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believe it or not, ~16 year old sini's first "real job" was at the old einstein bros location at biesterfield/arl-hts-rd in his hometown "the exceptional community" elk grove village. i will never forget the day i had to work an ass-early 530am-11am-or-something shift and my dad and mom drove over to say hi and have a break with me because my dad was surprising me with my first car (an 89 olds cutlass calais that would last about 2-2.5 years until my nascar uncle wanted to look under the hood and goes "hey did you know your timing belt looks like cheesecloth" and then my dad must have really liked me at the time (not an emotion-sharing-guy) cuz he took me to find a new car and i fell in love with a red 94 toyota celica GT (sport suspension / leather steering wheel FTW) and he did some great haggling/negotiating and got the car like 2500 below what they wanted (~7000-7500 w/~50k miles) and BLAM i was going in style until some 84 year old bitch had a senior moment and picked the one second you really couldnt make a left turn from oncoming in front of me going into a strip mall and yeah. but i digress.
einstein bros back when i worked there (96) had its patented WOW SERVICE! see, they preached to us that if you worked the line up front (cuz there were bakers in the back proofing/cooking/re-loading the "shmears" and there were ppl up front actually selling the bagels and working the dining room. even tho i was 99% baker (1 shift up front, tho it was teh shift where my good friend working there with me met marsha, and suffice to say he gave her suck WOW!!!! serivice and manager doug* thought about firing him because "YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO PICK UP THE CUSTOMERS" and paul is the friend i called "the faceman" because his response was "well in fairness to me, doug, no offense but are you gay? look at her. i'm a hetereosexual male. i believe god had at least 30k years of humanity on his mind when he hardwired me with the realization that, yes, i am supposed to pick up that customer"
one of the two managers, * -= doug had a NORML (national organization for the reformation of marijuana laws) bumpersticker on his car, and yet despite that he was really anal retentive. we think he was probably gay but subtle and indiscreet about it and not all about shoving it in your face (cuz his "friends" that visited him.... PING! on the gaydar... buit yeah) and doug was always trying to get you in trouble for dumb little shit about image because, again, that closeted/ish gay thing and the pot bumper sticker = he was fighting stereotypes with CLASS. DISCIPLINE. DIGNITY. AND HARD WORK AND EFFORT. the other manager IIRC was a pudgy-to-fat white chick and let's be real she knows how a restaurant should be run because she's spent a majority of her life in restaurants.
and then there was the guy who made einstein brothers bagels worth working at, baker darrell. darrell was the elk grove equivalent of the fucking dude. he had the general aura and demeanor of a post-richard-dawson game show host, and this guy was living his life to the fullest. when you got to know him you found out that he managed some properties in vegas that got him upper 5 / lower 6 figures, and his wife wanted a career so she's out working and doing well. since darrell and "the ol battle axe" (his term) had twin little girls who were K-5 range, he had nothing to do all day since his main source of income was hands-off and halfway across the country, so he loved his baking job cuz as "HEAD BAKER" he had to show up at 430 every morning nad he was out by noon or thereabouts, and then he got home and got a few hours to chiill before the girls came home and he;'d help them get a head start on homework before it was time to hang up the ol battle axe and do dinner and have an evening b4 repeat cycle.
we found out real quick that taking out the trash with baker darrell was both an honor and a privilege.,.. why? thats when the guy would burn one with whoever was lucky enough to get the "hey dude, will you help me with the garbage?" for that day.... it took him like seriously 1 shift working there to suss out if we were cool and/or smoked pot, and seriojusly i think darrell had a little fountain of youth thing being "the cool as shit older dude" to us seniors in high school kids. he was the type of guy who told you "hey if you ever have any trouble getting a decent bag of weed give me a call. i'm not a weed dealer but i'm a friend who helps his friends cuz we're all in it together when we're stuck working under the tyrannical homo at bageltown) and then he'd go into his kitchen cabinet and pull out his monthly qp of personal stuff from his brother in law (and i think his wife hated the fact that her brother was selling weed to her husband when she wanted him to grow up)
but yeha between him getting off bagellland and the girls coming home he had a couple hours to chill and maybe about once a week even after we left bageltown for a lil bit, he'd have us stop by for "a bowlski" (his term) and he'd tell us pre-battle-axe stories and kick back and relax, always smiling, and then hell he had so much good weed even if we werenb't not-abusing-our-privileges of geting those 5-gram eighths from our buddy darreell, man sometimes he'd even toss us a gram or two each compelling us to "stay high because people love to litter on the ground level" or something.
ah yeah well, after we left and fell out of touch with darrell we found out that even tho he outlasted doug and the pudgy chick manager he eventually got fired for getting caught peeing on the side of the building by some overconcerned customer right around when he was opening up the store at 430am one morning, and yeah..... what a way to go, right? this guy was in the groove because his condo was so close to einstein's he rode his bike for a nice lil 3-5 min jaunt every morning and he had easy $$$ to compliment his easy $$$ and it all came tumbling down because he was just having a dumb stoner moment b4 opening up the store at 430am and like, yeah. fuck.
so yeah, all in all it was a fun little job for the 2 months i worked it. i can tell you that the food was pretty damn solid and idiot-proof and even the worst crustiest nastiest stuff i could find there was like shmear (cream cheese) containefrs but i mean duh, cream cheese sitting out all day is gonna suck. i mean when ppl work fast food you usually hear the horror stories of how things really are behind the scenes and its like "plz stop telling me in case i wanna ever eat there again" --- and i can tell yiou that eintein bros bagels had idiot-proof ways to make bagels en masse and the production end i mean you'd have to be drunk concussed or borderline/retarded to do something to make a nasty/wrong/etc bagel. the people working the line up front making your sandwiches and shit, again, if they hired someone with a pulse it wasnt gvetting messed up.
WOW SERVICE!!! btw = give the customer eye contact when they walk in the door. then thioroughly kiss their ass and coddle them up to the register regaling them with the nice and pricey special sandwichwes you're slanging, then blah blah blah [marketing terms] and basically just make them say WOW! THAT WAS GREAT SERVICE... AND THEN THE FOOD? OUT OF THIS WORLD! I AM SO COMING BACK! --- they had some sort of early/primitive XM or sirius satellite radio service for the store music so we ended up finding the drum and bass channel (indeed there was one in the 90s... wtf why cant we have one now? electric area? get the fuckj out of here) and it was a cool little place.
my friend paul ended up getting marsha's # and gave her such WOW SERVICE! that she came back and applkied to work with us while she began dating paul. he fucked it up getting caught fucking.... oh man who did he fuck? i think it wasn't the hottest little technically-jailbait/ish (tho i was still 16-17 and hadnt turned 18 yet so game on!) wannabe raver chick maggie seska or something? or was it her friend? either way marsha stuck it to paul by dumping him for our mutual friend jake, who also worjked at bagel town with us (so did the dude and maybe someone else) and she ended up having like a ~10-15 year relationship with jake b4 they broke up and he went to arizona where you can now find him all tatted up working on motorcyhcles for a living dating a fineass tatted up chick who doesnt look as serious and emo with the relationship as marsha was. c'est la vie. jake was the one guy you WANTED to buy weed from cuz when he decided to answer your calls it was 5 gram eighths or 10 gram quartersw.... and hell i remember inviting him to a bulls/mavs game back circa 99 and when i went to pick him up he was like "hey there's some beers in the fridge i dont like, help yourself" and sure enough there's a sixer of becks (my brand) in there... and then he's like here's a couple'a vicodin to go with our weed here and let's get right and go see a damn bulls game.
whenever you chilled @ his place he went out of his way to bowl you with the social world version fo WOW SERVICE!!! cuz i'll never forget being at the UC with jake just * sticks hand out going straight forward making a whoosh sound * mainjtaining like that and we ran into 2/3 members of the polish pussy posse who seriously i';d be like a combo of tweak from south park (AGH! THERE'S TOO MUCH PRESSURE!!!) and stan (puking on the girl when she talks to him) cuz i thought they were so hot and i wanted to hit that shit so bad a pudgy dork like me had no idea what to do. so me and jake are properly glinted walking the upper deck concourse @ the uc and we run into monika and annie and just totally fucking bigtimed them and i felt like the biggest fucking pimp in the weorld for that one night. and smoking downright exquisite weed on the ride home didnt hurt anything.
and yeah, all this magic technically started at einstin bros bagfels, a place i worked at for all of 2 months cuz that's when i was able to jump over to the computer guy position @ the elk grove library for a cool crisp $8/hr starting salary and a job that was like 95% downtime and would evolve into me doing msgboards, downloading warez/msuic/etc holding down IRC and even playing quakle with kids on break while i got 2 AFSCME union negotiated prorated rases a year to the point by the time everything went tits up in 2004 i was just above $12/hr for this quintessential do-nothing job. it was grand.
but bageltown was where it all started. and as such this is sad news and i'll have to tell my friends who worked there with me about it.... wait paul's prolly still in jail in south carolina, i told off the dude last year because man.... when it came down to it and i needed a friend to step up and be a friend and help me out with something that was excruciatingly easy to help me out with (get me an eighth of weed when your portly wife is a huuuuuge piothead smoking nice weed every day but see technically she doesnt like me cuz that one old best friend dude who blew up the friendship with mne trying to start up an internet company with me in 2008 when he effectively hijacked my life and tried changing me into his little (well big) hipster sidekick like literally he put in work trying to get me to like aphex twin less and listen to more faggy emo rock and when the shit went down in our friendship (cuz i had basically worked all summer for nearly free, occasional $20 for metra/cigaretteses here and there, etc -- but when he decided to tell me what a fucking joke of a rapper/musician/wannabe i was and i was like "fuck him i'm going to write a song in these 2hrs it gtakes him to come back home from the 9-5) he comes home and starts screaming at me liek a failing marriage and thats when i ahd to be like "whats with all the weird staring at me? how come every time you come over to show me how to do somethign on the comptuer you always find a way to awkwardly touch me to the extent where i can literally sit there and watch you building up the confidence to do it.... whats up with slapping my hands when we're out for dinner in pilsen like a dad would do to a chilkd, and publically scolding me for "taking to teh help" all while you're evangelizing how great your newschool wine and cheese crowd friends are while equal parts telling me how lame and pathetic i am and how i'm lucky to have you cuz you're the only person on earth who would put in the time and effort to make me civilized? and now you;re treating me like a bitch wife screaming at me like i;'m gonna cower down. dude, i hacve no idea what fantasty world you live on but what the fuck makes you think that if we had some relationship you'd be the husband and i'd be the wife? that's the most insulting part and i'm not even gay, but you.... you've never been the same since you went to europe and stayed in those hostels, its like how you went from an ewwwws cigarettes get those away from me guy before the trip to coming back from 2-3 months in europe smoking like you needed them. and in fairness to you, i'd need a fucking cigarette too if i was getting assraped in european hostels for a couple'a months too.,
and that was the line that ended our friendship. totally worth it tho cuz seriously... some of yall met me IRL... do i look like wifey material? =D
_________________ Curious Hair wrote: Les Grobstein's huge hog is proof that God has a sense of humor, isn't it?
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