The OG.

Wednesday arrived. Six of 10 showed up, exactly like I suspected. There are people we invite to dine with us who say they want to go, but don’t show. They usually don’t get a future invite. It’s like sitting with the ‘in’ crowd in a high school cafeteria. We are the misfits, the crowd they all want to be a part of. We are the group that gets talked about the most. We know how to do our job and we do it well. We don’t have time for bullshit and we don’t talk shit on each other. We don’t back stab or gossip about each other. We are tight as a group, we stick up for each other and help each other and sometimes make up for each other’s weaknesses. We get things done. We leave on time. We have parties and celebrate birthdays. They have tried to imitate us, but can’t. They envy our outspokeness, our ability to be not a team, but a dysfunctional family. We pick on each other. We call each other out. We make fun of each other and we do it with humor and we do it to each other’s faces rather than behind each other’s backs. We counsel each other, we laugh with each other, we tease each other and, yes, we get mad at each other. We work things out before the end of a shift or by the end of a weekend.  They have a supervisor they don’t hate and a representative for the weirdness.

And monthly we take our show on the road. This month Olive Garden in Springfield, Pa was the spot. Kertisha chose OG. She has been there many times and likes this place. I personally don’t understand why people enjoy this dining experience. I think it’s over rated. Applebee’s is so much better. Kert told me about the pasta romano dish she loved, so during our Friday night shift at the internet café we googled the local OG menu and made our selections, then thought continuously about them til Wednesday. I was determined that this go round at the OG with their snobby, disinterested staff members and the senior center atmosphere would be different.The place is a mecca for walkers, wheel chairs and people over 80. The whole time I am eating I am wondering which one of these old fucks will keel over with a heart attack. I pick and choose who I am willing to get up and revive. I do that everywhere.

Our last OG visit was about a year ago this spring. We all hit up the place after April’s mom died. She had taken off a couple weeks, we were going through Ape withdraw, and she needed some cheering up over food. Really we needed to check her out what with her mental history. The atmosphere was the same. The Shrimp Fettucine Alfredo was reminiscent of top raamen and canned shrimp, which I could have made at home for a fraction of the price.

This Wednesday, however, we ordered our appetizers and I pigged out on the lightly breaded and fried calamari and stuffed mushrooms. Time had come to order the pasta romano that we spent thinking all weekend about, 5 days of imagining what this would taste like! And they took it off the menu. SON OF A BITCH! We argued with the wait-bitch.
‘But we went online on Friday night. We saw it online.” No, removed from the menu on Saturday. SON OF A BITCH! OG had got me again. Seafood alfredo it was and no top raamen this time around.

Flash forward to 545am. I am roused from my slumber with a strange feeling. It is not one that I endure very often. It is called nausea and the overwhelming urge to run in order to avoid crapping in my sweats. OMG, the vomit was laced with calamari (minus the light breading) and mushrooms! Lunch. OG’S LUNCH. The day progressed with more of the same wretching and writhing, the suffering I endured thanks to the OG. Fever, pain and mental distress. I ate water ice as I could stomach it through out the day.  Should I sue?

Being that I am a mom, that job doesn’t stop. Through all the wretching and suffering, I managed to get them to and from school and didn’t manage much else than that til 7pm when I was knocked off my plague pedestal by the 10 year old who was hurling in the kitchen trashcan.

There’s only room for one sick person in this house and it’s obviously not me.  At 10pm I was at the convenience store buying water ice and gatorade to keep him hydrated.

The downside to being a single parent is there is no one to go to the store when you are sick.

As for the OG, I will never go there again.

Jill

1/27/12