Read Online A Working Stiff's Manifesto by Iain Levison - Free Book Online

you can watch the late night porn channels and look at some silicone-breasted nymph sprawl around on a bed without paying eight dollars for the privilege. Who has the patience for more than five minutes of that anyway? By the time I’ve heard her tell me she likes swimming in the sea and doesn’t like rude people, I’ve usually been ready for more of Steve McGarrett catching the one-dimensional killer du jour. If Time-Warner wanted twelve dollars a month, they’d get it. If they want the equivalent of a car payment, they’ll get nothing and like it.
    The tragedy of a career in cable theft, however, is that unlike some criminal ventures, such as drug-dealing and prostitution, cable theft has no repeat customers. Soon, the well is dry. Everyone in my neighborhood is snuggled up watching Comedy Central and Nickolodeon, and I have to reenter the work force.
    I get a job cooking in a restaurant.

W OULDN’T W E A LL B E H APPIER
S OMEWHERE E LSE ?
    The irony of the restaurant industry is that no restaurants ever open up in areas of high unemployment, the logic being that these areas are economically depressed and the local populace doesn’t have the disposable income to spend on luxuries like eating out. This means that anywhere there are people who really need restaurant jobs, the restaurants are fleeing like crazy, only to open in areas where nobody wants to work in them. The result is that every successful restaurant is staffed solely with employees who would rather be somewhere else.
    While this might be true of most businesses, restaurant people don’t make any bones about it. “I’m getting a real job next week,” one of the waitresses tells me on my first day. “As soon as I graduate, I’m getting a real job,” the cook who trains me says. There’s an unspoken understanding among the employees that their jobs are not real, partly because they were so easy to get and partly because restaurant work doesn’t command respect. So employees are always on the lookout for something better, no matter how much money they’re making.
    Restaurants combat this the same way most corporations combat eroding morale: by offering meaningless job titles and fake benefits. But in the restaurant industry, eroding morale is a given, so they don’t waste too much time with it. “We offer full medical after ninety days,” the bleary-eyed manager tells me during my orientation. Then he adds, “And our home office deducts the expense from your paycheck.” He makes it sound like the home office staff is doing me a favor, saving me the trouble of subtracting my own money from my check. I check the “Insurance declined” space on the form.
    â€œYou also qualify to be a shift leader after ninety days,” he tells me, and I would decline that too, if there was an option. Shift leaders are the corporate restaurant world’s answer to prison trustees. For an extra fifty cents an hour, you become responsible for everything, basically performing management functions for cook’s pay. This frees the managers up to do the more important things, like wander around and look stressed, or sit at a table and wait for the night to end so they can start in on the hard liquor when there’s no one around.
    â€œLet’s get to work,” he tells me.
    The restaurant is one of those springing up everywhere, the defining characteristic being crap nailed to the walls. Sometime in the early eighties, someone somewhere decided that people felt more comfortable eating with a refinished canoe paddle nailed to the wall behind them. Busted brass lamps and blacksmith’s tools soon followed, and now every corporate restaurant in the United States sports a wealth of garage sale refuse secured to the walls; secured very well, I might add, so drunk people can’t pry it off.
    The food in these places is bland but palatable, and the restaurant where I have just