Courtesy Calls: The Better Business Bureau (2)

On my fifth visit Sheryl was not working. The schedule had moved her again. The woman on the register was Connie, the heavyset woman from my first visit. I ordered. I paid. I asked Connie, while she was making change, if the schedule had been posted for the following week, and she said it had and that Sheryl was back on Wednesday.

"Good," I said. "She mentioned her daycare situation. Wednesdays work better for her."

"Wednesdays work better for everybody," Connie said, in the voice of someone who has made this observation before and expects nothing from making it again.

I ate my chicken. I left cash for Connie on the counter. On my way out I called a shift manager at the other 64 location — a man named Lewis who had the bearing of someone given just enough authority to understand how little authority he had — and told him, in the collegial tone of one working man to another, that I'd been in on Wednesday and noticed the counter girl seemed run down, and that he might mention to whoever did the scheduling that stability in the rotation was good for morale and good for the customer experience.

Lewis thanked me. I drove home.

Whether the call moved anything, I do not know. Sheryl was on the Wednesday rotation for the next three weeks, which may have been Lewis, or the schedule's own cycle, or nothing I did. The point is that I did it — a small intervention on behalf of a person I had come to know in the limited way you know someone who brings your chicken to your table and tells you about her daughter's daycare — and I did it on a channel separate from the file I was building, for a reason that was adjacent to the file but not inside it.

Or for the same reason, arrived at from a different direction. What I was doing for Sheryl and what I was doing to Thurman Yow were not the same thing. They were also not separate.

The Harris Teeter on East Dixie Drive has not changed since Darrell Burch learned to park in a space. I still shop there on Saturdays. The fire lane is still red, still signed, still occasionally occupied by people who have made the same calculation Darrell Burch made and have not yet encountered the same education.

On a Saturday during the third week of the Yow project I watched a woman in a white Camry idle in the fire lane for six minutes while a teenager ran inside. The teenager came out with a single bag. The woman pulled away. I noted the plate, the time, the duration. I did nothing. She had been there once. Once is not a pattern. Once is a Tuesday in the life of a person who has not thought carefully about what the fire lane is for, and there are corrective avenues for that kind of thinking that do not involve me.

I bought my groceries. Ground beef, onions, crackers. I drove home and thought about the difference between a problem I was working and a problem I was not, and about the discipline required to maintain the distinction, which is considerable and which I take seriously because the alternative is a man who corrects everything, and a man who corrects everything is not a man with a code. He is a man with a compulsion.

I visited the High Point location once, on a Friday.

This was the third of Thurman Yow's restaurants and the one I had spent the least time in, because the first two locations had given me what the file needed and the High Point drive was twenty-five minutes each way. But the file wanted completeness, and completeness wanted a third location, so I drove to High Point on a Friday afternoon and ordered a two-piece dark and a sweet tea and sat in a booth by the window and watched the operation and confirmed what the other two locations had already told me. The scheduling board. The split shifts. The tip jar with the narrow slot. The camera covering the register and the jar.

The man at the counter was young — mid-twenties, tall, thin in the way of someone who is either very active or not eating as regularly as the work demands. His name tag said Randall. He took my order with the efficient friendliness of a person who has been trained to perform efficient friendliness and has not yet had it ground out of him by the work. I asked him how the chicken was. He said it was good. I said I appreciated it.

I finished my chicken. I bussed my tray. I left a two-dollar tip on the table. I pushed through the glass door into the Friday afternoon, which was warm and bright and smelled like fryer grease and asphalt.

My truck was in the second row. I was unlocking the door when I noticed — in the peripheral way you notice a thing your attention has flagged before you understand why — that Randall was standing at the window. He had a rag in one hand and a spray bottle in the other and he was not cleaning the glass. He was looking through it. At the parking lot. His eyes stayed a beat longer than the casual survey of a man watching a lot empty out, and then he turned back to the counter and I got in my truck and pulled onto East Green Drive and drove home.

The file was complete.

The file took two evenings to assemble. A third evening to get right.

I am not a lawyer and I am not a journalist and I am not a labor investigator, but I have spent a career building documents that present information in a sequence designed to lead the reader to a conclusion without stating the conclusion for them. The principle is the same whether the document is an after-action report or an anonymous file on a man who skims tips from chicken restaurant workers. You present what you observed. You present when you observed it. You let the pattern do the work that argument would do less well.

The first evening was assembly — putting the facts in order. The scheduling practices at all three locations, with dates and shift assignments from the posted boards. The tip pool system, including the management fee. The estimated jar intake compared against the payout amounts workers had described. The camera placement at each location relative to the jars.

The second evening was subtraction. I removed the attribution. None of the worker conversations were tied to specific individuals, because the document did not need names to function and because I had spent six weeks in those restaurants watching these people work and I was not going to put their names in a document that would end up on a desk belonging to someone who could fire them. I removed the speculation — my assessments of Thurman Yow's intent, which were accurate but which belonged to me rather than to the file. I removed the connective language that interpreted the facts. What remained was observation, date, pattern.

The third evening I spent on the corporate note. A phone call to the franchise's regional office, in which I identified myself as a prospective franchisee interested in their labor practices. This was not true. The woman on the phone was helpful. She confirmed that the franchise's corporate tip policy explicitly prohibited management fees on pooled gratuities. I thanked her and added the note to the file — the last page, the one that told the reporter what the franchise itself said about what Thurman Yow was doing. The page that made the file not a complaint but a case.

Four pages. Clean. The kind of document that gives a reporter a thread and enough confidence in the thread to start pulling. I had built six or seven hundred documents in my career that operated on the same principle — here is what I observed, here is when, here is what it means when you put it in order. The scale was different. The principle was the same. Whether the subject is a facility's security gaps or a man's theft from his own employees, the document wants the same thing: facts in sequence, presented with enough precision that the reader arrives at the conclusion without being told what it is.

I looked at the file on my screen. Four pages about a man I had never met, assembled from six weeks of visiting his restaurants and talking to his workers and watching his system operate. I had spent more time in Thurman Yow's restaurants than some of his employees spent in a given week, because his scheduling system was designed to ensure that no one spent enough consecutive time in any one place to see the whole picture. I had seen the whole picture. I had built it from visits and questions and the kind of sustained attention that is, if I am honest about it, not entirely different in method from the sustained attention I applied to Darrell Burch's fire lane. The scale was different. The mechanism was different. The patience was the same.

I spent a third evening identifying the reporter. The News & Record in Greensboro maintains a staff page with beat assignments. I found her in the archive — three bylines in the past eighteen months on wage theft in the restaurant and service industries, two of which had resulted in Department of Labor investigations. Her direct email was listed at the bottom of each story. I did not research her beyond confirming her beat and her follow-through. I needed her email and her demonstrated willingness to follow a document to its conclusion.

I sent the file from a terminal at the Greensboro Public Library, Central branch, on a Tuesday afternoon. The account was created for the purpose. The subject line was: Tip pool violations, three franchise locations, Randolph/Guilford. I did not sign it. The file would do what files do when they reach the right hands, which is become someone else's project and, in becoming someone else's project, become something larger than what one man could accomplish from a booth by the window.

I drove home on 64. The afternoon light was familiar. The feeling was not the same as after the Darrell Burch correction, which had been smaller and more contained and more mine. This one had left my hands. That was the point. That was also the cost, if cost is the right word for a thing you chose to give away.

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