“You’ll never work in this county again,” said the manager.

He didn’t say it to me. He had said it to my predecessor.

But, I thought it was an odd thing to say. In the restaurant business, there’s always redemption — for anyone. And that can be both good and bad.

Anthony Bourdain once remarked that “the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfit. It’s a place for people with bad pasts to find a new family.”

I would add to that the people in the front of the house, too — especially considering some of the bartenders that I’ve worked with. The irony was that in this particular situation it wasn’t the bartender that was the problem. It was the manager.

The hospitality business is all about building relationships: with your customers, with your suppliers and with your staff. And most of that starts with mutual respect.

“Hey, Jeff,” said my new manager a couple of weeks into my new employment. “You seem pretty handy. Do you think you could take a look at the light socket in the shadow box below the bar and see why it keeps flickering?”

“Sure,” I said, flush with the enthusiasm that accompanies new employment.

Later that night, I took a cursory look at the light socket and noticed that the wiring had frayed. I told my new boss that it probably needed a new light socket and that he could probably pick one up at any local hardware store.

“Is that something you could do?” he asked.

“Yeah, probably,” I said. “Buy me a hamburger and I’ll get it and put it in.”

I thought that was more than fair. I did already get 50% off on food, so at the time it would have amounted to about $6.

I wasn’t prepared for what came next.

“Oh, I thought maybe you could do it on your break,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “On my break?”

“Yeah, I thought you’d just do it then, you know,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You want me to not only do it for free, but you also want me to use my break time to do it?”

“Well, when you put it like that,” he said.

“Put it like what?” I asked. “That’s exactly what you’re asking me to do.”

I didn’t do it on my break. In fact, I didn’t do it at all. I chalked it all up to miscommunication and moved on with my life — only, he didn’t.

A month or so later, I had an accident at work. The neck of a bottle of champagne I was opening ruptured, sending pressurized broken glass through the webbing in between my thumb and forefinger. I had to go to the hospital.

The next day, I received a call from that manager.

“We’re really hoping that you won’t file a workers’ comp claim,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Our premiums are pretty high, and we were hoping you wouldn’t make a claim,” he said.

“I missed two days of work, so if you want to just pay me my salary from those two days I won’t,” I said, noting that “my salary” did not include any tips that I would have made.

“Oh,” he said. “We were hoping you’d just take the time off, like a little vacation.”

“An unpaid vacation?” I asked. “For a work injury?”

I didn’t do that, and when I returned to work, it was more than a little uncomfortable.

And then it got really uncomfortable when the wine representative for that sparkling wine came in.

“We heard about your accident,” she said. “We’re very sorry that happened. We gave the manager two bottles of sparkling wine, one for the restaurant and one for you.”

When I asked the manager about it, he said: “Oh, we just thought you’d like to donate yours to the restaurant.”

In fact, he insisted upon it. And very soon after that I quit.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• People don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses.

• If you don’t agree that respect is a two-way street, then you aren’t really talking about respect, you’re talking about advantage.

• When that restaurant closed shortly thereafter, it was that manager who never worked in the county again.

• Never get comfortable with letting people disrespect you — not even yourself.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com