Bliss (and Luxury of Work) – Limerick challenge

In consideration of BLISS

I can’t resist this so sweet reminisce:

that my fave Death by Chocolate

made a treat so besott-let

it’s a luxury I so sorely miss!

~~~~~~~

The above verse was drafted as my first response to Rashmi’s Limerick Challenge #2, but today I added the following verse to accompany it with some context, also in Limerick form:

When once I was able to work,

I was a waitress who never did shirk

so as well as good tips

plenty o’coffee and chips

Death by Chocolate was my weekly dessert.

image via unsplash.om

That’s not a great pic to illustrate my poem but I worked at an American diner style of restaurant and this pic.is quite diner like and chocolatey and blissfully mellow. Treating myself to dessert was something I’d do after my final shift of the week, as a paying customer, before taking flight for my days off. It’s actually twenty-six years ago, I can’t quite believe that!

I loved my job, could afford taxis to get there and get home because of good tips. It was  long way to walk and I managed part-time shifts but these had to include six hour days or evenings and a nine hour split shift whenever one or two were thrown at me. I still had to manage my illness with M.E. as well as having a baby and childcare to organise and an absent father who’d show up and make promises sometimes but always be a let-down – especially for help with child-care. I sometimes had to turn up at work early with my son and offer to pay other staff who were finishing work just as I started to look after him while I worked. I didn’t enjoy those kinds of complications or passing him about like a parcel.

During work as much coffee as you needed was on the house; you could have anything off the kids menu for your staff meal – although usually they only allowed you chips so as not to run out of things like fish fingers and if you were lucky you could have a scoop of baked beans with it.

I had to quit when I was expected to work either Christmas Eve or New Years Eve even though I had no-one to babysit my one year old son. My manager seriously told me to just put him to bed early and go to work and I at least had the choice of which night to work. I told her I actually had the choice of telling her to shove the job. These days of course, you can’t do that and still rely on welfare because you’re voluntarily unemployed if you give up your job for any reason.

I’d been getting dangerously accident prone anyway. We had to often carry these sizzling hot metal plates of steak and whatever on a thick wooden at shoulder height in a prescribed manner and I’d burnt myself and dropped at least one already (and dropping food got you in so much trouble even though you had to pay for it out of your wages – obviously because it affects service and causes delay.) So I’m rambling now, but, apart from the shoddy manager, I loved my job and I loved my weekly treat 🙂 I also loved being mummy to my little boy and having enough money to treat him to nice things too so in many ways, while difficult, it was also bliss – my Death by Chocolate was just the icing on the cake.