Recent Musings:
Alcohol abuse.
Thursday, December 8, 2005
Last night I experienced the effects of alcohol abuse first-hand in a way I never had before; the chef on my job was drunk when I showed up at work, at 4 p.m.
At first it was funny, since he was huggy and silly and generally nice. Seeing as my work has a fairly high tolerance for this kind of thing, we all shrugged it off. But he kept drinking, on top of his drunkenness, and things got ugly really quickly. He couldn't talk without slurring, he couldn't cook anything - not correctly anyway, he began screwing up whole tables' worth of food orders, he started knocking pans off the stove, spilling them on the floor and just causing general mayhem. Now his bad habit was affecting me, my job, my tables, my customers, my tips and the reputation of the restaurant, not to mention the other kitchen staff, the other servers and the bussers. Not cool.
The ironic part was, when we started getting angry with him for his lack of coherence and performance on the job because of his drunkenness, he got mad at us!! He started pouting like a child, started throwing pans around the kitchen, started slamming cooler doors and started yelling at all of us for complaining about our wrong orders, as if he was the victim in this situation! That's when I saw how twisted abuse could be; that's when I realized that abusers take no responsibility for their actions and try to manipulate the situation to make it everyone else's problem or everyone else's fault.
I was dumbfounded, angry, a little nervous and downright scared for my safety.
I did, however, find myself feeling bad for him. Even though this guy was being a real jerk, he also had a serious problem with alcohol. He recently received a DUI, had his license suspended and has been attending AA. Regardless of all the punishment, warning signs and help, he's still struggling with this. If he hadn't been so damn violent, I think I might have tried to sit down and talk with him.
He's a really good chef too, and a nice guy. I think it's a big slap of reality on how anything to the extreme can become controlling, abusive and may destroy a person's potential in life.
Alas, he was terminated and I had mixed emotions about that. Yeah, he screwed up and deserved to be terminated. I just wish, on some level, we could have held his hand, metaphorically speaking, and helped him through this. I suppose that's not how the world works.