We're All Just One Big, Happy Family

There are some programs on TV that simply stupify me, but one of them was on while I was working in the kitchen, so I listened ... and could not believe my ears.

Sunset Tan is a tanning salon. The employees are all blonde and well-tanned. The manager is a male employee, and he has the misfortune to work with 3 females: dumb, dumber, and dumbest. Evidently, they were selected for the California look they all sport: bleached white hair, cosmetically enhanced bodies, and mod attire, which means short, tight and trashy. Another common trait is the over-use of the "f" word, regardless of the conversation: business, personal, or private. If you can't fit the "f" word into each and every statement you make, you will never make it in California.

Anyhoo, one of the owners allowed "the girls," his female employees, to stay at his home, a very large, obviously expensive home in the Hollywood Hills. In his absence, they hosted a party that involved a lot of drinking and whatever else. The remnants of the free-for-all were clearly evident to the male owner when he returned home to a totally trashed property and the bleached blonde females passed out on the living room couches.

When he woke them and told them to get out of his house, one of them complained about all the chips on the tile floor and had to kick empty plastic cups out of her way as she stumbled toward the stairs.

Liberally sprinkling the "f" word into his reaction, he made it quite clear that he was upset by the condition of his obviously expensive residence, as well as the conduct of his employees, who were guests in his home. The girls were bewildered by his reaction (it was just a party), but they stumbled their way up the stairs to pack their suitcases and left, bumping the big bags down the stairs, adding insult to the injury inflicted by their disrespect for the home and their boss.

At work, the female employees spent the majority of their time gossiping, as well as discussing a former relationship the male employee had with one of them before he met his current girlfriend. With that can of worms opened, the current girlfriend confronted the guy and expressed her displeasure with a plethora of "f" word usage, to which the poor guy was hard-pressed to respond. His plaintive plea to get over it as it happened before he even knew the current girlfriend fell on deaf ears. When it became clear to him that the conversation was going nowhere, he got up and left, the threat of this being the end of the relationship not slowing him down one bit.

Meanwhile, with all the pot stirring, obscenities, and mutual disrespect disrupting business and driving customers away, the bosses had a sit-down to straighten out the situation. It should have taken two words, "you're fired," but the bosses took another approach: the we are family discussion. We treat our employees like family, we invite you into our homes, we take you to dinner, we this and we that ... which is, of course, the reason for the poor employee performance: they don't know they've been hired to do a specific job, in return for which they receive a salary, because they've been told they are family. The rules are different for family, so if you tell employees they are family, they are going to trade on that relationship and it will affect job performance.

When the boss whose home was trashed summed it up by saying, "we're going to have to let you go," the response from one of the bleached blonde bimbos was classic: go where?

Really.

The other boss finally cleared it up by saying "you're fired," but that really should have been the total conversation, omitting the 15 minutes of family fun and frolic that came before. Once the girls got it, they left, pissed that they will no longer be getting a paycheck, but not totally understanding that they've just been fired from their job, which is probably simply a way to mark time while they wait for another totally hot guy to walk through the door and be taken with their breast implants, overly-whitened teeth, fake tan, bleached blonde hair and total self-absorption.

If this is reality, we're in a lot worse shape than I've been thinking. I know there are shallow, self-absorbed bimbos out there, but I guess I thought they came one at a time, rather than in packs. If that's what you're looking for, the package, rather than the contents, it takes a lot of moxie to fire employees for being exactly what you wanted when you hired them, but the lesson is to differentiate between family, whose crap you have to put up with, and employees, who can be fired on the spot for failure to perform the duties for which they are hired.