Bad Boss Man

A Bad Boss Man
Recently I had a bad experience with an employer. I will withhold his name, out of fairness, and because I doubt any one who reads this will ever have any dealings with him. I’ll just call him Greg for the purpose of this journal entry.
He is the proprietor of an area restaurant that I will also rename, calling it the Sidewinder Café. He has owned this establishment for a number of years when his mommy, sorry, mother, and daddy, oops, father helped him open it in the early nineties. He originally went in as a partner with his brother, but after a number of years of vicious sibling rivalry, the brother pulled out to presumably run as far away as possible form Greg. Greg was now left as the sole proprietor/autocrat/dictator of the restaurant.
The food at the Sidewinder is a little upscale from Applebees, and a little downscale from The Outback Café. Now, I have nothing against these chains; they do what they do and make money at it, which in the restaurant business is an incredible feat. But Greg would have you think that his menu is comparable to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, as far as ingenious concepts go, and he guards his recipe book as if it were the Magna a la Carta. All of the recipes were either invented by himself, his brother, his mother, or some goon of a chef he employed for years, and who I will get to later. His ribs recipe came out so tough that I once chipped a tooth trying to gnaw one enough to force it down. All of these recipes he dotes over as if he were their grandmother, and any discrepancy by his cooks in changing them in any way is met with pursed lips and a brooding sulk.
He is ultimately a crude man, although he wears airs to impress the rich people in the neighborhood where he operates. Employees are often greeted by him holding a paper cup with a brown soaked napkin stuffed in it. This is his dip cup, which he indulges in twice daily, first when his wife takes the kids to school, and secondly after she has brought them by after school. He is very obsessive about not letting her find out about this habit, and the staff is set up to warn him if they see her arrive and he has a dip in.
The dipping is inconsequential compared to his signature crude habit, scratching himself in his crotch. I wish I could have flowered that last statement up a bit, but to do justice to the act, I have to tell it like it is. This is not the same as what men do when things get a little unorganized down below, this is a habit on the borderline of obsession. We would be having a conversation about inventory or invoices, and inevitably his hand would reach down and go for it like there was an infestation of some sort going on down there. Several times I would see this occur and quell the instinct to just run away and never come back. I never saw him wash his hands and later I would see him making chowder and think, “I ain’t eating that.”
The other cooks and I would make remarks to each other about these habits to relieve tension. This was by far the most negative environment I had ever been in. The cooks were disgruntled, the waiters were trying to undermine the kitchen constantly, the patrons complained often, and the sous chef and I were exhausted most of the time because, of course, Greg worked us like dogs, because we were on salary. He worked the hourly staff less, to save money.
Money. That was Greg’s obsession. He obsessed over money so much that he reminded me of a modern day version of a Dickens villain. All he needed was a tall desk and stool, with a quill pen, adding numbers to a colossal old ledger. That would be him. He was also paranoid of what he could lose. When I first started work he was so worried that a former employee was going to steal his recipe book, that he considered taking it home and locking it in his safe.
He once called me in the office to have a talk about how things were going. He talked about the former chef, who all of the staff had told me was a hot-headed bully (a dime a dozen in this business). The staff had told me that this guy would yell and publicly berate everyone until everyone was afraid to approach the kitchen. I’ve worked with chefs like this before, and vowed that I never would be like that because all it does is break down channels of communication. Greg said that this guy may have been a bully but, like Mussolini, the trains ran on time. I felt like reminding him that Mussolini was strung up by his own country men in the streets of Milan. I also should have asked him, “If he’s Mussolini, who does that make you, Hitler?”
This may sound like sour grapes, but sometimes in life you meet some one who you are completely incompatible with. Unfortunately, in the town where I live, there is a sequestered little group of society who puts on false airs, and likes to think of themselves as cultured. Greg is an example of some one who smells their money, and caters to them because he believes that he belongs on that narrow, shallow plateau.