AUNT and GRASSHOPPER (standard:humor, 1235 words)
Author: BENTLINK	Added: Aug 28 2011	Views/Reads: 3448/1959	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Aunt made him crazy till at last he solved the riddle.

I am so glad you ask!  Well yes by gosh I am still writing... 

Aunt and Grasshopper 

My title is apprentice bartender.  My employer the national franchised
locally owned bar and grill's management was big on titles.  The young 
lady that seated the patrons and supplied them with menus was titled as 
well.  If she had held her position for fewer than two months, she too 
would be an apprentice, longer than two months but less than six months 
she became “scheduling hostess”.  After working the job for six months 
and learning to smile sweetly while saying “You can expect only a few a 
short minutes wait before you are seated would you like something from 
the bar?” to customers facing a seemingly interminable forty-five 
minute wait for a table during our dinner rush she earned a title 
upgraded and became the more prestigious and slightly better salaried 
“senior scheduling hostess.” 

Charlie, my boss was classified as “Lead Bartender” and had scar tissue
to prove he had earned it.  Charlie had worked most of his still young 
thirty years as a bartender and bouncer in a string of establishments.  
His colorful descriptions of his former employment history experiences 
could fill a book. 

Before coming to rest behind the bar at 447 Charlie had worked his way
through a series of “Meat Markets” (I later learned he was talking 
about a pick up joints not steak houses) and “Pile Kickers” as he 
fondly called Country and Western dance halls.  It was in the last Pile 
Kicker loud rough dive that Charlie lost all his club bouncer 
aspirations. The club owner handed him two weeks severance pay and 
copies of paid doctor and hospital billings for the worker's comp 
broken hand and jaw.  As I said Charlie had been around the block a 
time or two and had sure as hell learned the bar tending business the 
hard way. 

As a full time junior college student, I counted myself, lucky to have a
job this close to home and school.  My title of Apprentice Bartender 
should have been Pack Mule because I was required to do so much grunt 
work. 

“Hey, Kid lug some beer from the back room and ice it down, no ice dummy
just pull the cold beer out of the refrigerated cooler put the hot beer 
on the bottom and return the cold stuff to the top.  Okay kid? ”. 

The code word “ICE” yelled or whispered sent me running to the large ice
cube making machine at the back of the kitchen with two stainless steel 
buckets for another round of grunt work.  On a busy night, I had to 
make eight or ten round trips with the heavy buckets of ice to keep the 
shallow bartender holding tanks filled.  Quoting one of Charlie's 
lectures “Ice cubes play a critical role in bar profitability, they are 
of course pretty to look at and sound nice being dropped into a clean 
heavy walled, thick bottomed glass but most importantly (please make a 
note of this) ice is much cheaper than mixers and many times cheaper 
than any of the alcoholic ingredients in mixed cocktails therefore 
using just the correct amount of ice as a filler insures increased bar 
profits.”  As I said Charlie really knew the bar business but I was 
later disappointed to learn his ice speech was a word for word quoting 
from page 22 of the franchised bar training manual. 

Now I guess that brings us to the Grasshopper part of this story. 

In his years of tending bar, Charlie had acquired an unerring ability to
divine what drink a person would order and often had the proper glass 
and ice combination selected and waiting before the approaching patron 
gave voice to their order.  It was uncanny that he somehow knew just by 
looking at someone exactly what the drink order was going to be.  Not 
so, with Aunt the little old woman that came by most weekday afternoons 
around 3 PM.  Charlie had named her aunt and being his always dutiful 
apprentice, I referred to the neat old gal as aunt as well. 

No question Aunt was making Charlie crazy.  Even after a dozen visits,
he had never even once guessed what she would ask him to pour.  It was 
as if she had a drink guess nullifying force field surrounding her.  
“Not even once” Charlie muttered under his breath “I can never guess 
what she will order but I'll get it you can count on that I'll get it”. 
 Reading her thoughts was clearly on his mind as Aunt came slowly 


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