The random ramblings of a wanna-be author.

So when I arrived at work on Tuesday, one of the girls I work with was sitting in our owner/manager's office talking to him on the phone. "Mike, none of them know how to close the kitchen, everyone else has plans tonight, and i am not working a double!"

Naturally, I wondered what had happened. Finally, Audry got off the phone and saw me standing there looking slightly confused. "Sam! You're here, good. Dan was fired. He didn't come in last night and he called earlier and said that he couldn't come in tonight or tomorrow because he had to move."

Dan was the new guy. He'd started a week and a half before and I hadn't yet had the chance to work with him and I hadn't really been looking forward to that shift due to some of the stories that I had heard from people who had worked with him.

"Oh," I said, "Cool...so is Mike coming in?"

"No, there was a fire in his house at three this morning, they're at his parents house, while his is cleaned. Everyone's okay, even the baby, he's just going to be gone a couple of days. Tonight though, you're closing."

"What?" Of course I was closing, I was working the 4 to close shift wasn't I? We called that 'closing' at my house, but at work, closing means that you're the one in charge that shift. You do all the cooking and make sure everything gets locked up. "Audry, I don't know how to clean the kitchen! And you want me to do it by my self?" Nobody else for my shift was there yet and if Dan wasn't coming in then it would just be me and Anna - she's never closed the kitchen either.

"Of course not, Ryder will stay until six or so when Lexie comes in. I'll show you how to close the kitchen now and Mike will call later to walk you through it."

So she did, and we made it through the shift okay. In fact, it was kinda fun. By five Ryder and I had Anna convinced that the store's haunted and we watched her run around the store, stabbing sissors into garbage cans in case somebody was hiding in them on camera. Lexie came, Ryder left.

Luckily for me, it was a slow day, so there wasn't a huge amount of food...or a whole lot to stock and clean up. Five minutes to closing, Mike called and walked me through what I had to do. It was pretty easy, especially since I'd seen it done just about every shift since the beginning of last May.

There was a tense moment when we couldn't find the key to lock up the money, but then Nathan, Anna's older brother and our other manager, showed up to take her home, and we discovered that he had accidently put it in his pocket earlier that day.

Thursday, when I got to work for my first morning shift in months, Mike was there, Dan had been scheduled to work that shift as well, and I discovered what had caused the whole mess.

On Monday, when Mike had left for the day, he had taken the dirty rags with him so that he could wash. Nothing unusual there, it's something he does at least once a week.

He had washed them, and dried them, then put them in their milk crate and set it my the door so he would remember to grab them on his way out Tuesday morning.  That night, the tempurature in the house was just right and the rags were packed together so tightly that something sparked and seeing as these were grease rags from a Dairy Queen, THEY LIT THEMSELVES ON FIRE.

The fireman said that they see spontaneous combustion all the time, but its usually wet paint rags by a heater vent or something. They had never seen something clean and dry just go up in flames.

I told Mike that this just proved that we need new rags.

True story, Honestly.