Coup D'Etat

We had to talk to Mr. Kaufmann about Pierre. It was nothing personal, just business. But every time that we tried to talk to Mr. Kaufmann, he seemed to have pressing issues to deal with. It is not like we had ample amounts of time to wait, we still had parties to put out and people to feed. We couldn't reach him on the phone, couldn't get him to spend more than a few seconds in the kitchen, couldn't even get him to look at us. Mr. Kaufmann was acting like a man trying to avoid a plague, we just happened to be the lepers he was trying so hard to distance himself from. It was a little odd.

St. John and I decided that we could wait no longer and had to take stronger methods. Full on confrontations with ultimatums if necessary. We knew that he was in the office one day and we took our chance. As soon as we walked in though, he said something about a phone call that had to be made while rushing to his desk. He had a nice little subsection of the larger office that had a sliding glass door. This was the first time that I had ever see him close it, and he was closing it to keep us out. This still had to happen so we decided to air our grievances in the open with Mrs. Kaufmann and their adopted son, Gregory. Luckily, Gregory was on our side about this and helped us keep Mrs. Kaufmann reasonably calm as we explained that Pierre had to go. She was not too happy that we were bad mouthing her Pet French Chef, but the gist of it all was that he was took up too much space to do too little and what he did do was so inconsequential in the long run. It would save us time and money to get rid of him, not only because of his excruciating lack of production but with him gone St. John and I could be more efficient since we would be relegated more than about a one foot space to work in. We had tried to explain this to Pierre. I don't know if it was the language barrier, him being set in his ways, or the fact that he probably did not want to take orders from a couple of kids, but we had not been able to get through to him.

Gregory backed us up all the way on this and that was nice, but the coup de grace came from Mr. Kaufmann. Locked in his office, phone to his ear(which probably had nothing but a dial tone on it), he listened to the argument going on. Finally he decided to weigh in. A little fun fact, the more excited or angry he got, the higher his voice raised. I don't mean just in volume, but in pitch. When he was really on, his voice took on a scary Mickey Mouse quality. It was that voice that we heard coming through the closed door, but clear as day...

"I've been telling you for years, that fucker is nothing but a waste of money!!!!"

Mrs. Kaufmann relented and we went back upstairs. She explained to Pierre that he had to go and we got back to work. St. John and I each had an entire prep table to work on. It was like we just doubled our kitchen space. Gregory came up a few hours later to chat with us. He let us in on why Mr. Kaufmann had been avoiding us. Mr. Kaufmann was convinced that we were going to pull the big money squeeze on him. He thought that we were going to threaten to walk out if he did not meet our demands. The thought had never occurred to us, we were just too busy trying to get the job done. I think the funniest comment was when Uncle Shyster quipped, "Well done boys, Dendorff would have drank around that problem for at least a month before quitting." (Uncle Shyster stories are great and I will get to them later).

A week later and we had fallen into a nice groove. We had our routine down and we were making ground. St. John and I had instituted our 'Brunch Meeting'. As soon as we got Gary set and gone for The Boat and had taken care of any other early parties, we would bring all of our paperwork out to the front and have something to eat. We had found ourselves at the end of too many days where we had not had a single meal. 'Water, water everywhere...' and all that. It would be a nice quiet time away from the kitchen when we could get our heads around what needed to be done. During one of those meetings, the phone rang and St. John picked it up without even thinking about it. If he had taken a moment, I am sure that he would have realized that the brilliant little MacGyverism of his had not gone off. St. John had picked up the office line.


St. John - "Catering Company...oh ahh no. Look, I gotta go. I gotta go." - Click

Me - "What the hell was that?"

St. John - "It was Pierre, he was pissed that we got him fired. He kept saying 'Why you tell zee Boss on me? Why you tell zee Boss on me?'. I didn't know what to say to him."

Me - "That's okay, he wouldn't have understood whatever you said anyway."

And we got back to business. I heard that Pierre went back to delivering Pizzas. Classically trained French Chef delivering pizzas. I gotta admit, I felt a little bit of schadenfreude at that.

It was a hard but fun summer. After it ended St. John and is crew all went off to college. I think that St. John felt bad about leaving, but this was never what he was meant for. It was only ever a summer job for him, I knew that and was happy for him. Besides, we saved a fortune on bandages after he left.