” shouted our captain behind the scenes. “Everything! We’re outta here by 11:30!”

Don’t tell me to make quick work of a last-minute on-call job. I’ll clear my station and the one next to mine–teetering stacked plates laden with stripped chicken bones slathered in uneaten bites of mashed potatoes be damned.

“Hey RG!” shouted the captain in my ear as I cleared my last water glass and privately worried that the pulsating and bouncing over-crowded dance floor was about to cave in and bury us all in the basement four levels down.

“Yes?” I shouted back.

“You’re cut! Go home! Thank you!” shouted the captain.

Really? Before the prom queen is crowned? Before the group of misfits at one table finally doesn’t care and dances anyway? Before the cool sports guy finally notices the never-before-noticed cool drama-club president? Before passionate kisses are stolen and after-party plans include rules to be broken?

Don’t ask me twice to go home after a double day, when I have to do it all again at 5 a.m. tomorrow.

Good luck to the beautiful and the awkward, to the brazen and the bashful, to those sporting overly inflated confidence and those about to forget they ever lacked it. Dance the night away, store it away forever, and remember that one night–no matter how perfect or perfectly horrible it is–is but one night. Even prom night.

“They’re so cute!” someone or 20 says every day. Then one of the someones gets splattered with the cute little scrawny birds’ droppings, and suddenly the scrawny black birds are not so cute anymore. I liken them to city pigeons up north–rats with wings. But that’s just me.

Because once they get done with the cute act of fluttering about and nibbling on the cleared leavings piled high on a tray everyone is too busy to hoist on a shoulder and carry inside, they dive bomb live tables where people are still eating, and in some cases, attack the food as I carry it to a table.

“Sorry, sir,” I smile and shrug several times a shift, and always when it is the busiest. “I’ll bring you fresh [toast, hash browns, eggs, waffles, pancakes, bacon, whatever] right away.”

And then I want to swat the stupid feathered things for putting me in the weeds and crashing the kitchen at always the worst possible moment during the breakfast rush. I love my lead cook. And I am certain he at least tolerates me because I don’t let my food sit on the line. But he is a man who prefers never to deviate out of his zone, and to have to ask him for another plate of eggs he just made, while 15 other orders hang on the line, well…it’s not pretty.

“What the hell?” he’ll shout. “Didn’t I just watch you take that order outta here?”

“Uh, yes. Yes, you did,” I will say. “But, well, the birds…”

What he has to say about the birds isn’t so pretty, either.

I assumed most, if not all, of my coworkers shared the cook’s and my view of the breakfast birds. Until one angled itself right into the blades of a slow-spinning ceiling fan and landed in a heap next to a couple enjoying eggs benedict and pancakes.

“Oh my God!” cried the women.

“Oh no!” echoed the man.

Oh crap, I thought, watching the poor pain-in-the-ass bird lay there, stunned. Or dead. Or dying. Whatever its condition, it was a now a breakfast stopper.

For a few seconds, the other servers continued to bustle about, pouring juice and balancing trays. The busboys seemed nonplussed as well. Tables needed to be cleared and reset.

Leave it to a scrawny black bird to bring everything to a complete and total standstill.

“We have to get him out of here,” I said to no one, because no one was really listening to me.

“He could be suffering,” said a woman sitting at another table adjacent to the fallen bird.

“Mommy, is he okay?” asked a little boy, turning his face into his stricken mother’s shoulder.

“Yes, sweetie,” she said, hugging him close. “He’s just resting.”

And for another moment that felt like an hour, the three tables, the bussers, the other servers and myself stopped and just stared at the unmoving black feathered heap on the ground.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” suddenly grumbled a man sitting four tables away from the immobile bird.

With that, he grabbed his cloth napkin, which would need to be replaced, and walked over to fallen feathered one and gently scooped it up. My manager seemed to appear out of nowhere then, and she urged the man to allow her to tend to the bird.

“Fine,” he said. “Just take it away from here.”

Yes, please.

And as she did, the breakfast shift energy slowly returned to its normal harried pace.

“Just in case anyone is wondering,” my manager said the following morning at our pre-shift meeting, “The bird is drinking water and eating a little.”

What?

“He’s a survivor, that one,”she continued. “You know the one–only has one leg. Been around here for months.”

“Oh, ‘Hoppy’” said one of the servers.

Hoppy?

“Yep, him,” said my manager.

They named the flock?

“Wow. Glad to hear that!” said a busser.

Oh, come on now.

“I put him in a corner of the alley, left him water and some hash browns, and he drank some water and ate a few potatoes,” smiled my manager, which I was sure was the first time I have seen her smile in the month I’ve worked for her.

“Really?” I asked.

“I have a thing about birds,” she said, her stern don’t-mess-with-me attitude firmly back in place.

“Well, great!” I said. “Glad he’s okay.”

Once upon a long time ago, a flock of noisy D.C. crows decided to roost in my yard. Day after day, they drove me insane with their constant shrieking and cawing. Until one day, when RG Daughter came inside to plead with me to save a too-young-to-be-out-of-the-nest juvenile bird that lay stunned and barely moving at the base of a backyard tree.

“Oh, geez,” I said, when she showed me where he was. Now the incessant cawing above sounded like a family calling out to a lost loved one–a kid, at that.

I wrapped the poor thing in a dirty towel and placed him in an empty drywall bucket. With a sad and very concerned RG Daughter in tow, I drove an hour and a half through rush hour traffic from upper Northwest D.C. to some outer P.G. County wild bird rescue place, just to give the young bird half a chance.

I have no idea if the D.C. bird survived, but I told RG Daughter he did.

To hear my manager tell it, “Hoppy” will soon be back to graze for seconds. In a way, that would actually be fine.

“I despise first days of any job,” I told her on that dark, chilly morning an hour before sunrise. “Thanks for walking me out of the maze.”

“I completely understand,” she laughed. “It’s the worst.” Then she extended her hand.

“RG,” I smiled at the beautiful chef. “New a.m. server.”

“Chef,” she smiled back. “I don’t usually work mornings, but I’m glad I met you.”

I later found out that she was the executive chef at my new job and was filling in for the morning guy, something she rarely has to do. Kismet for me, I guess.

A.M. server: the bane, the banal, the best of the worst of hospitality. It’s a long way from tending bar in the Keys, or anywhere, for that matter. It’s a longer way from anything good in hospitality, so it’s a good thing to get in good with the executive chef who never works the a.m. shift, especially on your first day.

I almost didn’t show up for this first day. Frankly, I almost didn’t show up for the drug test a week before. Two days later, when I passed the drug test (duh), I almost didn’t show up for the first of what I knew would be hours of agonizing and useless corporate propagandizing disguised as “orientation.”

Why? Because I had stalked the restaurant of this beautiful hotel for several days, watching the a.m. servers hoist their trays of eggs and coffee and juice and all the rest ordered by the tired, the hungover and the anxious-to-get-to-the-morning-meeting in hopeful attempts to wake the hell up on a beach setting they only wish they could appreciate.

Because I don’t carry trays. Because I don’t run food. This is not for a lack of willingness to carry and run, but because I have scrawny chicken wings for arms, and I am blind without my cheater readers that render me blind when I am wearing them and not reading.

Put another way, I figured out that I am likely too old for the carry-and-run show.

Thus, at 6:15 a.m. when I was due to show up for my first training shift at 6:30 a.m., I sat in my car in the parking lot maze and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed–but only in my head–because I didn’t want to have a blotchy, puffy face on my first day, even though I was sure it would be my last day at this Ground Hog Day-esque first day of another first day at yet another job.

Every day since has been a cluster of errors and trials. Every day since, I have learned a little of this and a little of that, but not all that I need to. Every day since I have learned that I can carry a tray and a jack just fine, which was the one thing about which I worried the most. Just goes to show, I should quit worrying.

In the three weeks since I last posted, I have lived three lives: mostly the life of an exhausted Restaurant Gal who almost didn’t show up for her billionth first day of yet another job that she was sure she couldn’t handle; secondly as an on-call p.m. bartender at my old-new job that I obviously learned to handle when I despaired I never would; and thirdly as a mom and friend who can’t take the phone calls from loved ones at 3 p.m. because she is sleeping off the morning shift and willing herself to be awake to work the night’s shift.

When you look at all this reality, you see that I have been living no life at all.

Until today, when I woke the hell up.

“Guess what?” I asked my great guy when I got home from my stupid-crazy morning shift. My great guy, who is likely wondering where his great gal has gone.

He shrugged.

I smiled for the first time in the three weeks that I have lived three lives. “I got it.”

He was clearly puzzled. “Okay…got what?”

“It,” I laughed for the first time in these three weeks of my three lives. “No weeds. No almost tears on the floor. I just got it all done. And then I got it. I am actually not so terrible in this job.”

“I told you all you needed was confidence,” he said, speaking like the annoyingly always-right restaurant manager he used to be.

“No, no,” I said stamping a foot and slapping his shoulder. “I really got it today.”

In D.C., when I was a maitre d’ at the so-busy-casual-upscale restaurant group, I remember feeling angst-ridden when I double sat a server. Every day of the past three weeks that I have lived three lives, I only wish I could have been a server at any of that group’s eateries.

Double seat? Hah! Those D.C. servers had multiple food runners and plenty of bussing support. They also had 5-table sections. Bussers at my current job mean Claudio, who is awesome, but he’s it. Food runners? You mean the night shift runner who was dragged in and only on a Saturday? Oh, and my “section?” You mean the five tables outside and the six inside, miles apart from one another? Do the math and walk in my non-skid heavy black Payless shoes.

Yesterday, I was seated six times in less than five minutes, with three tables in another section working. Today, I was triple sat within a minute in an inside section, while being double sat in the Siberia of all outside sections, with two tables working. And I handled it almost like the pro I am not.

Me. Who never worked as a server of this calibre in my life. Me, who,two weeks ago, worried most about carrying a tray and, who, today carried a zillion plates for two outside tables located a million miles away from the kitchen just to turn and burn ‘em and get back to the three inside tables.

Me, who never, ever in my life has worked so hard and felt such a pathetic pride in a pathetic job well done, because today I rang a few cents more than the ace server who trained me, even though I dumped water on one table (they grabbed glasses from my beverage tray and unbalanced it–dumb asses) and then pissed off the cook because he didn’t read my modifiers on the ticket and blamed the remake on me.

“I don’t have time for this!” he screamed.

“It’s on the ticket, read it!” I yelled back. After which he was only borderline surly and almost cordial toward me.

I think I got it. Or at least a tougher skin.

I am still exhausted. I am still a weed-paranoid freak and a freak show in the eyes of my managers on the floor. I still grimace every time I approach the line to hoist a tray for a 4-top and loop a jack over my other shoulder.

But I came home today and went grocery shopping instead of napping. Today, I looked at my computer and felt like listening to music and writing.

Today, I am pretty confident that I got it. Or, I got it that I got it enough, for now.

In the past three weeks of my three lives, I never pictured this day, because I was certain it simply could never happen. Old dogs may be difficult to retrain, and Restaurant Gals may make many mistakes and doubt themselves aplenty, but both, it appears, can learn a few new tricks.

Setbacks are to be expected. Exasperation is certain to set in as season heats up. But, damn, it felt good to feel good about work today.

Oh for God’s sake.

“This is our new manager, RG,” smiled the second biggest of the management trifecta later on my last day. “And this is RG,” he said, introducing me to the new manager, “Who we are so very sorry to see leave us.”

Huh? Sorry to see the gal go who couldn’t hack food prep and who could never seem to sell enough food to keep you and the rest of the trifecta happy? Sorry to see the gal go who garnered nothing but complaints from the three of you, well, until a couple of guests complemented me?

“Do I need to talk her into staying?” asked the confident new manager.

We all awkwardly laughed.

“So what happened?” asked the new manager a few minutes later, when it was just the two of us surveying a slow-for-the-moment lounge on my last day.

“Wait a half hour, and you’ll see,” I laughed, because it was easy to sustain laughter on my last day.

And when a half hour passed, almost to the second, the new manager cornered me in the kitchen while I was frantically tossing lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers onto a plate.

“What the hell are you doing back here and not serving behind your bar?” he asked, incredulous.

“This,” I smiled, “Is exactly what happened.”

He was dumfounded.

“No, no, no,” he scolded me. “You stay behind the bar and I’ll prep and run all your food. How can a bartender be in the kitchen doing all this and still do her job as a bartender?”

No kidding.

To be fair, my wonderful former manager felt the same way, and he always helped me as much as he could, until room service weeds grew thick and tangled as the restaurant staff hacked through their own tables’ brambles and vines. Then it was back to ladling soup and plating desserts–complete with fruit and whipped cream garnish–for this gal. And yet, something was very different about this new guy’s attitude. Something commanding. Something certain. Something I wish I’d known was about to land on my floor before I gave my notice and accepted a job that required carrying trays of eggs that I was sure I would drop on day one.

On my last day, I sold enough. On my last day, I garnered a few more “excellent” comment cards. On my last day, I worked with a manager who not only got it, he acted upon it 100 percent.

Damn.

Background checks and drug tests passed and accounted for, I start the new job tomorrow. But my new manager on my last day of my old job asked me to come in tonight “to help out for a few hours.” Which I did, of course. Because gaps between hospitality jobs–even a week–mean no income for days, which is followed by the dreaded “training” period, which means a meager income for more days, at best, and zero tips.

Swan songs aren’t always sung in perfect harmony. Sometimes, you just have to hum along for a bit, and hope your voice is heard during an instant replay.