Lois had worked as a waitress for Kristie’s family for fourteen years. She was reliable, dependable, and friendly. She was a capable head waitress who taught the rest of the staff the proper order and cleaning techniques they needed to learn.
- How to clean the slime snakes out of the ice cream scoop water bath.
- The habit she hoped to instill in all the bussers to wipe any water or garbage that had accumulated under the bus trays every time they changed one out.
- She expected everyone’s uniforms to be clean and ironed, and shoes polished white.
- Women were to wear their hair up off their necks in a neat bun.
- Side work like washing and refilling the salt and pepper shakers and sugar containers, cleaning the pie case, and salad bar.
Lois had a lot of rules. She preferred to work the early morning shift alone arriving at 6:00 AM to prepare for the breakfast rush. She worked through lunch and got off at 2:00 PM.
She and the cook who was also the assistant manager, fleeced the place for all those years. Not so much that you’d notice, but enough to buy herself a cute little two bedroom cottage and a relatively new car. Her whole house was furnished with plates, cups, saucers, glasses, and stainless ware she filched from the restaurant.
The cook also prospered in a similar way, but he opted for a slick red Corvette and free steak and eggs for all his friends after a night of drunken debauchery.
Neither Lois nor the cook wanted Kristie on the shift with them, but Kristie’s dad felt that something was up, so he often put her on dump shifts to spy on the organization for him. Kristie didn’t like these dump shifts. It often meant that she would only get a couple of hours during a rush or the slow days where she ended up cleaning everything while Lois collected the money. Kristie thought it was odd that Lois wouldn’t let her ring anything up on the register, being quick to usurp her position anytime a customer came up to pay.
It was also odd that none of the breakfast receipts totaled more than a couple of hundred dollars. The place was packed all morning with office workers and cops coming in and out. It was known as a “cop shop.” The graveyard cook was the girl friend of a cop, so all the cops went there as a matter of course.
The cops were not supposed to get a free meal, only free coffee, but somehow most of them never paid a dime. It wasn’t because they didn’t leave any money on the counter. They figured the bill out themselves and left a five or a ten to cover the cost of their eggs or a doughnut.
“Keep the change,” they would all say to Lois as they left on a call. She kept it alright. She kept the whole amount of the bill, never writing a ticket, and never ringing it up.
There were other problems too. Other waitresses were not in on the scam. Tips left on the table went missing. The servers were quick to blame the bussers. Lois had a way of sniping the unguarded tips off the table without anyone noticing. When a table of four or five people ordered their meals and left cash, the ticket would mysteriously go missing.
When asked about it, Lois would testify that they were walk-outs. Realizing that the ruse was up, she quit one day unexpectedly. Walked right out in the middle of a shift and then had the audacity to apply for unemployment benefits.
You would think that all these experiences would have been a warning to Kristie. But at some point, she decided to sell the farm and buy The Ranch. The same story repeated itself. Trusted waitress equals rip off artist. “You can’t trust anyone in this business”, she decided… “Not even family!”
(First Published 6/12/12)
