"You can't ever know a person"

[muckefuck]

I can't remember if I ever mentioned it, but a reason for me to keep frequenting the Greek Fire Grill which was at least as compelling as their tasty food cooked to order was an incredibly hot counterman. Middle-aged, bearded, brick shithouse, and quite honestly the best cook they had. (More than once I considered asking him to teach the other grillman his technique for rolling up the chicken wrap on the griddle to make it all nice and gooey inside.) I eventually worked up the courage to chat him up a bit, but I never got as far as asking any personal details, not even his name.

Both his shifts and my visits varied, so it took me a while to determine that not running into him this past month was more than a fluke. I thought about asking the manager, who likes to chat with me about FRPGs, but I held back in case there had been some unpleasantness. And then the week before last, I ran into him quite unexpectedly at the Loyola stop. He was about to board a bus with a small child (presumably his son), so I barely had any time to chat. "Are you still working up in Evanston?" "No, I'm working downtown now."

But today I was back at GFG and I saw the other veteran cook, one who's always been more friendly to me than I to him. (Why oh why is it so hard to get personality and physique to match up?) While waiting on my souvlaki, I asked him, "Whatever happened to the older guy who used to work here?" I was expecting a number of possible responses--he moved on, he got fired, etc. I was not expecting, "The cops came for him and he went running out the back."

"But he was a good worker, wasn't he?" "He was one of the best." What sense does it make to work your ass off and steal? If you've got the chops to make an honest living, why risk it? And if thievery is your game, why put that much effort into your cover? He had been caught stealing from the store a couple times, the cook told me, but he passed the incidents off as "mistakes" and was forgiven on account of his diligence. "Apparently his wife is a thief too, she stole something from Target."

Oddest of all, he came back four days ago and asked for his old job back. "I guess things had cooled off enough," my informant told me. It's all making me wish even more that I'd made the effort to chat with him. Someone with that level of contradictions is bound to have some interesting things to reveal, but not without building a lot of trust first.

Comments

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

No mystery, he had a kid to support and that job does not pay well, no matter how perfectly you do it. Something close to minimum wage, usually.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I suppose you're right. I'm doing the calculus from a white collar point of view, where a felony conviction makes you virtually unemployable. But on the margins places like these operate on, they probably aren't putting much into background checks.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I just read an interesting article about how to get a job following a conviction. Employers don't really care in the way we imagine they do, it's actually possible to spin it into a positive in many situations. In the restaurant industry, criminal experience is almost a prerequisite. And cooks get paid dirt, so employers don't exactly get to be fussy; a good cook is very hard to replace.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I can readily see how some convictions (e.g. assault) could be spun positively, but theft just seems like one that most employers would have real trouble overlooking. Yet I suppose turning a blind eye to occasional cash drawer raid still works out way cheaper in the long run than paying a living wage.