Alayna walked into The Odeon restaurant in February 2017 wearing light colored clothes and a large comfy looking scarf. She looked kind of familiar to me and I watched her from the corner of my eye as she approached the manager and handed him her resume. I remembered my own identical visit to The Odeon in September and remembered my own approach to the on-duty manager. I was so nervous and there was a tight knot in my gut as the manager had asked me to sit down and fill out an application. I watched as Alayna laughed and smiled and took her application and sat down near the bar to complete it. Her assuredness at this iconic (but kind of stuffy) restaurant confused me. Lucky for me it was a slow part of the day and so I could afford to pace around the room watching her through the mirrored walls. She almost instantly caught my eye, a look of perhaps amusement on her face, and went back to doing her application. Embarrassed, I quickly walked to the other side of the restaurant before plucking up some courage to look in the mirror again.
She must have made a good impression because the next day there were two trainees scheduled to show up for a test shift. When the shirt began only one had shown up and it wasn’t Alayna. The general manager was surprised. Nobody ever turned down a test shift at this prestigious TriBeCa restaurant, especially someone who’d seemed so relaxed and eager.
The next day, there she was, along with the other trainee. She looked so sharp in the black sweater the servers wore as part of the winter uniform. Her blonde hair pulled back into a long ponytail. She had kind of a sheepish grin the whole day. “Why didn’t you show up yesterday?” I think I’d asked with a smile. I had gotten tired of working there and all it’s rules so I thought it was hilarious this girl hadn’t even started and was abandoning all Odeon procedure. “What? Aaron never told me to come in yesterday. I didn’t know I was supposed to come in”. I guess she must have called and asked them what was up with her training day and when would it be. I’m sure they were stunned because a server or a trainee not showing up was a pretty big deal and all the managers had heard of this particular trainee’s absence the previous day. But there she was, and the on-duty manager seemed very amused by her. She didn’t let anything bother her and she was always smiling.
I talked to her the whole day. She said she was from Scottsdale and my mind immediately thought of MTV’s “My Super Sweet Sixteen”. The rich girls on that show were always from Scottsdale. Alayna laughed. I had told her that I had just been to a party the previous week where I was talking to my friend’s friend who was from Scottsdale. I had asked her why she left and she had responded that “In Scottsdale you need to have big boobs and be blonde, and I’m neither, so I moved to New York”. I told Alayna this story and said to her “Well now I see that she was right”. Alayna burst out laughing and told me that it was true, everybody did have big boobs and dyed blonde hair. I teased her a lot about Scottsdale. She gave off such rich girl vibes, talking about all the cocktail parties she went to, and secret clubs she could get into any time in NY. And her non-stop talk about Asia. Every time I would mention something, she could pivot the conversation back to her travels in Asia by saying “This one time (pause for breath) when I was in Asia”, and you never knew what was going to come out of her mouth after that introductory line. I started to brace myself for the wacky things she got into and how open and hilarious she thought it was. Through this I had learned she had pretty much just come back from her travels, but had spent a few months back in Arizona to save up some money.
She was so open and I told her all of my tricks at The Odeon. I wanted her to succeed and not be sucked into the craziness of formal dining. One day the manager had me show the two new trainees how to do their end of shift sidework. This usually consisted of putting the coffee mugs neatly away, polishing the sugar globes, doing the financials from the registers, and folding 50 cloth napkins each. I told Alayna about my little trick for polishing the sugar globes but I told her it had to be a secret or else someone would tell her to do it the right way (Rather than cleaning each globe with hot water and a cloth I would just put the globe under the steamer on the coffee machine and let it air dry). I remember I had an appointment after work so I was kind of in a hurry. I remember looking at Alayna and saying “Hm…I think that’s it”. Alayna seemed surprised but impressed “See, work goes fast when you’re trained by me” I joked. She laughed and joked back. The end of shift had been so easy. I said goodbye and left the restaurant as fast as I could. Only when I was entering the door to my appointment did I realize I had forgotten to fold my 50 napkins, and forgotten to get the twi trainees to fold their 50 napkins. The dinner shift would be down 150 napkins in a 250 seat restaurant. UGH. I texted a colleague of mine still at work and apologized. Luckily she said they had enough. I thought back to Alayna’s reaction and realized she knew she had folded napkins all the other days, but had probably implicitly trusted that she could not get in trouble as I was the one training her. No wonder she was so happy.
My next work day my friend, another server, comes up to me and says “Declan, did you tell that new girl Alayna, that she doesn’t have to clean the sugar globes, she only needs to steam them?” “What? No”. Emily told me she had trained Alayna the following day, and when she had told her how to clean the sugar globes at the end of each shift, Alayna had said “Oh well Declan told me I only need to steam them”.
The next day I saw Alayna I had two bones to pick with her but I wasn’t mad. I thought she was hilarious and brazen, causing to be fired perhaps. When I confronted her she giggled in that low devious laugh she has and protested that she thought I had told her to do it that way. “And I was wondering why you weren’t getting us to fold napkins but I just thought “hm…ok!”. I had just met her and she had already almost outed all of my Odeon secrets and gotten me in trouble. But it was okay because I was inseparable from her and teased her enough about Asia and Scottsdale. But I learned one very valuable lesson from that: Alayna was dangerous. She was happy and did not give a F*CK, and I thought I’d better be careful otherwise I might learn to not give a f*ck too.
