The help wanted ad seemed like such a great opportunity when I first saw it. “Resort help needed,” it said. “Work in a splendid woodland environment.” I applied right away, and was very excited when I was hired just as quickly.
The ad wasn’t entirely honest, though. It mentioned the trees and the resort, but it never once mentioned the wolfmen.
Wolf Lodge resort is a beautiful place – bucolic, even. No one would deny this. It’s exceptional, and the staff is very welcoming. In fact, it would be an ideal work environment – except for the wolfmen.
I don’t know, maybe they prefer to be called “werewolves” – or “lycanthropes” when they’re feeling fancy – but really, they’re wolfmen: honest-to-goodness, Lon-Chaney-inspired, torn-plaid-flannel-shirt-wearing wolfmen. They even have ripped up khaki pants, most of them, just like you’d expect.
But I didn’t know about them when I applied for the job.
I work in the lodge restaurant, waiting tables. I mean, it’s one thing to find wolfmen at every turn – but it’s another thing altogether to feed them. You’d think they would want nothing but meat all the time – maybe piles of the raw stuff, or maybe just a burger ordered “extra rare” as a little inside joke. But no, it’s breakfast all the time for wolfmen – breakfast at every meal – morning, noon, and night.
And hash browns with everything: hash browns with eggs over easy, hash browns with sausage and biscuits, hash browns with even more hash browns on the side. I swear, I think those hairy bastards eat their weight in potatoes every single day. And the sheer amount of ketchup the wolfmen go through is astonishing – beastly, even – if you’ll forgive the pun. I’ve filled more than my fair share of ketchup bottles – hundreds at the end of every shift – endless ketchup bottles emptied again and again over endless plates of greasy hash browns, from here to infinity.
In hashbrownium perpetuatum, amen. I can’t even eat hash browns anymore; I eat oatmeal for breakfast now.
Don’t get me wrong, though. It’s not that they don’t tip – wolfmen tip as well as anyone else – and it’s not even the way they shed and you end up sweeping up big piles of fur from under the tables after every shift. It’s not the way they howl at the full moon, and though stereotypes would have you believe otherwise, you don’t even have to worry about them getting fresh and biting you.
It’s just that they’re everywhere. The wolfmen are everywhere around this place, and they’re always shoveling those hash browns into their wolfish little faces, the ketchup dripping off their fangs like blood.
I’ve had just about as much as I can take.
