One Minute of Praise Received!

Today at work I experienced a level of corporate fuckery from my bosses that had to be shared. Allow me to set the scene. I used to work for a restaurant that was part of a small laughable corporation that is currently going through chapter 11 bankruptcy. My managers didn't give a shit about anything we did, and allowed us to get away with anything we wanted. Completely incompetent management that paid little to no attention to anything that happened within the restaurant carried huge benefits and huge downsides at the same time.

I think this situation successfully illustrates both sides of this. One day at 5:30 in the afternoon on a Friday, our general manager decided to completely turn off the water to the restaurant. Nobody knew why it happened and to this day I've never received any sort of explanation. Seeing as how Fridays after 5 are pretty fucking busy hours for a restaurant, this was about the worst possible time you could do this. The only drinks available for us to serve to customers were coffee, unsweetened iced tea that was already brewed before the water was shut off, and a few bottles of Coke and Diet Coke that the assistant manager bought at the Target across the street.

After the water was shut off I had a table of six. Me taking their drink orders went something like this:

Customer: I'd like a Cherry Coke
Me: Actually, that's not available right now
Customer: Okay, I'll take a Sprite
Me: That's not available either
Customer: Fine, I'll have root beer
Me: We don't serve root beer
Customer: What do you have?
Me: We have Coke, Diet Coke, iced tea, and coffee that was brewed about 3 hours ago
Customer: What's the deal here?
Me: This is the worst restaurant in the entire tri-state area

You can clearly see all of the frustration that comes with working at such a place, but the huge benefit was that I could tell a customer straight to his face that our restaurant is the worst within 60 miles, an offense that would get most servers fired, without so much as a slap on the wrist.

Working at this place was a total blast, but the problem was that the location was horrible and the place being so incompetently run resulted in orders taking upwards of 40 minutes to make their way to customers, and that resulted in minimal business, and it also resulted in the few customers that did show up being completely pissed off, and that resulted in me making about $250 a week. I had no choice but to quit and leave for a more respectable place run by a larger corporation.

I won't say which restaurant chain I work for now, but I will say that they have about 600 locations nationwide, they have a history of discrimination lawsuits, the first word is a common perjorative term for white people, the second is a wooden container in which you might shoot fish, and they do not franchise to local owners. Every single location is ruled by the iron cock of corporate policy. My entire first week of training was just a list of shit that will get me fired. Apparently any evidence of theft, racism, or sexual harassment will get me shitcanned. I don't know about you, but any place where I can't whip out my penis and slap unsuspecting coworkers in the face with it while stealing containers of Apple Butter and ranting about how much I hate blacks is not a place that I'm comfortable with being at.

It never hit home with me how controlled every aspect of the place is by corporate policy until today. Our general manager and an assistant manager were eating lunch near one of my tables. They observed me greeting my customers, getting their drink order, getting their food order, entering all of it into the computer, and bringing out the drinks. As I walked away, the assistant manager took me aside and asked if he could speak with me for a minute. He informed me that I greeted and took their order perfectly, and praised me for doing a good job. I smiled and thanked him. Then, he pulled out a "Notice of Employee Praise" Form.

He told me that I needed to sign the form to confirm that I had received a minute of praise from a managerial figure. There was a section on the form where the manager could indicate the degree of praise that the underling received. It ranged from "One minute of praise" to "3-4 minutes of praise" to "Written Commendation." I signed the form, prideful that my minute of praise was officially logged in corporate records.

I imagined in my mind a theoretical bit from the horribly strained disaster that The Office has become where Michael briefly praises Jim and then asks him to sign a form, only for Jim to smugly inform Michael that he has only been praised for ten seconds and won't sign it until he's been sufficiently praised for 50 more seconds, which causes Michael to awkwardly improvise "hilariously" inappropriate compliments about his hair and nailing a hottie like Pam. Then I slapped myself for being a giant dipshit.

I realized that this moment of receiving an official notice of praise from one of my bosses would be completely at home in a network TV sitcom. As as result I have either gained an incredible amount of respect for the writers of The Office and how expertly they've captured real-life, or I've been crushed with the knowledge that my life is a fucking sitcom or cartoon devoid of any real meaning.

Then I though really had about the true implications of my official notice of praise, and I realized, did you get an official notice of praise from your boss today? Did you? Oh wait, you fucking didn't! SUCK IT! SUCK IT HARD!! I got official praise! It's even in writing!! It's been signed by my general manager AND my assistant manager. Your boss didn't sign shit for you today, and if he did it sure as shit wasn't an official document confirming that you're awesome. Fuck you if you're reading this, because YOU SUCK HUGE DICKS!!! Fuck you right up your stupid black ass! I EARNED THE PRAISE! MY LIFE IS VALIDATED BECAUSE I FOLLOWED THE RULES AND MADE MY BOSSES HAPPY!!! FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOU SO FUCKING HARD!!! EAT MY SHIT, COCKSNUGGLERS!!!!!!

God my dick is hard right now.