God told him to?

When I first started my bar gig at an Italian restaurant in Hell's Kitchen, there were some glaring omissions to the bar set-up. There was no simple syrup (sugar water) and there was no fresh citrus of any kind. Even the most generic of cocktails, the Lemon Drop, calls for both fresh citrus and simple syrup. This particular bar instead would use sugar packets (like the kind you use for coffee) and Sweet and Sour, a generic, lemon-flavored product for such a drink.

I made simple syrup in the restaurant kitchen and put it in an old break bottle (emptied out booze bottle) with a partially torn off label, so folk wouldn't mistake it for alcohol, and put it in the well in place of the Sweet and Sour bottle. I brought up an apron-load of citrus (easy pickin' in the walk-in) from the basement at the start of my shifts. Apparently, no other bartender had gone down into the bowels of the restaurant. The stairs leading down to the basement were treacherous and there was a rumor of rats. After hearing from the owner that my s.s. should be in a different container, so as not to rankle the inspection folk, I brought in a label-free bottle that used to house incredibly fine scotch that the husband and I recently polished off, and poured the sugar water into it. For six months, this arrangement worked well.

Then one day I came into work, and found, to my dismay, that the simple syrup I used to make drinks with like this one--

Mojito

was gone.  I looked around a bit for the missing bottle before I started to squawk about it to my co-workers.

"The Monday night bartender took it home," said the busser, David. "He did what?!?!" I said louder than was absolutely necessary.  David was like, "I didn't know. I thought maybe he had talked to you, and you told him it was okay to take it." After hearing from David, I phoned Edmond, my sticky-fingered co-worker, and left a WTF? message on his machine. He returned my call and left a message that was some tripe about "well, I heard you quit, and no one here uses simple syrup, and I liked the bottle, so I took it." I had quit, but was still working for the next two weeks, so I was NOT DONE with using simple syrup yet.

Edmond, around my age, and sorta decent-looking, had worked at the restaurant full-time as a bartender up until a few months before I was hired on. Edmond was also the guy who, having come back on a "fill in" basis, trained me. He'd quit, he said, because he wanted to focus on some "at home" job that I was only vaguely interested in hearing about at that time.

As I became settled in to my new digs, I began hearing about the real reason Ed didn't work at the restaurant anymore. Edmond, having found God seven years' prior in a really serious way, was told by God to "stop serving people alcoholic beverages." This bit of info. could be substantiated by a handful of people at the restaurant. God told him to stop, so he quit tending bar. (Although he's now back two days weekly serving drinks to those in need, so did he have to ask God for permission first in order to do so?) Oh, and, did God tell him to pinch my bottle, too?  I should ask him that tomorrow when I go into the restaurant to retrieve it. If he'd just asked to have it, then I would have given him the bottle, but it was the principle of the matter.