Smoking at the A & W

The mind wanders down memory lane. Three or four of us fry cooks at the A & W Restaurant smoked. We would go back to a little area near the back door to smoke in little mini-breaks. There was a perpetual dirty ashtray on a second ice machine there. Later, when I quit college and came back and worked there at twenty, there was a little lady that now worked there as a dishwasher. I knew her from my night wanderings in Bloomington during my freshman year at IU. She had worked at an all night greasy spoon diner across the tracks where I would end up at four or five in morning writing poetry. She had been a waitress there, but she had a incredibly bad speech defect and was real hard to understand when she talked. Being a quarry baby (or a "stoner" - for locals who's father worked in the limestone quarries- from "Breaking Away" the movie) I understood the accent and could understand her. No one else in the A & W could understand her when she talked. She started coming back to sit in our little corner for breaks. She didn't smoke. Everyone was looking at her and questioning what she was doing. She explained to me and I translated that the smokers were getting little 5 minute breaks and the rest of the staff weren't getting any breaks. And she was going to take hers!. Me thinks she personally instituted mandatory breaks in the Indiana restaurant industry. Everyone in our restaurant and the other three that these guys owned got their breaks after that, smoking or not.

But sometimes change, comes slowly. Years and years later, I was chastised for going to pee while I was working at a hotel front desk and I was the only one there. This still goes on.