I’m six hours into a nineteen hour shift, minus this break, and so far it’s not too bad. The hard part is pulling your weary arse out of bed after five hours sleep. It’s listening to the Girlf gloat from under the duvet informing you that she went to bed at half twelve and has no intention of getting up for hours. It’s knowing that you won’t be able to get back into bed until six the following morning.
Straight into a fortnight of double shifts on a bloody Saturday. Weekends are the worst. Friday, Saturday and Sunday equates to fifty hours behind the counter when you’re double shifting. It’s as close to hundred hour week as you can get without exaggerating too much about your workload.
The Girlf, who’s unlikely to break forty hours any week of the year, has no sympathy. My life choices are my life choices and her inner Tory tuts at me then moans that Saturday afternoon is our rolling around in bed time. Generally we eat up the whole day with gratuitous nudity, so my pain is completely over-shadowed by the denial of her fun. Clearly I’m of no use to her today so all I get is a cursory wave as I crawl out from beneath the duvet and attempt to wake myself up in the shower.
I’m five minutes late and the Pole is already staring out of the window when I get to work. I speak loudly and slowly gesticulating with my hands that it was the taxi’s fault. She’s polite enough to pretend she under stands and gets on with putting my chicken and wedges in while I scoot around turning on gases and filling up the cabinet. It’s eleven thirty. I will be finishing in eighteen and a half hours.
The old man has left me precious little to be getting on with so I spend the first couple of hours cutting sixteen chickens up and tinkering with the menu. Things are going nice and smoothly then the Girlf texts me that she’s now awake and bored. I didn’t expect the sexual frustration to set in this quickly so I invite her down for lunch. She’s never been one to turn down one of my meals so she rolls in an hour later in dirty joggers and an old t-shirt starving. The beauty about having a take away is you can pretty much knock up anything from scratch at a minutes’ notice. I make her a wicked souvla and salad and she goes and ruins it by requesting chips and gravy to go with. I’m on five hours sleep so my distain is vocal.
I’ve learnt from experience that it’s not a wise move to keep her from her gravy so after some token grumbling I get her some. It’s probably close to eighty degrees in the shop but this doesn’t stop her covering her chips with it and demanding cheese. This is the girl that originally wanted something green because she was having a fat day.
Gee is doing his usual sullen, pacing mope so is ill prepared for her exuberant excitement at slumming it. She’s amazed that people can go to work without being required to wear a suit and starts demanding jobs and an apron. I let her cut the cucumber as it’s unlikely that she’ll mess it up and off she goes enthusiastically chopping with me wincing as I can see how close she’s coming to cutting one of her fingers off. Gee asks if she’s ever done any manual work before as we quietly watch her make it a lot harder than it actually is.
The Girlf being the Girlf soon turns this mundane task into world domination. We discuss colour schemes for ‘our’ shop because obviously this is the most important factor, way above menu or location. I refuse to wear a pink apron point blank and tell her that the black alternative is lazy. Black just says you can’t think of anything else. It is the male pink.
The plan seems to be she’ll handle the decorating and marketing side of things while I do all the actual work. She’ll help me as and when she feels like it. I know, deep down, I’m probably going to end up doing most of it on my own but, to be fair, that appeals to the control freak in me. She can paint the place whatever colour she wants as long as I retain artistic control of the menu and seeing as I’m the one who can cook I would posit that'll probably be the best plan.
We settle on a mixture of browns and creams (beige and light beige) for their warm qualities and then she starts demanding to serve a customer. Time to leave I think darling. I tell her if she wants something to do she can wash up. That gets her out the door pretty fast.
