A love letter
I suppose this isn’t a surprise, but I love my wife. There are any number of reasons for that, ranging from the standard to the unique-to-us, but it’s true either way.
This weekend, I got a new reason.
My wife works as an assistant GM at an upscale-ish seafood restaurant here in Lexington. She became salaried when she got promoted to AGM last year, which has been nice — the restaurant tends to be slower during the colder months, which means fewer manager hours. In the past, that’s just meant our income goes down a bit during that time, and then jumps up during the summer when she works a bajillionty hours a week and gets overtime. It worked well enough, especially when I had an income to go with it. Now, when it’s slow, she gets paid X, and when it’s busy, she gets paid X. It’s nicely reliable, and it’s especially helpful now that my income is $56 a month through my Patreon (sign up! Make it grow!) plus whatever odd jobs and gigs I can do.
COVID-19 is a freaking scourge right now, and even if you think the general public is overreacting to it, the best idea is to stay home. Don’t go out, don’t congregate. Patronize your local restaurants if you must, but do so with takeout and/or delivery. Stay the hell out of the bars, you big dummies.
(Related: I don’t understand how you can think this is anything remotely resembling a hoax at this point. Billionaires — traditionally the last people who will make any sort of decisions that could cost them money — have shut down entire hugely profitable affairs, from sports leagues to Broadway to movie theaters. They are also by and large the least susceptible to hoaxes. Overreaction? Maybe, a little, but that doesn’t matter. Hoax? Fuck you.)
Related to COVID-19, and related to my little parenthetical there, states around the country are shutting down nonessential businesses. Sunday, Ohio and Illinois (and probably others I missed) shut down restaurant dining rooms, making everything takeout or delivery. New York City (New York City!) did too. It’s only a matter of time before that’s the standard everywhere. I bet with a friend of mine that Kentucky would come Monday. It might, it might not. But it will almost certainly happen soon, and who knows how long that will last.
As I said, Laurie is salaried. Barring a huge surprise, she’s getting paid no matter what happens, especially if she still has to go in to the restaurant to help with to-go service. But the servers, the bartenders? They work for tips that they likely won’t be getting for at least a little while. And it’s easy for managers or those with authority to shrug, say “well, that sucks,” hope for the best. Laurie? She takes this crap personally.
I love her for so many reasons. She’s crazy good at her job. She’s a wonderful mother to our kids. She’s so kind to me. She spreads herself so thin that she feels like she’s not accomplishing anything when she’s accomplishing everything. She cooks dinner, bathes the boys, rearranges the furniture when I’m at a UK basketball game (she did that, and it was fantastic), but then she dwells about the fact that she was stuck at work for an extra hour after the boys were already in bed and she didn’t miss anything, or that a stray bit of food on a burner that she missed caused smoke in the kitchen. She spends so much time dwelling on her tiny failures that she misses her massive successes.
And she just cares. That screenshot shows it. Sure, anyone would feel bad about people losing work. But man, the amount she feels. It’s how you know you got a good one.
(Also, get takeout from your local restaurants, tip so freaking well, and also, what say we get down on some universal basic income already?)