Goodbye Organic Grill!

Appetizing, ain't it?

My official goodbye to the neon-green-painted nightmare you see before you: the worst job I’ve ever had.

For those of you in Albuquerque, think of The Organic Grill as the twisted, evil doppleganger of Green Light Bistro…and Green Light Bistro was pretty twisted itself.

It was uncanny, really.  It had the tempeh bacon, the soy cheese, the grossly overpriced vegan desserts.  It even had a Prakash and a Yashoda, the quintessential angry immigrant owners, except they were called Vladamir and Olga.  (Could their names sound any more doom filled?)

Vladamir and Olga run their restaurant through a fax machine, except when Vlad makes his daily five minute visit to scream at everyone.  When they’re not around, they watch you in real time on the many surveillance cameras hanging around the business.

They recently got a restaurant computer system, but are afraid it will eat all of their records, so they make their underpaid employees do everything twice.  On paper and then in the computer.  The records are still, always, always, always, wrong, because they have so many glitches in the system that they will never fix.  It’s the most inefficiently run business I’ve ever seen.

In a way, it felt like returning to my old, dysfunctional Annapurna family.  It felt familiar and comfortable in an “I’ve been here before, I know how to handle this” way.  Then I remembered that I didn’t WANT to handle it.  I lasted a week, had a few open spats with the owners, and then got a new job.  (More on that later.)  You thought the turn over at Annapurna was bad?  The longest employee there had only been there for eight months, and she quit at the same time I did.

The thing that hurts my soul about the place is that all of my coworkers, to the extent that I could get to know them in a week, were amazing.  (Phil being one of them, who I may have made a legitimate friendship with.)  And they were being mistreated and screwed over in ways I can’t believe.  But it’s the same New York story, the city is short on jobs but full of horrible business owners and desperate people.

One of my favorite people there, Abel (or Abelito, or “the kid” depending on who you’re talking to,) the delivery boy, isn’t getting paid wage.  Just delivery tips.  Let that sink in before I tell you that he works for ten hours a day delivering food on bike to over privileged Manhattanites that, on average, tip him less than fifteen percent.  Let THAT sink in before I tell you that he does it seven days a week.

Despite the language barrier, Abel is one of the sweetest people I’ve ever worked with.  He’s my age, lives in the Bronx.  I don’t know his story at all, but despite the perpetual black circles under his eyes, he smiles a lot.

This was one of the biggest puzzle pieces in the “Why Manhattan Breaks My Heart” puzzle.  I wanted to call every person that ordered something for delivery and tell them, “hey, Abel is going to deliver your food, he doesn’t get paid wage so take care of him.”  But they probably wouldn’t care because the divide between people like Abel and the people ordering fifteen dollar vegan lunches in Manhattan is so great that they literally cannot interface with it.  One choice, drunk, trust fund baby at an NYU dorm tipped Abel with a lip gloss.  No money.  Handed him a pink lip gloss.  And he, being in the position he is, didn’t even have permission to punch her in the face.

I’m somewhere in the middle I guess, floating in the chasm between the super rich and super poor.  Either way, I definitely don’t belong in this borough, where everyone either seems tired and sad (the majority?) or drunk (on booze…or money…or the thrill of a new city), giggling, stumbling off to their next liquor/food/goods dispensary.

The new job isn’t fantastic, but it’s less soul sucking by far.  I’m making better money there, and I’m slowly warming up to the co-workers, who aren’t as instantly bad ass as the folks at the grill, but aren’t bad either.

Three new jobs in two months?  Can I be done now?

~ by fancydelic on March 29, 2010.