Bring Back Tickets Hanging On A Wire Line With Clothespins

The company who has our contract at the airport for the restaurant I work in has 54,000 employees worldwide with revenues last year exceeding 3.9 billion dollars yet has a computer program seemingly created by Atari, right after they created "Pong".

The company has been wonderful to me and my only complaint is the outdated computer system on which we work. The system goes offline and often stays offline for hours at a time, leaving everything (including us) hanging in the wind as far as financial culpability goes. I've learned after over almost two years of working for them, the one sure way to get fired is messing up that money drop you have to make at the end of each shift.When the system goes offline, checks seem to disappear becoming "ghost checks" the manager has to find and close out and can't even get a detailed readout at the end of your shift.

The airport where I work has a union which am sure is in place to protect all employees but have learned also enables poor performance and total apathy.

I have never had a job as good as my current one and grateful for all it has done for me and my family but that blind money drop scares the poop out of me. Not to mention  have to guestimate all my tip outs, which affects other employees who assist me.

Yes I make incredible money most shifts and at a  level of serving where it consists of support staff, aptly titled. When you sometimes make upwards of thirty sometimes forty dollars an hour in an eight hour shift and support staff is being paid minimum wage, you need to take care of the people who help you succeed making it. On the other hand, am not in it to simply give away my money either. Some servers don't comply but I do. I tip out 2% to the bar for wine and beer, 6% for liquor. I tip out food runners 2% of my food sales and the same for server assistants. Some shifts I tip out over forty dollars but when they help you make literally hundreds it's only fair to compensate them as well.

Yes I have more knowledge about the food and wine (as I should) which increases my monetary potential, but they also know table numbers, seat positions, go get condiments and refill water, even help polish glasses and silver when the need arises.

Actually I think my biggest complaint about work is servers who refuse to support support staff. Tipping out is not mandatory but in my mind obligatory. There are servers who tell server assistants not to bus their tables simple because they don't want to throw them a small financial bone.

A server assistant or food runner has no option but to do their job, even if not compensated by a server and no wonder they get irritated after a grueling extremely busy shift when someone hands them five dollars instead of fourteen after bussing tables and actually seeing what the server has been left. They most probably are calculating it their head every time they bus, wipe down and reset your table. I know I would!

I have a few rules I firmly live by. One of the most important  is "You get what you give."

I can pretty much guarantee if you took a survey  from front of the house to the back of the house of our restaurant, to the hallway out back where garbage guys collect trash and people who clean the food court out front, to  restrooms where women scrub the toilets to peeps who take me to and from my car parked for twelve bucks a day to the cashier who I pay when leaving...would all tell you, I'm a stand up person.

I started at the airport all by myself two years ago, a fish out of water and brought my daughter on board this past year but lucky for me the apple didn't fall far from the tree.  When I go to work during the week while Massey is in school, every cook, chef and every shuttle bus driver asks about her. So do cashiers when leaving the parking deck. Even my fave TSA guys when going in and out of security. ask where the other Cotton is?

When you try and be a good person, make other people feel like they matter in the scheme of your own life...it comes back ten fold, maybe twenty.

It makes the occasional crappy day so much easier to bear and brightens the life of people you interact with on a daily basis.

I'm gonna be a proton, regardless of haters, regardless of the clueless and peeps deemed to fail as I succeed.

That's a battle they chose..and  "Good luck with that!"

Til next time... COTTON