on jobs, jubilation and a thief with taste

It’s hard to get excited about a job interview when you know there’ll be hundreds of others. And the pay is minimum wage.

That sums up today’s scenario. A grill restaurant’s holding open interviews this afternoon. If prior experience is any indicator, hordes of the unemployed will show up and I won’t get the job. I’m not being pessimistic, just never once landed a job that way. Plus I know that none of you do but it’s fucking hard to live on minimum wage. So I’m going because it satisfies the weekly job-search requirement, not for a song in my heart.

Update: There was no interview, only a man taking resumes for a new restaurant to be opened in the next town. They'd collected a stack three inches high, some 135 resumes, in just the first 45 minutes and they'd only just begun. Ain't gonna happen, this one.

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I wanted to kiss Julie yesterday. She’s the middle-aged co-owner of a downtown restaurant. During a lively chat about how dumbed down and illiterate we’ve become as a society, she informed me that she knows the difference between “lay” and “lie” -- and so do her kids because she taught them! I was jubilant, grateful, impressed, I honestly would've leaned over and kissed her cheek had I not been sitting across a counter.

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A friend was in the news. Well, not him but his garage was:

EL CERRITO — A hungry Hayward man landed in jail Sunday after he stuffed about $100 worth of supermarket steak and shrimp in his jacket, pushed aside a store clerk and fled, then broke into a garage to swipe a change of clothes, police said.

An off-duty federal air marshal flagged down police after tracking Reginald Sherman, 50, who had fled the Lucky store in El Cerrito Plaza at about 11 a.m., police said.

Sherman allegedly ran more than a mile north, then dumped the bag of surf-and-turf into a yard as police pursued him. Police said Sherman ducked into a garage and switched clothes before his arrest after a short foot chase through residential yards.

Sherman was booked into county jail in Martinez on suspicion of robbery and residential burglary.

Should you wonder what happened to the stolen goods, the police returned them to the store, which dumped them.

Once Mr. Sherman starts on that jail food, he’ll regret having gotten caught. Plus for him food court takes on a new meaning.