I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up


Have you ever been at work when something happens that requires the call for an ambulance or fire truck? It doesn’t happen often and of course we hope that it never does, but occasionally, shit happens and you gotta bring in some emergency medical technicians who are gonna get all up in your space. When I was working at Bennigan’s we had an occurrence that ended up with a lady being carted away in an ambulance. It was many years ago at my first ever waiting job. The main thing I remember about that place is that I wore suspenders and had buttons and crap all over me. We were encouraged to be unique in our “flair” so I pulled out my sewing machine and made my own aprons and then started charging people $5.00 to make them one if they would supply the fabric. Anyhoo, the details of that job are a blur, but I do recall this event.

The restaurant was your typical Bennigan’s with a big tiled foyer where the host stood and handed out crayons and balloons and whatever else the crap we had to pass out to our tables. The tiles had a tendency to get slippery if it rained or if we spilled food or sodas on them. People were always slip sliding their asses all over the place there. I don’t know why we didn’t just throw a mat on the floor or something, but I guess that was too much effort for the managers. One day, the inevitable happened. A lady fell. An old lady. A really old lady. A really old lady fell really hard onto a really hard floor. I was shocked, horrified and amused all at the same time. Call me an asshole, but if someone falls I can’t help but think it’s the funniest thing ever. Seriously, I can watch America’s Funniest Home Videos and laugh my ass off every time they show a bride running through a haze of celebratory rice and she trips on her veil and face plants into a sidewalk. The shit is funny. When the old lady hit the Bennigan’s floor, the manager rushed over to assess the situation. Of course he wanted to cover his ass and make sure the floor didn’t have a big puddle of honey mustard on it that she slipped in. But the floor was miraculously dry. Could it be that Senior Citizen Sally just lost her balance due to missing her blood pressure medication? Could he be that lucky? And then he spotted the culprit. A lone fork was on the floor next to her head. She had tripped on a piece of silverware. So what did he do? He did what any self respecting and model manager would do in this situation. He kicked the fork out of the way so she wouldn’t know it was there. Yes, people, he hid the evidence. I saw it with my own delighted eyes as the fork slid under the host stand and he bent down to check on the well being of the lady in pain. Of course, he called an ambulance and they put her in a gurney and rolled her broken ass outta there. I never heard what happened to her. I assume they just gave her a new hip and called it a day.

As she was leaving a fellow server came up to me to discuss the incident. Her name escapes me but I always liked this girl. She was the one who informed me once that she only ever serves decaf coffee because she doesn’t “need a bunch of hyper people” in her station. She leaned over to me as she watched her guest beining rolled out of the restaurant. “I wonder if I could have gotten her anything else. Coffee, tea, a splint? Oh well.”
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