The Story of Caralee

 I haven't posted here for a very long time so I thought I would log in and tell you about Caralee.  Sometimes you meet someone in your life that you will always remember for all the wrong reasons.  Caralee was one of those people.

About 15 years ago I owned a small Italian restaurant tucked away in one of Omaha's older neighborhoods.  Now, when people hear the phrase "older neighborhood" they usually imagine a run down place that is way past its prime, infested with gangs, drug dealers, escaped mental patients, and generally full of people trying to stay under the radar.  This neighborhood was truly nothing like that.  It was full of nicely kept homes on tree-lined streets, families out walking, a public library/community center, an ice cream parlor, a family-owned hardware store, and several restaurants and bars.  You get the picture -- it was basically the ideal upper middle class  neighborhood.

I bought the restaurant from an owner who was ready to retire.  The restaurant had been the neighborhood's favorite place to eat, drink, and enjoy live music for many years and lots of Omaha's best bands got their start there.  It had been there over 50 years and a lot of stuff came with it, including Caralee.  

Caralee worked 4 nights a week as the hostess.  Several of the servers had been there for many years and they basically ran the front of the house, leaving me to do what I do best, which is  and manage the kitchen and the business side of things.  If you've ever worked in a busy restaurant you know that the host/hostess is the person who distributes customers among the servers as they come in.  Usually it's a pretty equitable way of making sure each server gets roughly the same number of customers throughout the shift.  

Caralee didn't really have to do this.  The servers would look over the reservation book at the start of the shift and split up the tables ahead of time so there was never any question of someone not getting their fair share of customers.  Caralee would greet the customers as they came in and walk them through the lounge to the edge of the dining room and the servers would take it from there.  Caralee just had to cross their name off the reservation list and walk them about 20 feet and her job was done.  She would be the last person to start her shift each night and the first person to finish for the evening.

Ok, so now you have a mental picture of the work environment.  Now let me draw you a mental picture of Caralee.  She was a middle-aged lady -- maybe in her early fifties, heavy smoker, poor vision, plenty of missing teeth, and no manners.  Just the kind of person you want to have greet your paying customers right when they walk in the door.  Caralee had poor grammar and she could cuss like a sailor.  Unfortunately she didn't hold any of it back.  I heard her tell the CEO of Union Pacific Railroad that "Eileen was going to take your table tonight but the stupid cunt's section is still full so you're going to be stuck with Erin."  Then she proceeded to tell them "Someone fucked up the reservation book and put some fucking kids at your usual table. Next time we'll have to make sure we don't fuck it up again."

Now we come to the heart of the problem, which was Caralee's drinking.  At that point in time it was common for restaurant people to be heavy partiers and there was always lots of alcohol flowing after the shift was over.  We gave everyone a shift drink and any additional drinks they wanted would be half price.  Shortly before Caralee got off she would survey the other employees and see who was not planning to have a shift drink.  Then she would go to the bar and proudly tell the bartender who had agreed to give her their shift drinks.  Sometimes this was 9 or 10 people.  After a couple of minutes she would happily walk away from the bar with a pint glass full to the rim with straight vodka and two ice cubes.

You would think that would be all for Caralee but it wasn't.  If she had some cash with her she would order up some more drinks.  When she ran out of cash then she would try to get someone else to buy her a few more drinks.  If that failed she would resort to using her house account.  After watching this shit show for a couple of months I pulled her aside and told her to get her language cleaned up and limit her alcohol consumption while on the property or she would have to find other employment.

The house account that I mentioned earlier needs a little more explanation.  I gave it to my employees as a benefit.  Basically they could order any food or drink at half price at any time, including on days off.  They could either pay for it like any other customer or put it on their house account and I simply deducted it from their next paycheck.  Most of them used it wisely, but not Caralee.  Usually repaying her house account reduced her checks to almost zero.  This created another problem because she had no money left to buy drinks.  

You won't believe the next thing she tried.  Technically an employee could charge anything on their house account, so Caralee charged cash on hers.  Yes, she would charge $40 in cash on her account.  The bartender would hand her $40 and she would use it to buy half price drinks for the rest of the night.  Anything charged on a house account is technically considered a sale, so I would pay tax to the IRS on the $40 she charged and then sell her drinks at cost for the rest of the night.  When I found out that this was going on I immediately put an end to it and Caralee was irate.  She said it "wasn't fair," "discriminated against her," and, best of all, it "violated her constitutional rights."  I told her that if she could find the text in the US Constitution that covered charging cash to a house account then I would gladly let her continue the practice.

Caralee's next move was to simply ask me for an advance each night at the end of her shift.  She was counting on the fact that I wouldn't know the balance on her house account at that particular moment.  That worked for a while until I got ready to do payroll and found that her net pay wasn't enough to cover the advances and her house charges.  I cut her off on house charges and told her I'd take repayment out of her next four checks until she was even and then we'd have a discussion on whether she would get to enjoy that benefit thereafter.

Unfortunately that didn't stop her from asking for another advance at the end of her next shift.  She was smart enough to wait until she knew I would be exhausted and wouldn't put up much of a fight.  It worked for awhile.  She would pop up in the kitchen, office, bar, dining room or wherever I happened to be and ask "Can you spot me $20?"  It was like she would appear out of thin air and quickly ask for money while I was still wondering where she came from.

I decided to make this a game.  I got the servers to tell me when she was cut for the night and then tried to hold her off as long as possible by making sure she couldn't find me.  On the last night we played I held her off for well over an hour with the help of the servers, bartenders, bouncers, and kitchen staff.  They sent her to some neighboring bars and other restaurants looking for me, but in the end she cornered me in the office when I was helping a new server do her closing.  I gave in and advanced her $20, but told her it was the last time I would ever do it.  I told her that I had an agreement with my bank that promised I would not function as a bank and in turn they agreed not to serve food.

The next day was the end of the road for Caralee.  She called in sick about 15 minutes before her shift started.  I was mad as hell, but the resourceful servers came up with a plan to cover her duties and when we opened to an immediate 2 hour waitlist they were doing a fine job of it.  I had to make a quick run to the office at about 7:30 to grab a few rolls of printer tape.

When I ducked into the office one of the servers followed me in and asked for Caralee's paycheck.  She said Caralee was in her car in the parking lot and had called and asked one of the other employees to get her check and run it out to her.  She said Caralee was so drunk she could hardly talk.

Now I understand when employees are sick and can't come to work.  I really do.  When that happens it's nice to have a little notice so you can cover their job duties, but I understand that sometimes it just doesn't work out that way so we just have to figure it out and move on.  What I don't understand, however, is when an employee calls in sick and then shows up at the workplace drunk and asking for their paycheck.  This was my breaking point with Caralee.

I took a few minutes and calculated the amount of money I owed Caralee for the shifts that would have been on her next paycheck, voided the current payroll check, and cut a new check for the total amount.  I didn't bother to subtract the advances she still owed because I just wanted to be through with her.  I went out the back door and sure enough there she was parked in the lot with her head resting on the steering wheel.  She was out cold and there was a half-empty 1.75 liter handle bottle of some kind of cheap Missouri vodka on the console.  I gently woke her up, handed her the check, and told her that her services would no longer be needed.  She grunted a few times and drove off.

At that point I thought I would never see Caralee or hear from her again.  This was not the case.  In a couple of weeks I got a letter from the unemployment people asking for the details of her termination.  I outlined the whole chain of events just as I have done here and sent it back to them.  For those of you who have never owned a business, it is important to keep these unemployment insurance people on your side.  If you have a lot of terminations that they have to pay out then your unemployment insurance rating will go up and so will your premiums.

About a month after I sent in my response I received a notice that they had decided to pay her claim.  I thought this was ridiculous but decided not to fight it because the business was not doing well and I needed to focus all my attention on turning it around.  They approved Caralee for a few months of benefits which were eventually exhausted.  It seems that Caralee didn't have a very long work history so the funds for her claim were limited.  From what I knew about Caralee this was not surprising to me.

Several months later I got a request from the unemployment people to do a phone hearing to help them process a new claim from Caralee.  Several months after she filed her claim I had decided to close the restaurant.  I won't go into all the details in this post, but basically the landlord had a friend of a friend of a friend who thought he wanted to leave the corporate world and become a restaurant owner/operator.  Our landlord became increasingly more demanding and difficult to work with in hopes that I would simply close the doors and abandon a fully operational restaurant for their friend to simply take over.  Rather than fight that battle I decided to close the doors and rip out every fixture that I could get out the door.  We left the place completely gutted and in violation of every fire, building, and health code possible.  I'm going to call that my contribution to karma.

So back to the Caralee story.  I got on the conference call at the appointed time and learned that Caralee was alleging that when I fired her I already know the restaurant was closing.  There is a little known provision in the Iowa unemployment statutes that provides for a larger unemployment benefit if someone is fired because the business was closing.  I explained to them once again the details of her dismissal and emphasized that my intent at the time was to turn the business around and continue operating it.  having a perpetually drunk hostess who regularly missed shifts wasn't compatible with that goal so she had to go.  When it was Caralee's turn to tell her side of the story she lied as usual and even said that I told her when I fired her that the business would be closing.  I responded by saying that when I told her she was fired she was so drunk there was no way she heard or understood anything I was saying.  The hearing was adjourned and the call ended.

About a month later I received a letter from them saying that the judges in the hearing had ruled in Caralee's favor and that if they didn't hear form me within 10 days they would issue her a check for  the difference between what she would have been paid if anything she had said at the hearing was true and the amount she was actually paid.  I sent in another appeal by mail and they immediately scheduled another hearing.  The second hearing went the same way as the first one except that Caralee sounded more desperate.  

While we were waiting for them to issue a decision a few weeks later I received several phone calls from guys pretending to be Caralee's lawyer.  They all said it would be in my best interest to just drop the matter and let Caralee scam the system a little more.  I could tell by their second grade vocabulary that none of them were actual lawyers and they were probably not smart enough to get themselves dressed without help so I wasn't too concerned.  when someone starts a phone call by saying that they want to discuss their client's constitutional rights and how I violated them, it's a pretty good bet that they're not really a lawyer.  There were a few night when cars with Iowa plates were parked outside my house for several hours.  The next morning there was usually a large nail pushed up under my car tire when I got ready to go somewhere.  It was shoved in there so that it would puncture the tire as soon as I backed the car up a little bit.  The judges once again ruled in Caralee's failure and I decided to just drop it before I was forced to waste a shotgun shell on the "lawyers" she had sent over to persuade me to see things her way.

So that was about 11 years ago.  I thought of Caralee recently and wondered what had happened to her.  After a quick Google search I learned that Caralee is in prison.  In fact, this is her third time in prison since she worked for me.  Each time was for a DUI and subsequent charge for possession of a controlled substance -- weed, then meth, then heroin.  The latest one may keep her there for some time because it was possession of heroin with intent to deliver.

So that's the story of Caralee so far.  I'm sure her story isn't over, but I'm glad I'm not participating in it anymore.