The first time I got fired...

I'd like to think that I was a valuable asset to a lot of companies that I worked for over the years. Oh sure, I can sometimes blow my lid and can easily be distracted by the banter of conversation, which some people (namely managers) don't like, but all in all, I'm a pretty good, smart worker.

That was lost on my boss at my second job.

Like my brothers before me, I worked at a place called the Captain's Table. This was my first job. I worked as a busboy, dishwasher and cook before finally leaving the place. I had gotten my second job through my older brother, Paul. They needed someone to help out and I fit the bill.

It wasn't a very hard job at first. The place I worked at was a steak restaurant called David's Steakhouse. Paul had a friend that we can call Ralph. Ralph had a wife named Sheri. Now Ralph and Sheri bought David's Steakhouse from the original owners. It was stuck in the middle of a nothing town outside of my hometown, but it had a reputation for serving pretty good food, so it thrived on out of town business.

My job was pretty simple. The cooler with all of the steaks was inconveniently on the other side of the kitchen door. On one side was the cooler and on the other side was the chef's area. My job was the take the orders as the waitresses placed them on the order rack, go into the cooler, select all of the appropriate steaks, take them back to the chef's area and give them the order and the steaks. It was pretty easy work. There may have been some food prep work and table busing that went along with it, but it wasn't that bad.

It was easy and I was pretty good at it. I mean, how hard can it be? You only have so many steaks to choose from and the order didn't pile up that hard. As long as the cooks were busy, you were fine.

Where things started to go wrong was my interactions with the other staff. Being a teenager and me, I probably thought I knew everything. That attitude probably didn't go over well with some people.

One of them was the bar manager. On the other side of the restaurant, they had a lounge where people could drink. It was generally not very busy, but Ralph had a lady run it and she, it seemed, had complete control over every aspect of the bar. She even was allowed to set her own rules for how many pops you could have. If she was working and you were thirsty, she allowed you to have only two glasses of pop from the bar. Now I didn't know this at first and on one particularly busy night, I came in after my second glass of pop, which by the way were long and skinny glasses so it's not as if they were breaking the bar's bank, and I asked for another glass of pop.

She shot me a glare and yelled, "I told you kid that you only get two glasses of pop! That's it!"

I was a flabbergasted. I'm not exactly one to take inane rules lying down. When someone tells me something that I find stupid, I have to ask the reason why. So I did.

"Why?" I had the nerve to ask.

She responded with "That's my rule!"

"Well, I didn't know!" I retorted.

"Well now you know!" she snapped back.

I decided to put this policy to the test. I didn't initially set out to do this, but I liked drinking my Cokes. I noticed that on the days that she didn't work, which was about once a week, I whoever was running the bar would give more than two fountain Cokes with no problem, no questions asked. I then figured that if she gives out two free ones, that I would just buy another Coke if I wanted one with my meal after my shift.

The bartender was back one night and I had already had my two Cokes. I pulled out my wallet and with money in hand I asked for a Coke. She flipped out.

"I told you that you only get two pops a night!" she said red in the face.

I was flabbergasted. Here I was, trying to pay for another Coke and she was turning me down?

"I'm paying for this!" I yelled incredulously, or with disbelief for those who don't like big words.

She said that she didn't care and that if I kept asking, she would talk to Ralph about it.

I couldn't believe it. It's not as if I was trying to bilk David's out of money by overusing the Coke gun behind the bar. Far from it. I was trying to pay for one!

My brother, Paul, told me to not worry about it, but if she was told to start shelling out the Cokes, I don't remember. I do remember having to drink water or bring my own in a little cooler for after I got off work.

If Ralph was not satisfied with my work, I really didn't get a warning. I must have been doing something right because I asked for more hours and I got them. I helped carve the prime rib during the Sunday lunch buffet, helped with prep work and even washed dishes. I was multi-talented (being sarcastic here).

Right about the time I started washing dishes for David's is when things started to go wrong.

Maybe it was my teenager attitude. Maybe it was because I over slept one morning. Maybe it was because I asked Ralph if he minded if I brought in a homework book to read while I was waiting for the dish machine to finish it's cycle.

His response: "I'm not paying you to do homework."

Fair enough. I guess he paid me to lean against the dish machine staring at the cook leaning against the prep table because when you had everything done and you had an hour left before the restaurant closed, that's really all there was left to do. Occasionally, when management had left, I would sneak in my boring homework book from English and read it while washing dished. Like I said, multi-talented...

Maybe it was because I came in one week to pick up my check and I demanded to know why my check was exactly the same as the week before. Surely, I thought, this was a mistake. What are the odds.

I went to Sheri to ask her why and she seemed a little irritated when it wasn't an error, I had just happened to work the exact amount of hours for that two-week period that I had the paycheck period before. Since they didn't use a punch clock and you wrote in when you came and left, everything was rounded up or down to the nearest 15 minutes. It was a simple mistake, I guess.

Maybe it was my increasing attitude towards the waitresses. I thought was had a pretty good relationship. They seemed to like me, but waitresses are pretty temperamental. They take shit from the customers for hours on end, the last thing they want to take shit from is a teenage dishwasher. In retrospect, I should have seen this rift coming when I snapped a few times after I thought I had gotten every dish from every waitress before breaking my machine down for the night. I was usually when I was almost done when one would rush up with a tub of dishes saying, "Sorry! Here are some more dishes!" I would groan and put the machine to together. Maybe it was the groaning. Maybe it was me slamming the machine back together. Maybe it was me slamming the dishes into machine after slamming the said machine back together. Who knows?

Maybe it was those above reasons, but I have a feeling it was because of that fateful day in the kitchen with Sheri.

Sheri was the boss's wife and as such, she had an attitude. I've worked at a few jobs where someone's wife works either in a position of power or as another worker. I don't think I've ever encountered one that didn't act like they owned the place because they were attached to the man. Sure, in this case, she did technically own the place, but that not the point! Sheri already didn't really like me because of my daring to challenge that my hours were wrong, so this last incident was the straw that broke that camel's back (not saying she was fat, which I don't recall).

Whenever I would wash dishes, people would come by me all night long to go outside to smoke. That was no problem as I understand that they are the slaves to their masters and must satisfy that fix. Sheri, on the other hand, would walk to the back door and then not go outside to smoke. She would light up literally 3 feet behind my back and stand there and smoke her entire cigarette not saying a word most times.

I don't smoke and I hate being around people that smoke. I always have. Every time she did this, I would either suck it up or move to the other end of the dishwashing machine to unload the machine or I'd put away dishes that were clean. But a lot of times, I would be trying to load the machine and she'd be puffing away, looking out the stupid back screen door for minutes on end. Finally, one day, I kind of snapped.

One one long night that I was tired, she came back to smoke and look out the back screen door like always and I just asked, "Could you please not smoke around me?"

Now what's wrong with that? I asked her as nice as I could and I used the word "please" so it shouldn't have been a big deal right? Well, it was probably because I backed it up with this sentence.

"I reserve my right to free air."

That probably didn't go over too well... Probably not.

I remember her saying something about how that as soon as I own the place, then I can tell her what to do or SOMETHING like that.

I believe it was the next time that I came into work that I checked the schedule and found that I wasn't on the schedule. I was a little confused as I had never been fired before, so I asked someone why I wasn't on the schedule. They told me to talk to Ralph.

Ralph informed me that he was letting me go. While he didn't mention the smoking thing specifically, he did mention about how I was a little rude to some of the wait staff, so he was letting me go.

I was a little irritated to say the least. I didn't even get a warning to cool it. I was just told to leave. This really didn't hinder my wage earning at all because I was also working some shifts at my previous kitchen job and my old boss was happy to have me back for any shift that he wanted to schedule me for.

So that's my fired story. I would like to say that I concocted some elaborate revenge scheme to get even, but I didn't. I even took my prom date to eat there after the fact. What did happen was what I call karma kicking in. I won't exactly say what happened, but let me point out that the restaurant isn't even open anymore and it may have had something to do with the actions of Sheri, who may or may not have funneled over to remodeling their house instead of paying the business bills, leaving Ralph with a huge amount of debt when he finally caught wind of it. (Thanks to Paul for filling me in on the sordid details, most of which I've chosen not to go into)