Underutilized Resource ©2012 by Joe Sixtop all rights reserved

     At night I work at the weediest restaurant in America where all I do is straight-up wait tables. They haven't asked me to do anything else, like fill in on to-go, or hosting. If ever they do ask me to do anything like that, my answer will be "no" because that job withholds whatever hourly pay I get from them to the IRS. It kind of messed me up when I never got a check for training ("THIS IS NOT A CHECK," November, 2011) but now I'm about to get a fat-ass tax refund, so oh well.
     I do all kinds of shizzle at my day job. I was hired as a server but I've worked every Front Of The House position they have. By far my favorite chore there is working Curveside™  to-go and I'm slowly but surely making that the only task I do for them. I get $7.25 an hour doing it, plus tips, which can be substantial. I get a somewhat-meaningful paycheck every other week. It's usually just me who's bagging up chow and taking it out to people's vehicles and it can get pretty overwhelming sometimes. It's not all that unusual for me to be kind of slow on Curveside and everybody else to be pretty slammed. That's when my cheap-ass day job fails to make full use of a terrific underutilized resource that's right under their very noses: me.
     Company spec for Curveside greet is "less than 30 seconds." They have a camera on the Curveside parking area. There's a little TV in the kitchen that's connected to that camera. The to-go employee can be bagging up orders and keep an eye on when someone pulls up, and make greet. That TV hasn't worked in more than a year. When I'm working Curveside, I try and help everybody else as much as I can. I'll run food, replenish the ice holes, bus tables, make beverages, all kinds of shit. Without that TV, I'm a little bit limited in playing my position, but a lot limited in eating my co-workers' weeds. A small, analog, Black & White TV could be purchased for less than 50 dollars. Paying a professional to install it might run another $50, but we've got a ton of regulars who'd be able and willing to do it for a free cheeseburger.
     My GM, Brenda B, tells me that she asks her boss to improve our closed-circuit capabilities on a regular basis but is consistently shut out and I believe her. I've thought about finding an appropriate television on Craigslist or somewhere and paying for it myself, but so far when that thought has entered my mind, I've been like, "Fuck that!"