Since articulating on Yelp the reprehensible and disgusting nature of Devines, the owner hasn't had the guts to talk to me or reply to my review to explain himself.
He bullies Yelp's staff to remove truth, while hiding behind his lawyer like the lily-livered, yellow-bellied sap sucker he is - the exact opposite of the public image he feigns. Crass, cowardly, and childish are the three C's that apparently define his Christianity. He casts himself as the letter-man who took a bullet, yet here he is callously harming a recently orphaned woman. Here's what I wrote:
My girlfriend worked here until just now. Her father died a few weeks ago of small cell lung carcinomas that had spread to his brain. She informed management, did all her due diligence, and had repeatedly asked the shift manager to talk with her about scheduling to accomodate the business.
When she returned from watching her father take his last breath (she left when he was on his deathbed, and returned the very next day, right back to work at Devines), her year's service and the seniority she should have accrued were totally ignored in the schedule. No offense to the second-to-newest hire, but he was hired two weeks before being given the Friday night money bar shift. Another senior team-member, whose father died the month before and who had an alcoholic breakdown complete with rehab (as opposed to my girlfriend, who was simply unhappy and cried occasionally immediately following her father's death - and never in front of customers), had been given all my girlfriend's day shifts as a result of that alcoholic breakdown since he was coming to the evening bar shifts already shit-faced.
So my girlfriend asked the shift manager to please talk with her to try and work out a reasonable, fair schedule. Although she'd asked for conversation of any sort ahead of the schedule being written for weeks (ahead of her father's death), she had had no response to that. And once it was written, well, she was told that it may as well have been written in stone that she had the shifts that indicated that she was essentially senior only to the new trainee. She asked why, and was told that she was reliable, but that she was no good.
She has a facebook page. It has the highest privacy settings it can have, because she had a seriously creepy stalker who surveilled her years ago. Only her friends can see what she writes; 99% of them live in Tennessee or California. She wrote that she was unhappy that her shift manager wouldn't talk to her, and quoted a movie (Half Baked).
Finally the shift manager, practically a month later, mere weeks after her father died suddenly and tragically, found time to talk with her at 10:30 in the morning after she'd completed a shift to 4:30am the night before. My girlfriend began the conversation she'd been expecting to have for a month: I've been a model employee, why am I not being given seniority based on my experience here?
The shift manager interrupted and told her that the owner had spoken with his lawyer, after the security guy (who is one of the few folks she was friends with on facebook, and who is getting in on the bar shift money now) ratted her out NOT for her comment, but for an old friend's comment ON her comment. She was told she could either give her two weeks notice, or be suspended.
THIS WOMAN'S FATHER JUST DIED. Dante said there were nine circles of Hell. The ninth is reserved for those sinners who commit Treachery. A restaurant is like a family; dysfunctional, but you're in each others' hands and have to trust each other to not just "disappear" you. The first round of the ninth circle of hell is named after Cain, who betrayed his kin.
My girlfriend called a co-worker to enquire about this "suspension," and whether she was on the shift calendar at any point. She was told that the shift manager had simply told everyone that she was "gone."
There's a special place in hell. Seriously. It's in the literature. Christianity is about compassion, community, and caring for the poor, sick, weak, and disadvantaged. And while the old-testament God never shrunk from replying to confrontation, he certainly didn't respond to confrontation by sending his god-damned lawyer to obscure the truth from the public while hiding behind the curtain himself. read more