Love Triangle Drama

Chad is a server, early 30’s who studied computer science and because of his personal situation, he was unable to work in a office so he ended up working in a restaurant. He is a quite handsome man, muscular, not much of a banter but he would be very nice to customers and always have been popular with ladies. On a regular basis, female customers would either ask for his number, Instagram, or leave their contact info on a receipt. He wasn’t pretentious or anything, but he was quite horny, and he was single, so he was quite active on dating.

Susan is a server who went to graduate school majoring in art, volunteered abroad to help poor people, and somehow ended up working in a restaurant as a server to meet her ends. She was not the prettiest one, but she was very, I mean very popular among older men. I still cannot exactly tell what it was, perhaps it was the way she was smiling at them, but she was definitely popular among men who were 40+ years old. Some older guys would sometime offer her to come out with them for dinner or come back to see her. For some reason she had depression and had a very defensive characteristic.

Andrea is a server who studied marketing and because her allowance was cut off from her parents, she had to work as a waitress to pay for her nice bags and clothes. She was very perky, fun, lovely but she was really like a little troublemaker. She was a bit clumsy as well, either she would forget something or make a mistake daily. Funny thing is she would look like a completely different person on her Instagram. She claims that she gained a little bit of weight, and she did not put on her make up, but you would not be able to recognize her.

So, what was the deal with these 3 people? While they were working together in the restaurant, they developed complicated relation – Love Triangle! Susan was in love with Chad, she tried not to show it but she was fairly easy to notice. Especially after work when several people got together to eat and drink, the moment she gets tipsy she would be very obvious. On the other hand, Chad was interested in Andrea. He was originally very much interested in Andrea’s sister after seeing her Instagram but eventually the two of them ended up getting closer to each other. Did they actually hook up? Unfortunately, it was never explicitly revealed so we will have to leave that to your imagination. Problem started happening when they would get together including other people to eat and drink. Susan was not happy how Chad was getting close to Andrea. There were several incident where Andrea, even after she quit she would come to restaurant and wait for Chad to hangout after work. One day both Susan and Chad came to work hung over (Although it happened frequently!) and they were arguing with each other over very small things. At one point they started to argue, Chad claimed that Susan was doing something wrong, and Susan was arguing that Chad is not the manager so he should mind his own business. This started making other co-workers and the environment toxic. It seemed, and also rumor was going around that Chad hooked up with Susan briefly after getting drunk and their initial hook up did not progress further unfortunately. Eventually Andrea hooked up with someone else, but Chad and Susan relationship did not get repaired and just made everyone else’s life miserable.

Lesson from this drama

As a person managing a restaurant, you must remember that you cannot intervene in an employee’s personal life and that includes love relationships. You can set company rules explaining that dating in the same workplace is not allowed and one of them either leaves or be transferred to a different location if there is another location. But this is very tricky since it’s not easy to prove unless very explicit. You can say there is a conflict of interest but that applies to a lot of different people as well, including friends at the workplace. You may pull them on the side individually and let them know that drinking, coming to work hung-over, and underperforming during their shift will affect negatively on their performance, possibly a write-up for serious underperformance, but in the end, they have their freedom to date who they like. Hence you must remember that you can discipline them for work-related issues but without very solid evidence, you would be wise not to bring it up at all as they can make it false-accusation and HR issues.