After months of painstaking research and development, enduring unspeakable humiliations as their reservationist, it turns out all I had to do is just wait for them to go mad with power and insist on being filmed long enough to have one of their melt-downs in front of millions of television viewers! Yes, by doing nothing I have achieved my career objective before the age of thirty-five! Lesson learned.

And, as an additional employee bonus (the first one they've ever bestowed), they're financing their own downfall with millions of their own advertising dollars. They just saved me a clean 2.5 million I'll never have unless the settlement of any number of potential lawsuits I've filed against them ever goes through!

Starring. . . .

JEFFREY CHODOROW: Chief Financier and ass-bag CEO— Unshaven, slovenly, Ubergabillionaire. In 1996 he served four months in jail after pleading guilty to obstructing a Department of Transportation investigation into the fitness of his airline. Around this time he lost all interest in shaving. Despite many FBI probes, the interest never resurfaced.

In 1986, Chowdorow made millions with his first property The China Grill, located on the first floor of the airtight and oh-so-destined-for-future-safety-violations CBS building (One time the CBS security goon wouldn't let me in until I could produce a blood-cell membrane bearing enough DNA strands to admit me "molecularly").

In the mid-nineties Chowdorow met Hotel Magnate Ian "I-am-the-Walrus" Shrager. They soon discovered they shared a mutual love of fisting, undisclosed locations, and moonlit walks on their semiprivate beaches. Joining together, they formed an evil partnership that in just four years beget twenty-two pretentious, trendy, bougie lovin', cork-sniffin', employee ambushin', properties World-Wide. I found these locations on company files as decrypted formula: "Spawn"+ "#"+"(designated number between 1 and 22.)=Experimental Pod, (designated take-over regional sector number 1-7).

Chowdorow's favorite speech to give at company functions is entitled, "If Only our Oppressive Ancestors had lived during a Republican Trifecta: Where Wouldn't we be Today?"

ROCCO DISPIRITO: Celebrity Chef and Head Retard: What a dick. If there were a Heisman Trophy for the Emotionally Stunted, he would have been a four-time Varsity Contender.

Rocco is being promoted by NBC as "New York's most eligible bachelor" despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Take it from me, Rocco is looking for a woman just like his reality-challenged mother; a submissive gal who will not only put up with any level of his abuse, but who will also overheat his meatballs in under ten! After all, he's a very busy psychopath who barely has the time to eat-out his own mother, let alone take on an additional pussy of greater or equal size. (And if he prepared it himself? He'd be waiting on the dish till his syndication rights expired!) I guess you could say he's more of an "appetizer man" in the relationship department—too full on himself to digest anything else. Prone to belligerent temper tantrums, he is known for firing entire kitchen staffs on a whim; general tyranny and disregard for the safety of his employees and enforcing front-of-the-house staff mandatory "makeovers" which, by all appearances, are conducted by Tammy Fay Baker's people, desperate from the lean years and now pronouncing their comeback with more flair this time.

My only complaint about "The Restaurant" is it's over-the-top product placement. Not a frame of this show exists that isn't plastered sideways with the names and logos of its corporate sponsors: Coors Light, Mercedes, and most ironically—American Express. (Amex is running ads throughout the program touting Rocco as a "small business owner." Right. Rocco doesn't own shit. He's just the company celebrity freak. And if you believe it's a "small business," I've got a Verizon employee benefit package to sell you.

CHINA GRILL, MNGMT: THE COMPANY MASQUERADING AS A SMALL BUSINESS: In just the last eight months, China Grill, INC has engaged in the following stupidity:

. . .Recently issued a memo to all employees instructing them that from now on, no one is allowed to call in sick unless it is their day off.

. . .Slashed the wages of all employees up to 25% during a time of unprecedented growth for the company in order to subsidize five new properties/ eleviated employee dental plan.

. . .Refused to fire any of the said struggling employees outright, because all unemployment benefits are taxed by the insurance companies, thereby jacking up the premium costs. Not a viable business option just because those pesky spics want to eat.

. . .Required mandatory staff attendance for monthly seminars ranging in topic from: "Sexual Harassment In the Workplace" (which was held, moronically, in the Grand Bedroom Suite in one of their lavish hotels. There we were, thirty-five of us crammed on the bed rubbing up against eachother inappropriately while the guest lecturer showed us, on the doll, the difference between 'good' and 'bad' touches.) And my favorite waste of time, "Protecting Our Ass": a technical seminar devoted to making sure they we are doing everything we can to maintain our "just legal enough" status to keep Jeffery Chowdorow on a limited diet of only one subpoena per episode.

. . deploys monthly "secret shoppers" who are paid by the company to visit the restaurant incognito to spy like Kojak and write detailed reports of everything we're caught doing wrong.

Last month I was nailed for single-handedly bringing down our overall percentage rating by 30% when I failed to greet a guest within 5 seconds. Why? Because I had become "distracted by a staff member demonstrating a silly dance." You can't make up this crap.

At first I was upset and confused, couldn't remember the silly dance. I had questions. What kind of a silly dance was it? We don't normally get too many of them, so what made this night different from all other nights? Which of our misanthropic staff members would even know how to go about silly dancing? Did I display any emotion at the time, or was I just merely "distracted" as the report suggests?...

In an effort to unravel the mystery, I peppered my coworkers with leading questions: "What were you doing on the night of June 25th, Wednesday night of Restaurant Week at approximately 10:45 PM?" and "How would you demonstrate a 'silly dance' if forced to do so, say, at gunpoint?"

Couldn't the company spend the money they're stealing from us on pens or something?

GOLDEN MOMENTS IN TELEVISION:

. . .a disoriented beer purveyor asks a construction worker on the site if he knows where to find the bar manager. The worker laughs as he bangs away at the bare foundation and replies, "Guy, I don't even know where to find the BAR!"

When they finally DO locate the bar manager, he's on all fours trying to expel the rats from the plumbing with his bare hands hours before all the celebrities drop in for the opening. Hope Fran Drescher enjoys a surprise in her duck salad!

Good God, give this show an Emmy. . .

Of course, I realize I have been very lucky. Not every gal gets nationally televised PROOF that her depression is so well-founded. I am almost giddy with vindication (certain to be short-lived—for I can already foresee my rage kicking in when the show only results in profit increases for these amoral fucks and seven times the increased work load for plucky me) but I digress and ruin the 'up-with-people' spirit of the piece.

If your office doesn't have a professional camera crew and/ or high-profile producer yet, then I suggest you get on that. If you're in accounting, just refer to the corporate account and file these charges under something banal, like "Team Building." It'll take at least three weeks for them to get the bill, and according to my calculations you don't even need three minutes to sufficiently document their multiple acts of treachery. In fact, according to a recent study by the Borough of Labor Statistics, these childlike eruptions of bad behavior in owners and upper management occur an average of once every .002 minutes. In some cases, it's been difficult to clock as we don't yet have the technology to track the frequency of these emotional outbursts—THEY do.

Good luck to us all.