Putain de merde....

Well, having just reread my last blog entry, it turns out that, in my assessment of my new state of living, I was sadly wrong about one key fact which is going to end up making a huge difference to my new-found "existence."

The extremely attentive amongst you will have spotted an incongruity (discrete but significant) between my assertions of last time and reality. Those of you who are really watching what's going on in France will have noticed that there were some riots in the Paris banlieux a while ago about the revokation of a certain right given to young people when they start a new job. The law previously stated that somebody gained all the rights to continuing employment, and hence an immunity to being sacked for being rubbish, as soon as they started a new job. This means that if you hire'em and they turn out to be cretins, it's your lookout for not having interviewed more thoroughly. Nickolas Sarkozy, if I followed the story correctly, spotted that this meant that basically no-one was able to get any jobs because employers were terrified of being lumbered with a dolt and he promply changed the law provoking demonstrations and riots throughout the country.

How do I know all of this fascinating polical info? And why am I writing about it here? Because, my good friends, my trusted and loved ones, I've just borne the brunt of this new law with a shocking and ruthless immediacy.

Yes, twenty minutes or so ago I was told that I could finish half an hour early, wash my uniform, and give, in cash, the 20 euro I owe from an apparently underfunded till the other day, and never expect to return bar to pick up the cheque for the work I'd managed to squeeze in in between getting and losing my first ever foreign job.

It followed a genuine day from hell in the pizzeria. It's a jour ferié here (bank holiday) and to make matters worse (or better depending on your point of view) it was sunny and at least 25 degrees in the shade. Hot hot hot. And the restaurant was an absolute zoo. I started the day serving outside on the terrace while there were no customers and was then, as usual, banished inside where the harm I would do was expected to be minimal.

Sadly we were so busy that both the terrace (25 tables, two experienced serveurs) and the main room (23 tables, me) were jam packed. It was way more than I could handle. I didn't stress and I generally believe that I either got most stuff right or was sufficiently charming and english to those tables I forgot about or muffed up the order of that it ended up not matter too much from the clients' point of view. My colleagues however were fuming as I ordered lamb instead of salad, spent fifteen minutes looking for a bottle of champagne that I'd never had anyone order before and, to top it all off, fall up the stairs (my shoes are impossibly slippery and entirely inappropriate but I haven't had any time off in which to buy new ones) while loaded with plates filled with greasy garlic mayonnaise and congealed lamb fat which, when flung far and wide across the restaurant by my flailing limbs covered everything in a fine, but lethal, covering of the industrial equivalent of a thousand banana skins.

I then spent the next twenty minutes looking for the brush, then looking for the mop, then mopping and brushing whilst trying to stem the flow of blood which leaked from the pesto-infested wound I'd inflicted upon myself during the incident.

After the end of his dabacle, I settled in to some post-lunch drinks serving on the terrace in an efficient, if extremely irritable and unfriendly manner. It was during this that I made what was to be my final mistake. I served beers to a group of danish businessmen who weren't eating. This contravened our licencing laws and my dragon/bitch/boss took her typical hands on hips, lips pursed approach to giving me the ensuing reproach:

(the following is roughly translated from the french)
Her:
Rob! What did you serve to table 301?

Me:
Err.. I don't know any more. Who is it...? Oh them. Er.... oh yeah, a cappucino, a cafe latte, a pschittt (the hilariously unfortunately named lemonade) and three large beers.

Her:
And do you find anything shocking in that list (I think that's what she said)?

Me:
Err... No. I served a lemonade because we have run out of Iced Tea.

Her:
The biers. You served alcohol to them and they're not eating?

Me:
Oh yeah. I forgot. Sorry. (The bluntness of this response indicates how many times I'd apologised to this dragon only to receive either a dismissive tut or a sorry's-not-good-enough type tirade)

Her:
Do you know that that act could cause this cafe to close?

Me: (tiring of her questioning but also partially thinking that I was getting into the french way of arguing)
I do now. Exit stage left to go and take another order.

This order was the last thing I ever did for Pizza Marzano, Place Du Capitole, Toulouse. I was fired straight afterwards.

The only mitigating factor in this tale of woe is that I was genuinely going to resign at the end of the shift anyway. It was as clear to me as it was to everybody else that I was incompentent and an easy whipping target for the others to boss about and do the shifts no-one else wanted to do (I was scheduled to do 10 straight closes in a row, 6 of them split shifts 12-3pm 6pm-1am. I was 6 days into this punishing regime) and it wasn't a long way from the life I'd wanted to lead when I made the decision to leave england.

The only difference between her solution to the problem and mine was that I was going to, out of good old english courtesy, offer to finish this marathon to give them time to replace me. She insisted I finish right away. Fine by me.

So where does this leave me? Square one? Square zero? I don't know. It's too early to say. What I do know is that it's back to the job market for me and back to wondering whether it's worth the pain to join a society that is collectively battling a mounting unemployment problem.

I'll write again when I get some ideas together.

Rob