Adams Meets Eve

I'll tell you how we came to hire Eve.  I don't know if you've ever played the role of a hiring manager, but it is a crap shoot, a bet, and we, my partner Jack and I did not like doing it.  But we had to do it quite frequently.  The bar we ran did not have professional staff, no 60 year old waitresses named Mildred.  Only the chef, and he wasn't a gourmet cook, stayed with us for an extended period of time.   All the others came and went, starving students, starving artists, moving on to better things, graduating from college, all of them young and most of them good workers.

Eve walked in the place one slow afternoon, when Jack, the bartender and myself were cleaning the place.  She was a tall, thin young woman with mounds of dirty blonde hair that she seemed to have trouble managing,  sharp face features, long nose, high cheeks,  not bad looking, but in her own eyes she must have thought herself below average.  She said she wanted to talk to us about something, and before telling us what it was, asked directions to the bathroom, to wash her hands.  We watched her walked across the room, and when she was out of sight, Jack said "She moves like mama panther," "Or a zebra," I added, lacking a better comparison. Jack shook his head at me, but we both knew that whatever her business was we were buying.

She came out of the bathroom, shook our hands and said they had been sticky because she had been eating ice cream.  There was no ice cream shop for a mile from our place, and I asked her if she lived in the neighbourhood. No.  Her business was asking for work as a waitress.  She was a student, graduating next summer, had no work experience of any kind, other than running a lemonade stand when she was ten, and without much ado we hired her.

We always liked situations such as the one with Eve, when we knew from the start whether to hire the person or not. First impressions, you know.   Asking probing questions, interrogating people was not our style. I didn't like doing it to others any more than I liked when others, government bureaucrats or bar customers did it to me.  And so, what I told you about Eve's past here, came from here voluntarily, not through our  questions.  And the people we interviewed knew fairly soon in the process without our saying so that they had the job.  Or in some cases were confused by our lackadaisical interview style.

We trained Eve, and she proved to be a good worker, reliable, courteous, efficient.  And that hair, man.  She didn't like it and didn't know what to do with it, but she wouldn't cut it short.  She would dye parts of it, pink or purple,  this was the time when rock punks were starting to do such things.

There was a regular customer at the bar named Hermann Adams.  He was an engineer of some kind, construction, or ventilation, oh yes, he designed air duct systems for office buildings.   And he was known as an ardent atheist, getting in discussions with other customers who often teased him, mocked him, but he put up with everything like a good sport, or like somebody who did not understand the jokes.

I was away on vacation then, when Adams talked Jack into allowing him to bring a movie projector into the bar one afternoon to show a film titled "The Atheism Alternative".  I don't know how Jack had agreed to it, he later apologized, our rule at the bar was no religion, no politics from the owners and staff.  The safe route chosen by most businesses of this type.  But the showing of the film happened.

Adams promised Jack to bring along a crowd of customers for the showing, and indeed, 20 to 25 people showed up, none of them seen previously at the bar, some wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, and one fellow looking like Lenin himself, with the beard and a cap that revolutionaries of Lenin's era wore.  The projection was setup in our overflow room which we called Le Deluge Room, and which was seldom used during afternoons.  Drinks and sandwiches were served to the customers, who didn't order very much, but after the film started and she saw what it was about, Eve, with tears in her eyes, refused to continue serving this crowd.  Jack took over, though there was hardly anything to do any more.  After the film ended, Hermann approached Eve and asked her what was the matter. She threw a glass of Calvados in his face.  He demanded that Jack fire her, Jack refused and we never saw Mr Hermann Adams again.