My first job in food service was great, great owner and boss. My next job was horrible pretty sure we were all bullied (we didn’t think of it that way then- just had to tough up)- we had to crawl under the deep fryer table to clean the floor because grease would condense/drip down there into a puddle. One of the nastiest jobs I ever had and our boss wasn’t great either, she used that task as punishment if we messed up. The restaurant was owned by a drunk and she would come in and cuss us and call us thieves, pigs, and liars. I clocked out once in the middle of one of her tirades and never looked back. Funny thing is she called me the next morning and wanted to make me the manager, no I did not take her up on it. No more restaurant work for me.
I was raised to believe life would not be easy or fair, and if things got tough I had to be tougher. I was taught that I was responsible for what kind of life I would have and if I wasn’t happy then I needed to do something different. It was no one’s job to make me happy but mine. When people shelter children from the truth we do them no favors.
Restaurant work is even worse than working for Douglas Elliman Real Estate - one of my early jobs at 17 or 18! Not only was I bullied, I was made the scapegoat of one financial disaster because of my typing, I think...
Suicide has many fathers. It runs in families for many generations - Mariel Hemingway has been in the forefront of fighting this dread genetic disease. It also seems to be encouraged among young people today as an escape from life. Why? Why are our children not as resilient as we were?