alcohol and women.

Our resident bad boy at work used to be a 35-year old dinner chef named Jarrett. In the six months that we both worked there, he'd been arrested a couple of times that I know of, and I'm generally behind on the workplace gossip.

Aside from being mildly unstable, he was perfectly obnoxious. He told me once that his only weaknesses were alcohol and women. The alcohol got him into jail, the women got him marked as someone to be avoided by all the waitresses. He had a list of inappropriate and almost clever (the first time) comments that he used to hit on everyone. No doubt he got them off of someone else with more capacity for wit. For example, according to him, he tasted great AND was actually more filling. You get the idea. He would pretend to be sorry if he saw you were offended, but conveniently forgot that you told him to back off by the next shift.

The weird thing is, he had this girlfriend who was the psychotic jealous type. Maybe dating him made her that way. She came to pick him up or drop him off every once in a while, and was always very friendly. Her existence was common knowledge, though Jarrett only ever mentioned her if he was told by a waitress that she had a boyfriend. "Oh yeah, I got a girlfriend." He also tended to forget the existence of both the waitress' boyfriend and his own girlfriend by next shift. What a terrible memory.

Fortunately, I am and have always been the dayshift queen, so I rarely had to work with him. He didn't tend to bother me as much as some of the other girls, and I ignored him as best as I could. (Though I think I yelled at him once for slapping me on the thigh with a spatula, at which point he actually remembered to leave me alone for several shifts. Unnecessary.) Some of the girls would tolerate him for the fact that he would hook them up with free food if they were civil to him and laughed at his old jokes. No sandwich is that good.

With all this in mind, it's not hard to imagine that in the same way he adored all the girls, he felt threatened by all the guys at work. Maybe he figured out that while the girls were generally friendly, even flirtacious in some cases, to every other male in the restaurant, they learned to avoid him on the very first day.

One weekend this past March, he apparently decided that he would teach one of these other guys a lesson. Not because he was actually provoked, just because he was Jarrett. So, with all the force of his 35-year old maturity behind him, he keyed a waiter's car in the employee parking lot.

So stupid.

But we're all so very glad he did it, for it got him fired. I haven't seen him since, and I'm comfortable that with his poor memory, he wouldn't recognize me if I ever had the misfortune of running across him again. And I keep a spatula in my purse just in case I do run into him again, just in case he gets fresh.