The Courtship Road, is a little rough
I borrowed a plot device in this story from DanielQSteel's A Moment of Clarity, but as he is a better writer than me, I'm sure he won't mind. I read his stuff some years ago, am rereading them now, and find they are as good or better in the re-reading. I recommend his work to you all. Pandybear311 did a fine job editing this, but did not see the revisions to the weak spots she found, so all errors are mine.
This is copyrighted material, and may not be reposted or published without permission
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I am John Desmond, a 27 year old man who has not found the right woman for me. It's not as though I haven't been looking. I think I'm a decent catch; normal body, good sense of humor, employed, and a good cook. What more could a woman want?
I became a chef in a round about way. My high school grades were good enough to go to college. So I gave it a try, but soon knew that it wasn't for me. Between working and studying, I had little time for girls and realized college wasn't fun for me. I hated it. Fortunately I quit before I ran up big debts.
I am a mechanically talented guy. I can do anything with my hands. I started out working on cars when I was 14. By the time I was 21, I had graduated to working on really big, complicated machinery. I got my first, and perhaps my last, really good job as a millwright. In the old days a millwright was someone who built or repaired mills. Nowadays it is someone who works on industrial machinery.
As the manufacturing base in the USA declined, the old timers who use to do this work grew old and retired, making room for me. I learned my trade from them, made good money, bought a small house and had both a truck for work and a nice car when the plant closed.
I was out of work for months and looking everywhere. Nothing! Not even as an automobile mechanic. I had too little experience with the new computer driven cars and too much for Kmart and the chain shops.
I had one enemy in town, the father of a girl I use to date. I don't know what story she told him about me, but I was shocked when he interviewed me for a job at the hospital. He probably thought it was a shit job way below my ability. It was justifiable on the dubious strength of me having worked in a diner for several summers starting back in high school. I had kept the job during my ill-fated year and a half at college. It was a lousy job then and only a little better now.
At the hospital, I went from doing the dishes to
"Hey Dizzey, do the fucking carrots and onions..." and eventually began doing a fair share of the cooking. Inside of six months the chef quit followed a couple of months later by first one and then the other assistant Chef. *this paragraph is a bit confusing with the way it's arranged. The dialogue in the middle of a sentence just makes it a bit choppy. Consider rearranging it or introduce a character to give him a bit of grief in the kitchen for a moment*
I was on a fast track to nowhere; getting promoted every couple of months until I reached the top of this little food chain, head chef. I went from working ten hours a day to twelve; six days a week because HR was slow in hiring people. I had no life, but I was paying off my credit cards pretty good.
At the hospital, the job of Head Chef paid a decent wage. The administrative work kept me out of the kitchen a lot which was a plus. I was responsible for the kitchen which served two cafeterias, meals to the rooms, and the snack bar off of the lobby as well as all of the staff involved in food handling.
I had a lot of people working for me, but I was having a hell of a time hiring kitchen help. Frankly we weren't competitive in money, so the people answering the ads were poor quality, especially as the hospital uses e-verify to weed out undocumented workers. I started out hiring two people a week and would end up losing one, so retention became an issue too.
I did my best to make the kitchen culture friendlier. I made a point to know everybody by name. And set up a bulletin board in the cafeteria posting names and pictures of the food service staff. It was good for the staff to know everybody and enabled me to memorize names and faces. I tried to talk with everybody who worked for me at least twice a week and asked for suggestions on doing stuff better.
If a suggestion worked out, I gave the person a small bonus and bragged to one and all about the great idea so and so came up with. I respected them and they me. We began getting along as a team. While that raised my retention rate, I was still behind in filling positions. That's when the hospital director asked me if I needed help. No shit, of course I did.
"Do you have any problem with mentally challenged people?"
"I had a lot of them working for me when I took over here, but attrition and firing rid me of the worst ones. I don't suffer fools so well. But if they can do their job, I don't care about their politics, so I get along."
"Politics?"
"Sure, look at the politics of this country. Split about even 'tween 'crats and 'publicans. Listen to them. Not a brain in their heads. Crazy as can be, all of them."
"So, which are you? Republican or Democrat?"
"Soon's I figure out which one is the most crazy, I'll join the other."
He laughed at that.
"Good answer, John. Keeps them guessing! Here's the deal, I can get developmentally challenged people...well, actually, they have an assortment of mental problems. Most are just slow, but a few are indeed crazy. They're in, like, a sheltered workshop were people judged to be harmless to others volunteer to get out into the world and work. The one's that aren't too bad off, we pay. Others the state reimburses us for helping them. You'd get two of them for every normal person who's replaced, because they need more supervision, you know?"
"Well, it sounds like asking for trouble. I'll tell you, there are a lot of so called normal people out there who turn out to be about worthless when I get them. Now you want to hire people who aren't right to begin with? I don't know! So will somebody tell me what they can do? Can't have them emptying a mop pail into the soup, or have 'em cut up carrots and find their finger in the chilly pot."
"Actually, they'll send somebody around to evaluate the jobs you have, and then send some people they've prequalified for you and your staff to interview for the work. The interview is part of their training, so you need to seriously interview them. We hire only those we want. You and your assistants'll need to get some training so as to understand how to work with them."
I knew marching orders when I heard them. It was agree or be put in the brig.
"Well, let's give it a try. I need help. I'm killing myself and you're paying me a lot of overtime. The other day I got an offer from one of the nurse's for a quick screw and turned her down! I was too damn tired."
Actually, I was thinking shit, as if I didn't have problems enough now! But you know, as I got to know some of these folks, I realized how wrong I was in my earlier assumptions. Some of them didn't work out, of course, but most did okay. Their supervisor or myself had to check some of them when they came in the door, to see that they were fit to work based on whatever 'normal' was for them.
Hopefully they were on meds. They had taken them, gotten a good night's sleep and took a shower recently. Skipping medication would make them nutty, as could upsetting episodes in their life. You had to talk to them to figure out if they were themselves that day, which of course you should do anyway, talk with your staff, I mean. I did my best to treat them like everybody else, greet them by name, remember their cat's name, and the like.
