Waiter Later

Bonnie Parker, Former Waitress, Killed Dead

2011-06-17T23:44:00.003-05:00

I was at a double feature at the Paramount tonight, "They Live by Night" and "Bonnie and Clyde." As I left the theater, I heard the woman behind me say to her friend, "Well, I guess that's better than being a waitress all your life."

Betty, Please

2011-03-24T22:28:00.003-05:00

Even before I became a waiter, I had been given the nickname, "Betty" by some of my co-workers in Washington who remembered this Laverne and Shirley episode (at the time, the show was still on the air). A few years later when my friend Curtis and I were waiting tables around Denver together, he also started calling me "Betty" and I named him Hazel. This clip is really funny, but I think because there is truth underneath the slapstick surface. There is nothing quite like the chaotic experience of being "bombed," "in the weeds," "slammed" or "going under" in a diner.

Well done, good and faithful servant

2011-02-14T00:50:00.005-06:00

I don't think I was ever really cut out to be a waiter, even though that's what I spent most of my life doing. There are some things about me that were a decent fit: I am intuitive, fairly quick-witted, and I motivate well with short term goals and the regular affirmation that being tipped affords. However, I really suck at multi-tasking (unless it's big picture, planning-ahead stuff) and my feelings get hurt way too easily.

I didn't ever know how to take advantage of being a waiter like using the job to network, sucking up to the cooks for free food (or stealing food), moving around from restaurant to restaurant (or city to city, working the circuit) or knowing how to sweet-talk customers into bigger tips. Instead, I was the kind of waiter that wanted to please people and was flattered or hurt by the size of my tip. I also didn't have the sense God gave a pig to know that eating a side of toast that was never served and was going to be thrown away wasn't a kind of "stealing" that would hurt my employer. I was going hungry, trying to make a generic loaf of white bread last for three days of meals, but I'd throw the toast away at work because I hadn't paid for it. My conscience got in the way of common sense.

When I worked at the Pancake House, every waiter was supposed to "dip butters," meaning, we each scooped small balls of whipped butter into portion cups on large baking pans that were stored on racks in the refrigerator and used for pancakes and waffles. There were times I would realize after I had walked over a mile from the restaurant back to my apartment that I hadn't dipped my butters and I would walk all the way back just to take care of it. Didn't matter if it was snowing and I was dog tired and cold. I was also the kind of waiter who would keep working if someone from the next shift didn't show, even though I knew my loyalty wouldn't even be noticed.

I behaved on my job as if I worked in an office and could expect a promotion some day for my dedication, when I should have stayed on the move, always looking for the money. That is, if being a waiter had ever been about the money for me. Instead, I think waiting tables was a matter of honor. I knew it was a hard job, and I wanted to be good at it. Of course, wish in one hand and shit in the other; I'm not sure that I ever succeeded. There are times when I'd like to have just one more run at it to prove to myself, but I'm pretty sure I'd just be chasing after that proverbial carrot. Still, I don't think of my career as a waiter as misguided. Skills or not, I did want to be a waiter. To paraphrase Florence Foster Jenkins, "They may say I couldn't wait tables, but they can never say I didn't wait tables."

Bright-Sided

2011-02-05T13:13:00.005-06:00

A friend of mine just posted on Facebook that he's in a noodle restaurant and he that he loves being "the only Caucasian in the place." That reminded me (your time's comin' you'll see ... when you get older, everything "reminds" you of something) of the groups of Asian tourists and businessmen that stayed at one of the hotels where I was a banquet waiter. At least at that time, in the 1980s, that thing about Asian people taking a lot of pictures was completely true. Our hotel was the first place in the United States these folks would see after arriving at the airport, so whoever happened to be working when they arrived usually wound up posing for a lot of photos.

One evening, I did give a group of Chinese businessmen plenty to laugh (or be alarmed) at. I had decided to bleach my hair blonde that afternoon, but the processing took longer than I expected and I didn't have time to put a toner on it. I had also spent a little too long in the sun the day before, so my skin was rather pink. It looked especially pink next to me very yellow hair. For those of you who have never bleached your hair, it's a two-part process. When you take the color out, your hair is pretty brassy, so you need to add a color back in to soften it to a more natural looking shade of blonde. What I had was the color of a hi-lite marker.

I didn't know ahead of time who I was gonna be waiting on that night, or consider, even after I knew the group was Chinese, just how conspicuous I would feel being so much more brightly colored (and at least five inches taller) than all of my guests. Every time I walked in the room, flashbulbs would go off - way more than usual - and every eye was on me. And, of course, they were laughing.

I fixed my hair the next day, and the sunburn gradually eased into a tan, but my moment of shame lives on in the rolls of 40 men's rolls of vacation film, someplace in China. No doubt some of their children are now traveling to the United States, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of our pink and yellow giants. I've seen the colors kids are putting in their hair these days; I'm glad they won't be disappointed.

If You Let Them Treat You Badly (They Will)

2011-02-04T20:41:00.003-06:00

Snow in Texas?
Yes, it's true. And I was okay with it, since I didn't have to work, but it reminded me of the many times being snowed in in Denver meant working 'round the clock. You wouldn't know it by how often I visit my own blog, but there was a time when I was a very dedicated - really, to the point of being obsessive - worker. I would actually come in to work when I wasn't scheduled when there was a blizzard, knowing there would be several who wouldn't risk the drive. Because so much of my f & b years were spent in hotels or 24 hours restaurants that never closed, my work ethic was a perfect match for their needs.

Did they appreciate my dedication?
Almost never.

I remember one night in particular when the blizzard had started while I was at work serving an evening banquet. The storm was predicted to close the airport, stranding our guests, and make the roads impassable, so the general manager of the hotel told me he'd arrange for a room for me at the hotel if I'd open the restaurant in the morning. When the banquet ended and we'd cleared and cleaned up the kitchen, the rest of the staff went home to their families while there was still a chance of getting home, and I went downstairs to get my key. It's pretty common for a hotel to put up staff in extra rooms when they're needed for quick turnaround shifts, long hours or emergencies like blizzards, so I wasn't anticipating any trouble, but the front desk told me they had not been "authorized" to give me the room. It was about 1 in the morning so they weren't gonna call the GM to verify my claims, but since I'd promised to open the restaurant at 6, I didn't think it was likely I'd get home and be able to get back.

If I had it to do over today, I would have left. However, I was duty-bound to keep my promise to management and not inconvenience the guests of the hotel, so I went back up to the banquet kitchen and made myself a bed on the floor out of the soiled linens from the party I had just worked. I didn't even let myself have clean tablecloths! I didn't even try to get Housekeeping to give me a blanket! "Oh no. Just a spot on the cold linoleum wrapped in dirty wadded up laundry is good enough .... I can only sleep for 4 hours anyway."

Dipping Sauce

2011-01-18T02:00:00.006-06:00

Have you noticed it's everywhere now? Even gravy and ranch dressing and preserves become various kinds of "dipping sauce" on menus. Maybe it's just that there are more foods with sauces, or foods that need sauces, or more finger foods?

I don't know why the term annoys me sometimes. I'm afraid I'm getting that crazy old man "Get off my lawn!" disease and I'm gonna wind up on some random child's porch telling them about Country Time Lemonade some day. I suspect it might be that I am resistant to the trendiness of it. I react similarly to the terms "Meme," "Tone-deaf" (when not applied to music), and people getting their drink "on" or their party "on" or their game "on."

Also - and this is even more crazy-sounding - it might be just the sound of the word "dipping."; it's got kind of a chirpy, pretentious "ihh" to it that makes me think of tea and crumpets and pince-nez. I imagine the request for "More dipping sauce!" sniveled through the self-righteous nostrils of an unctuous, irksome ornithologist with yellow gravy in his beard. I always hear it in the "Knights Who Say 'Ni'" voice.

"More dipping sauce! More dipping sauce!"

Stop saying that.

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T02:08:00.007-06:00

I worked a New Years' Eve reception at a convention hall years ago where we had pre-poured way more champagne than was necessary for the toast. If memory serves (and frankly, I'm surprised I have any memory of the event at all) they were not a real drinking crowd ... or they had to leave ... or the crowd just didn't know about all those extra plastic glasses of champagne. Anyway, somebody had to clean up all that mess. I was working with the director of the convention hall, dumping two or three glasses of champagne in a bucket - drinking one - dumping one - drinking two etc. Within a half hour we were bumping into each other, laughing and weaving between the tables, and probably spilling more of the wine on the floor than we cleaned up or drank. I was in bad shape, so I walked a few blocks down to the hotel where I had a steady job (the convention thing was just on-call for my days off) and drank coffee for about three hours till I could walk home.

It was years until I could face another glass of champagne, but fortunately I have managed to overcome my phobia of spinning rooms and I am here tonight in Texas toasting in one more new year. At least I don't have to walk anywhere.

Groundhog Day

2010-12-27T10:57:00.002-06:00

"These hash browns are terrible! Every time I come here I get terrible hash browns!"

"Why do you order them if you don't like them?"

"Because I like hash browns!"

"But you don't like our hash browns."

"No, I don't! Take them back! I want new ones!"

"They'll be the same as the others."

"I know that! This restaurant has always had terrible hash browns!"

Old Friends

2010-12-27T09:15:00.004-06:00

In the last week, I got back in touch with a couple of old friends from my waiter days. I wrote about one of them here last night, Jo, and then deleted the post this morning, deciding it was a little too personal (not about me - about her) but I still want to acknowledge our friendship. We worked together during a time when so many of our friends were getting sick and dying with the AIDS virus - she as a cook and I as a waiter. There are so few people left from that time to remember it. At least two of the guys we went out the first night we met for drinks after work are gone now, and probably more, but I didn't stay in touch with all of them. It's so reassuring to have Jo to talk with today, like a found a missing piece of myself.

We've stayed in touch off and on, sometimes going two or three years between phone calls, and through living in a combined seven different states, and over 23 years. Neither one of us is in the food and beverage business any more, and our friendship never did need that as an anchor. It's fun to have the memories of working together, but that was really just the way we met, and today it encompasses such a brief part of our history. I used to work with a gal that would say when she got off break, "Back to the battlefield!" and there's some truth to that. It's good to have friends who've been through that experience with you, but even better to know you would have been friends no matter where or when you met.

A Room at the Inn

2010-12-25T21:04:00.005-06:00

When I tended bar in a hotel, I always had to work on Christmas. Hotels, of course, do not close on the holidays. They become large boxes of lonely people with no place to go except the hotel bar, hotel restaurant, or their own room. Every place else is closed on Christmas; sooner or later, they usually all wind up in the bar.

There is something sadistic about filling a hotel bar with Christmas decorations - reminding the customers of their isolation - by fate or design - from their families. It's like showing pictures of food to hungry children. Then you add alcohol to their misery and everything gets so much better. I think the decorations are nice enough in the two or three weeks preceding, but they might just as well be toned down a little out of respect on the Big Day.

One hotel I worked at tried to make me wear an elf hat on Christmas. I said, "I did not spend this much time doing my hair just to have it flattened out with a children's costume. No thank-you."

Elves Have Feelings, Too

2010-12-24T22:48:00.004-06:00

"Nobody's perfect. The only one that ever was was crucified."

- Loretta Lynn

I'm still here. I'm not dead. I'm just not here here.

My computer was dying, so I had to send it in to the manufacturer for repairs (it was under warranty) and in a stroke of genius I managed to lose all of the notes I made for my blog by either not copying them onto a disc, leaving the disc in the PC when I sent it in, or just losing the disc after I made it. Anyway, that leaves me wondering what stories I have left to tell, and which ones I've told already - knowing I'm gonna have to make notes from what I've already posted unless I wanna be like someone's granny, telling the same story over and over. Also, I just found the part of blogger that shows comments "waiting to be approved" so I was late getting a couple of them up. I was touched to hear from Fuck My Table - it's nice to be missed. There was a comment I didn't post, and it actually got me to go back and edit an entry so someone couldn't be identified. I don't want this blog to hurt anyone, so I'll work harder at disguising the guilty parties!

It's Christmas eve, and I just got back from candlelight service. I'm back to singing with the choir - hoping I'm not singing badly. Sometimes I do still miss waiting tables, but I know there were many years when I couldn't go to candlelight services because I was working, and I sure wouldn't have been able to commit to singing with any group regularly. One year, not only did I have to work parties on Christmas eve, but at the last moment - just when I thought I was going home - the hotel I worked for told me that one of the regulars from Saturday Night Live was in town for a show and NBC would like to throw a party for him and his guests in a suite upstairs, so I would need to stay. Midnight on Christmas eve, and about 3 hours' notice.

I stayed (it was either that or lose my job) and set up the hors-d'oeuvre and host bar, and the "star" showed up for less than a minute - treated me like a bad smell coming from the neighbor's house - and virtually ignored all of the people who had shown up to meet him. Good news is the party died early, but it sucked to be regarded as so inconsequential. Maybe NBC hadn't checked with their "star" and he was feeling just as manipulated as I was, but at least I stayed and did my job. I didn't need anyone to be nice to me; just don't be rude, waste my time, and dump your guests on me.

Most of my Christmas memories of waiting tables are from banquets when I worked 105-115 hour weeks with only snatches of time between shifts. There were always a lot of splits crammed into about eighteen days of pure bedlam. My legs would cramp, my knee would give out and I'd have to wrap it, and I'd eat the same holiday buffet food for several days running. I still gag just thinking of leftover well done prime rib. Once it has sat under the carving lamp for two hours and another two hours in the warmer, it's not so appealing, but it was better than the chopped weenies and hair in the employee cafeteria.

We had several groups that came back year after year for their Christmas parties. Some of those folks were as dear as family to me, and I miss them. I kept in touch for a while after I left Colorado and I have remembrances like a crocheted book mark, a coffee cup with my name on it, and a statue about 18 inches tall of a waiter with a tray that one of my groups carved the words, 'To Guy. Best Waiter in Denver" in the base of. They'd have extra cash for me for waiting on them all year and it was fun to see them having a meeting that was more of a party than business.

On the other side of it, there were some groups, both familiar and not, where the parties were sponsored by employers who intimidated their subordinates into attending. Nobody would drink until the boss drank, everybody drank exactly the same thing that the boss drank, and everyone was afraid to leave until the boss left. One older couple with several restaurants would "spontaneously" entertain their "guests" (prisoner employees) with a hokey song and comedy routine till after Midnight. Every year someone would be assigned to talk them into singing, and then they wouldn't stop. If they did stop, it was someone else's "job" to talk them into singing more. On and on it would go. It was painful. We'd see people arriving for the party with all the enthusiasm of children waiting to be inoculated for German measles.

Not that the hotel's own Holiday Party was much better, but at least there were always a few people in food and beverage who didn't care if they got fired for drinking too much and since the chef was making food for people he was gonna see every day - including his boss - it was pretty good. I still had to help set up the party, but usually they got management to wait on us. Sometimes, we'd work it and they paid us extra. One year we hired temps. We never did that again.

I always worked especially hard at Christmas, and under particularly trying circumstances. When I was a banquet captain, the sales staff would book more parties than we had silverware and china to accommodate, and when I was a bartender, there were a greater number of emotional basket cases dousing the flames of their own personal Hell with booze to keep watch over and know just when to help them to the broken crackers and sweating cheese on the buffet table. Among the staff, we didn't hold anything back and there were plenty of awful words exchanged under pressure, but out on the floor we made "Christmas" happen for the strangers paying for the experience. Those memories are bittersweet.

I'm reading a book right now called "The Managed Heart" that discusses the disconnect that happens/has to happen when people are paid to exhibit feelings they don't actually feel. Waiters have to look like they enjoy their jobs, are happy, eager, thankful, excited, concerned, remorseful .... anything but genuine in most cases. The customers sometimes even know that the face on the outside doesn't match the person inside, and may even challenge how well you've performed this ruse. They don't care that you are irritated with them, but they certainly care whether it shows. "Never let 'em see you sweat" is what is expected of you as a waiter, but it's probably the worst thing you can do in personal relationships. I don't miss being all the people I needed to be in order to be a waiter. I'm still working at discovering the person I really am underneath all those years of pretending.

I hope I start writing again, and that there's someone left reading. Thanks to all of you who have been so encouraging. Now that I've figured out where the comments are going, I'll be better about getting them posted. Merry Christmas!

On/Off

2010-10-24T02:17:00.004-05:00

When I was a banquet captain, most of the on-call people I hired were waiters and waitresses I knew from working in other hotels and restaurants. Monica was one of these. We met in our early 20s working in a pancake house. I waited on her and her mother when she came in to fill out an application, and we are still friends almost 30 years later. By the time Monica was filling in for me on the banquet staff, she had a full-time office job, so we didn't work together much. She was a great waitress, though she's actually a little shy. That quiet nature made what was likely one of the most embarrassing moments of her waitress years even more hilarious the night we were clearing tables during a wedding reception at the point of transition from "Dinner" to "Dance" and Monica unplugged the DJ. She thought she was unplugging the hot plates that we used for coffee service. There were people on the dance floor, music, and flashing colored lights when suddenly everything went dark and quiet. We heard, "Oh my gosh!" and in about 10 seconds the lights came back on again, with Monica, beet red, and huddled next to the electrical outlet. We loved to tease her afterwards about "that time you unplugged those people's wedding."

Wedding Gaiety

2010-10-14T19:56:00.003-05:00

I've cut some pretty fantastic cakes in my years of working banquets. The quinceaneras were probably the most elaborate ones, with fountains and trellises, and often 15 separate layers. Wedding cakes were usually four tiers with a groom's cake on the side. I never worked for a hotel that offered formal cakes, so they were always set up by third parties, with varying results. Sometimes, it would strike terror in your heart just to walk past the cake table, when it was visibly tilting or rocking with the slightest movement. There were other issues to contend with as well, like under-baked cakes that began to slide or sink as they thawed, or cakes delivered by people who didn't know how to set them up.

Until I started cutting cakes, I never realized how many different ways there are to construct one. I've seen forms made from plywood and bolts and huge ceramic bases, to Styrofoam and plastic. Very large cakes also usually have several wooden dowels in them that (hopefully) the guests never know about. As unnerving as it could be to even approach some of the towers of cake at these events - let alone take them apart and cut them - it was one of my favorite parts of the job. The cutting of the cake is one of the most important ceremonies and I liked having that responsibility. I wish now I'd taken pictures of some of them.

The worst cake story I know of isn't (thank God) my own. I knew a waiter who knocked the top of a wedding cake onto the bride's lap. I never worked an event where the cake was set up at the head table, but I know that, depending on the bride, the bride's mother and the caterer, a cake is liable to be set up just about anyplace if the banquet manager or banquet captain aren't around to guide things. I did work for another captain at an event where the cake fell, and the hotel ended up paying for it (which meant we gave up part of our gratuity with it). When I became captain, I didn't take any chances. I stuffed wedges of cardboard under layers, and propped up sagging frosting with floral arrangements ... whatever I could do to make that cake live till the cutting.

I enjoyed the responsibility, but it's ironic that I spent so much of my life making everything just right for straight couples at their wedding receptions, considering it's not even legal for me to get married. I wonder if any of the couples think about that double standard when they're meeting with their dress designer, florist, hair stylist, wedding planner, baker, photographer, caterer or waiters, when likely several of those professionals are gay? A while back, I wrote a little piece about "The Gays" and their usefulness. I posted it to Facebook a few months later, and I'm reviving it again, here. I hope you like it.
----

There are so many ways that having a gay friend can validate your straight life-style, not to mention support it. How many times in my day do I perform simple little gay things that nobody is even aware of? There must be millions of them . . .

The Gays contribute so much more than just that lively piece of window dressing that you can take to the bathroom with you because he's "just one of the girls." And If The Gays didn't get to do all of the things that they are so good at, it would be the end of weddings for straight people (At least weddings that anyone wanted to go to.) Think about it: wedding planner, cake, flowers, dress, hair and makeup, decorations, catered food, wait staff, and best man (who is just a little too close to the groom for the bride's comfort) would all go out the window. A justice of the peace and a quick pass by a Wendy's drive-thru would be about all you'd get.

And it's not just weddings. The Gays practically invented Bette Midler and she is the Number One Choice for recorded music at funerals. Think about it: "The Rose?" Nope. "Wind Beneath My Wings?" Probably not. The original Gary Morris version doesn't have any of those "fly, fly fly" things at the end. Funerals would be over in 10 minutes leaving the bereaved alone in a room full of tuna noodle casserole and bundt cake wondering why the Irish Tenor didn't show up for the wake.

So what if you have a gay friend? What do you do now? Is he going to make you all gay-like and expect you to talk gay-talk? Will he make fun of your shoes? Will he go shopping with you and help you decide if that episode of Law and Order that has a gay person in it is just as The Gays see it, live it and breathe it every day? Is he gay enough? Too gay? Can you take him anywhere and "no one would ever know?"

Well, there isn't just one brand, girlfriend. You've got to pick The Gay that is right for you. And make sure he's not planning on running off to Massachusetts or anything political. Remember that this is about what The Gays contribute to mainstream society... not the other way around. They are the minority. One of the beautiful things about a democracy is that 90% of the population can vote to dictate the rights, social mores, intimate expressions and living arrangements of the other 10% of the population and there's not a damned thing they can do about it.

Or is there?

Satan, Party of 30

2010-10-03T09:33:00.003-05:00

This morning, as I was getting ready for church, I remembered when one of those huge stadium churches started up in Denver and the effect it had on both the clientele and the staff. The church was pretty close to the pancake house I was working in at the time, so we started getting a lot of waitresses who worshiped there. It was one of those Charismatic churches with radio and TV ministries, and the new girls were full of "Praise Jesus!" for everything, from their sales incentive points for selling desserts and side orders, to any tips they received. They were a close-knit group, and mostly they were nice, if a little self-righteous. The tough part was when the church members would come in for supper after evening service. There would be about 30 of them - sometimes more - and I don't remember them calling ahead. Usually we only had one person to wait on them with separate checks and the tips were horrible. Some of the customers left tracts in place of tips that said things like, "I gave to the Lord today in your name" or "Thank-you for your service - I'll share your tip with the Lord." It was really frustrating.

I've been glad to notice that, when I've gone out to brunch with members of my own church, they are very healthy tippers. A dream to wait on. I just don't think I could be a member of any organization that treated waiters like the folks did from that place back in Denver. (I was gonna say the name of it, but there's no point in hurting anyone's feelings.)

The Right (way) To Marry

2010-09-27T01:25:00.009-05:00

It's more appealing to be presented with a full bottle of any restaurant condiment than it is to get one that looks used. Of course, restaurants don't throw away the condiments if the bottle isn't empty. They do what is called "marrying," pouring from the emptiest bottle into the fullest bottle so nothing but a full bottle ever goes out to the table. Granted, sometimes this is done with a huge bag of ketchup mounted on the wall in the service area and not from bottle to bottle, but the point is, it's likely some of the ketchup or other condiment has been around for a pretty long time, just getting topped off over and over again until it starts to bubble and then, one fateful day, a customer lifts the cap and rotten ketchup erupts like projectile vomit. (Sometimes, it's a waiter that gets hit, but in most cases I've observed it's the customer.) That's when you know it's time to throw that bottle away.

The worst condiment to marry is mustard. It's thick and especially difficult to get to drain, (though I actually did work in one restaurant where the manager made us marry those tiny bottles of Tabasco. We had to use toothpicks just to make it drain and we usually ended up hiding the half full bottles in the bottom of the trash instead of marrying them. It's not like we had four hours to do our sidework.) With ketchups, you can set them upside down in the service area and most of the sauce will eventually drain to the head of the bottle, but mustard usually requires a little more force. The way I learned to pack the mustard to the end of the bottle was to do a kind of wind up, using centrifugal force with the cap end pointed forward, swinging my arm in full rotation four or five times.

I was working in a small cafe one night, finishing up my sidework, when I attempted this wind up move on one of the tall skinny Heinz mustard bottles with the metal cap. The kind of metal cap that doesn't secure very well. I spent two hours trying to scrub the perfectly straight yellow line I created running up one painted white wall, across the ceiling and down the wall behind me and never did get the stain out of the paint. After that, I made sure I held my finger over the cap. Or sometimes, I just threw the bottle away.

Bass-ackwards

2010-09-25T04:05:00.007-05:00

I was reading an old news article online and saw that a philanthropist and his husband were buying one of the Denver's historic mansions. It had been owned by Denver University for the last few years and had been used in various capacities, one of which was for catered parties. I worked one of those parties - just one - and here's how that came to be:

I was out to brunch with my boyfriend and another couple at a popular gay restaurant in the Cheesman Park neighborhood. Our waitress was very chatty and she mentioned that she was also in charge of the catering staff at _____ Mansion. I told her I was a banquet captain and she asked if I'd like to work with her because she was short staffed. I gave her my number and she called and booked me for a wedding the next week. When I arrived, she was in a tizzy because she hadn't managed to completely staff the event and asked if I knew anyone who might be willing to work. I called my friend Monica whom I had waited tables with off and on for about ten years, and she arrived within a half hour. I think it was the meanest thing I ever did to her.

It didn't take long to realize what a disorganized mess this "banquet" was going to be. Aside from staff who were only half in uniform, I remember a bartender who was using a champagne ice bucket stand to keep a two litre bottle of 7-up chilled (no bucket ... just the stand), and setting up the buffet on top of antique billiard tables that had been covered with sheets. Monica and I had been working about an hour on the setup, which included moving tables and chairs (not waiter work in my book ... I always used housemen for that kind of heavy lifting) and we had time for a break before guests were to arrive. We went outside to smoke and the first thing she said to me was, "Let's just leave now." Believe me, I was tempted. The woman running the thing was nuttier than a pecan log at Stuckey's.

When the wedding part of the event was over, we needed to flip the room from theater style seating into rounds (for the plated reception dinner) while the guests were enjoying the hors-d'ouevres around the sheet-covered billiard tables. Rather than placing the rounds first and then putting the chairs around them, the staff was setting up one round at a time with chairs, running out of room in various areas and shifting all of the tables and chairs - one table at a time - till the whole thing looked like a Keystone cops movie. Finally, I just took charge. I told the staff, "We're going to place the rounds first for the whole room, and when we know where we want the tables, we'll put the chairs around them." When they said they'd never done it like that before I told them they'd been working too hard.

At the end of the night, the manager was very impressed with our work and wanted Monica and me to come back. I told her I was a waiter and I didn't move furniture so, "Thanks, but no thanks." She said, "I move furniture and I broke my back last year!" Like I'm supposed to think that's smart? Of course Monica was just polite. She said, "That's really nice of you. I'll have to see if I can since I'm so busy." I don't know if the gal called her - I can't remember - but I know she never went back there. I was apologizing for years for getting her into that one.

State of Mind

2010-09-19T19:22:00.003-05:00

Three or four evenings a month, I used to wait on a group of four elderly women at the pancake house for dinner. They dressed to the nines in jewels and furs, were always a little tipsy, and they'd tell me they had just come from a "cocktail party." I'd been waiting on them for months before I realized they were just getting drunk at each other's houses and then going out to eat. It made me like them even more.

A Perk

2010-09-15T23:21:00.005-05:00

I'm sick, so I don't know if I'm gonna get much in here for the next few days. Once I got out of the habit, it was hard to find my voice again, and now I just feel like crap. I hope the people who have been reading will stick around. At least I don't have a shift to cover.

When I moved back to Denver from St. Petersburg, Florida, I didn't want to lose my tan, so I got a job working in a tanning salon. I used to lie in those beds after hours for an hour at a time, and I look at pictures of me now and wonder why nobody told me I looked radioactive. The tanning salon was next door to a little restaurant that was looking for a waiter, so I applied and got the job. I'd been hired on the spot at places before, but this was the first time I was told to come back that evening to work, given the keys to the building, and told where to drop the cash in the vault because I would be the last person to leave. They didn't even know me! They had a strange setup, in that we carried our own banks, seated and bussed our own tables and made our own drinks. There were no stations, so the waiters were always bumping into each other 'cos we had to work tables like patchwork all over the restaurant. The bar thing was just silly, since I was the only one who actually knew how to mix drinks. I wondered how they could possibly have come up with such a disorganized way of operating, and then I met the owner.

I was hired by the chef, and I'd been working for a couple of weeks before the owner showed up. She was a middle-aged Asian woman with a very strong accent, difficult to understand and prone to emotional outbursts. She followed all of the waiters around, asking if we'd taken care of such and such table, where was so and so's food and stuff like that. It made it even worse since she had no idea who was waiting on which customer. She kept up a shrill banter through most of the lunch shift until I finally had enough. She'd been trying to get me to wait on some people who had already had cocktails, eaten, ordered dessert, had their dishes cleared and paid their bill. She thought they'd just walked in and was frantic about my getting them menus. I told her, "I don't think this is going to work out." I could tell this must have happened plenty of times before, 'cos she started backpedaling. She asked me to reconsider and said, "I'm not here very often" but I told her I thought once would be enough.

There are plenty of things that suck about waiting tables: Having to work when you're sick, putting up with sexual harassment, shifts that never end because someone didn't show up, being made to do cleaning and janitorial work for two bucks an hour, no 401k, no insurance, and knowing that your job security depends on whatever some jerk says about you, not whether it's true. The really nice thing about the job is that it can be really easy to leave. As simple as cashing out your tickets and walking out the door.

Drunken, Dangerous Liasons

2010-09-10T21:02:00.004-05:00

I've been busy with the LGBTQ film festival in Austin, aGLIFF23, so I haven't had much time for blogging. So far, everything we've shown has been well received. It's important to me because I was part of the programming team this year. The theater we've been showing them at is called Alamo Drafthouse. They started here in Austin and have a handful of other locations but they have completely spoiled me for seeing movies anywhere else. They have chefs and very good food, with beer, wine, soda, coffee service (and even hard liquor at the one downtown) and very comfortable seats. Imagine waiting tables in a movie theater? Wow.

So, my mind's been on movies and I remembered when my friend Jill and I used to work the breakfast shift together at a downtown hotel, grab a cab, stop by the liquor store and go to the movies with a bottle of Southern Comfort hidden in Jill's backpack. Jill was usually supposed to work in the cocktail lounge at night (she pulled a lot of splits) but she'd inevitably call in sick. We'd get huge cokes at the movie and split a bottle between us, so we were smashed by the time the movie was over, and she was in no condition to be working.

Two times stand out for me in particular from our drunken matinees. One was the time we set an empty bottle on the floor and it rolled all the way down the theater under the seats on the sloping cement ... faster and faster ... man, that was loud! The other time was at the same theater (our favorite). The Cooper was built in 1962 for Cinerama and had smoking lounges on the sides so you could have a cigarette and watch the movie at the same time.

(It has since been torn down to make way for a Border's or Barnes and Noble -I can't remember- such a shame.) Anyway, Jill and I both smoked. Especially when we drank. So we were sitting on the side bench watching "Dangerous Liasons" at 2 in the afternoon, guzzling Big Gulps of Southern Comfort and Coke and puffing away, when I got up to put the empty bottle in the trash can nearby. I'd been sitting in the middle of the bench and Jill was on the end so as soon as I stood the bench flipped and dumped her on the floor. I immediately joined her there, because my knees won't hold me when I'm laughing that hard. There were only about ten people in the movie at that hour, but apparently, "Dangerous Liasons" is not the kind of film most people find funny, so we never did have the nerve to go back to the main part of the theater. We set the bench back upright, finished our drinks, and left before anyone could kick us out.

When a Stranger Calls

2010-09-06T04:07:00.006-05:00

"Johnny's Pizza!"

"Didn't I just talk to you on the room service phone at the hotel?"

"Which hotel?"

"Oh, never mind."

Whew! Almost busted again.

I worked for a hotel chain in Florida that had two separate phone lines that both connected to room service. One of them was advertised in the rooms as "Johnny's Pizza," trying to pass itself off as a local pizza restaurant that offered a special service to the hotel, supposedly delivering the pizzas for the room service waiter to bring to their rooms "as a convenience". They didn't exactly come out and say this much, but they put the fear of God in the waiters to never tell the truth about "Johnny" and used some pretty slick advertising. It wouldn't have been quite so bad if the pizza hadn't really sucked. It was just frozen institutional stuff that the waiters baked themselves and I wouldn't be surprised if the box cost the hotel more than the pizza did. Taking a complaint from someone over the phone and pretending not to be the person they just saw five minutes ago is a challenge.

I worked as a room service waiter long before Caller ID or any kind of electronic ordering systems. In the mornings, we relied on something called door hangers that customers filled out some time during the night and hung outside their rooms with their breakfast orders. I remember the nightmare of arriving at the hotel at 5:30 in the morning and taking the elevator to the top floor to begin picking up the hangers to organize the breakfast deliveries. I think the hotel was 17 stories. If I was gonna be in trouble, I usually found out about the time I hit the 12th floor and already had 25 rooms that wanted breakfast delivered at 7:00 a.m. Conventions were notorious for this. Since I was the only waiter (and I still had 10 more floors of orders to pick up) I would start to run, snatching the cards off the doorknobs as I flew by. Like that was gonna save me. Two room service carts will hold breakfast for five or six rooms, tops, depending on how much hot food is in the box and how well you stack the tables, so there might be 12 rooms who aren't totally pissed about when they got their breakfast. Those mornings were like Dead Man Walking. It's one thing to get in the weeds when you're on the floor, but to see it all coming an hour before it even starts is to die a thousand times.

Also, one of the worst things anyone can do to a room service waiter during the morning rush is to return something. From time to time, at the hotel in Florida, salt water would back up into our water lines, and the phone would start ringing with customers who said the coffee tasted "horrible" (it did). We couldn't do anything about the lines - the coffee was just bad - but I'd have to bring up juice or milk to replace it and there'd be all kinds of yelling and complaining. Orders would have to be comped, and that meant no gratuity on top of making two trips to the room. I also had to call all the other rooms that were expecting coffee to find out what they'd like instead. And we all know, there is no substitute for coffee in the morning. Not a legal one, anyway.

The busiest time for room service (breakfast) also coincides with the busiest time for housekeeping. The two departments shared the same service elevator, except housekeeping didn't share. They had a key to lock the elevator on the floor that they were delivering towels or bedding to, so that, after five minutes of frantically waiting for the car to arrive, I'd have to wheel my trays through the restaurant, bar and lobby to the guest elevators, knowing that by this time the food would be so cold that the best I could hope for was that the guest was too angry to eat. For about a month, I did manage to get some use out of the service elevator, but only because the housekeeping staff was afraid to ride in it after getting trapped between floors a few too many times. I had reached the point in waiter hell where plummeting 15 floors in a runaway car couldn't be all that much worse than the wrath I was almost certain to face from my third attempt at delivery of "HOT tea!" I was willing to take my chances if for no other reason than to be put out of my misery.

Even with whatever improvements have been made to room service by virtue of electronic orders (so everyone doesn't wind up ordering breakfast at the same time) there are still some pointers I can offer the potential breakfast room service customer. Don't order anything you're not willing to eat a little on the cool side, and stay away from things like waffles or sunny side up eggs that just don't lend themselves to sitting in a warmer for five or ten minutes. Scrambled eggs and omelets are best for eggs, muffins, biscuits or English muffins hold up better than toast, and you can hardly ever go wrong with yogurt, cereal or grapefruit. Coffee is served in a thermal pot, but often times hot water for tea is served in an identical pot (which makes it taste a little like coffee). It shouldn't be that way, but, "Wish in one hand ..." Although there is a service charge added to the room service bill, it doesn't all go to the waiter, so don't be thinking he's getting rich off traveling all over Hell and half of Georgia with your order of two scones and a pot of decaf. A little extra tip for the mileage on those puny orders doesn't hurt. Finally, if you are going to let your towel "slip" when you answer your hotel room door, please be sure you don't have the kind of body that inspires a lifetime of nightmares.

Working With Professionals

2010-08-31T04:48:00.007-05:00

A couple of weeks before the new "gentleman's club" (in this instance, a strip club ... not the kind of gentleman's club I worked in that I've already written about) opened around the corner from our hotel, a meeting was called for all of the front-house food and beverage employees. It was explained to us that "the girls" who worked in the club, as well as the managers and bouncers, would be staying at the hotel and that we should make every effort to assure they felt comfortable and respected. This was apparently a huge chunk of revenue for the hotel they didn't want to lose, so they were taking no chances. As soon as "the girls" began arriving, I could see the reason for the extra caution.

Most of the contact I had with the women who worked in the new club was to nod a brief, "Hello" to them as they left or arrived, except for the ones who were leaving and arriving several times within the late evening, and then I just pretended not to see them. They were always escorted by a beefy male member of the club (bouncers, I'm guessing) and they would usually be gone for 60 to 90 minutes, two or three times a night. Sometimes they sat with the cops - and there were suddenly a lot more of them than the two who usually worked our area. They'd talk for a while at a table, or every once in a while they'd come in with one or two of the boys in blue who had taken them for "a ride in the squad car". It wasn't uncommon to have a customer ask,

"Are they arresting those prostitutes?"

"No, sir. The ladies are guests of the hotel."

"Wow. They sure look like prostitutes."

There was a definite shift in attitude on the part of hotel security, and of course, all of us working in the bar. Time was, we would keep a keen watch for anyone doing business in the lobby. Suddenly it became difficult to tell if the suspected entrepreneur was one of our neighbor's employees, or the freelance variety we used to discourage.

I don't remember the end of the hotel's association with the club. I think it was just a one or two month contract deal until the employees of the new business had time to re-locate. I never went inside the place, but I heard it was pretty swanky and even served decent steaks. The fact that it was next door did cut into some of the money I used to make for calling cabs to take guests to one of the other strip clubs, or making arrangements with another club's limousine service, and it's never great for bar business to have the cops popping in and out all night long.

What I recall most from that time was the feeling of subterfuge. Even though I'd been making arrangements for guys to head off to strip clubs for years (I had all of their phone numbers and addresses memorized), and I'd seen plenty of 'just-walk-on-by-wait-on-the-corner' assignations, this situation had money, power and methodology behind it. It seemed like my job had taken on the aspect of pretending to be a bartender in a hotel, while I was really operating a front for another kind of business entirely. Truth be told, that is probably what I'd been doing all along, but it's a different game when your eyes are open to it.

Cluck

2010-08-29T06:22:00.010-05:00

Just like clothing fashions, there are foods that are wildly popular in restaurants for a brief span of time and then virtually forgotten in a couple of years. Blackened redfish became such a trend in the 1980s that the redfish was in danger of becoming extinct. Sale of redfish is banned in most states in the U.S. even today. Except for making an entire species disappear, I don't see any harm in people getting excited about trying something different. I admit, it could suck if I happened to be working in a restaurant that hadn't caught the new wave of interest quite yet, and it's amazing how nasty some customers can become over even simple things like not finding focaccia bread on the menu in a pancake house, or herbal tea in a bar.

The trends that I remember best were the salad dressings, and I think of them almost as eras in my life as in, "The Catalina Era" or "The Honey Mustard Era". There were also honey-lime, balsamic vinaigrette, creamy peppercorn and caesar and probably a few others I've blocked out. If the restaurant I was working in didn't have one of these during its reign of popularity, everything was "just ruined" for some diners, and no amount of fresh baked rolls or assorted crackers could console them. Thank God I was too young to wait tables when ranch first came on the scene - the heroin of all salad dressings. I would hate to ever have to tell someone, "We don't serve ranch dressing." Can you imagine the tears?

I mentioned that the trends didn't bug me when I was waiting tables, but as a banquet waiter, I suffered dearly. When one kind of food makes it to superstardom, it becomes the main course of at least half of all banquets being served. That means there is easily a 50% chance that it will become the employee meal of banquet waiters working that season - every freaking day of the season. It's hard enough to deal with all the chicken (it's usually the cheapest thing on the banquet menu so it gets ordered a lot) but when you're eating chicken prepared the exact same way day in and day out, it becomes like prison food. Herb Chicken with Summer Squash Vegetable Medley and Roasted Baby New Potatoes had a run rivaling The Sound of Music on Broadway. I got to where I could barely serve it, let alone eat it. During the Herb Chicken Years, I even nearly ended a relationship before it had a chance to begin because my date made "this new recipe for herb chicken" as a surprise for me the first time I went over to his house. Looking back, I can see why his feelings might have been hurt when I said, "You KNOW I work in banquets! How could you DO this to me?" Chicken is an entirely different food to people with office jobs.

The Only Boy

2010-08-27T01:18:00.006-05:00

When I switched to working days at the pancake house, I was almost always the only waiter among four to nine waitresses on a shift (we had two dining rooms). Though I was still pretty young, I was growing up fast around these women, fetching birth control pills and tampons out of their purses, helping them pull up their pantyhose, and being the brotherly shoulder to cry on in the women's employee restroom plenty of times. Once, I even re-set a waitresses knee that popped out of its socket. I still can't believe she asked me to do it and that I was stupid enough to try. Thank goodness it popped back in and that I didn't break it.

The gals played plenty of pranks on me, but it was all in fun. Once, Debbie sent me out to one of her tables on the pretense she was too busy to ask a customer, "Are you ready for you Baby Apple?" A smaller version of the German Apple Pancake, usually ordered for dessert, had gotten the nickname "Baby Apple" among some regulars and the staff, but it didn't occur to me just how stupid that sounded until I mentioned it to someone who hadn't even ordered one and didn't have a clue such a thing existed. When I got back to the kitchen Debbie was in a fit of giggles. "Did you see the look on his face? Did you see? Ha ha ha ha ha ha!" That same waitress used to steal a piece of bacon off my side orders sometimes just to get the cooks to yell at me when I said I was short a slice. I knew damn well she had bacon in her pocket, but I didn't tell on her. I liked working with her and she had a fun, off-beat sense of humor. We worked a graveyard shift together once when she gave me five bucks to walk around the dining room with a kids toy wind-up radio on my shoulder, singing along while it played "When You Wish Upon a Star." It was easy money. Woulda taken me at least two tables in that place to make as much.

There was another waitress, Becky, from Alabama. She was really sweet and didn't mean any disrespect at all when she told me that I was the first gay person she'd ever met. Though it made me a little uncomfortable when she'd introduce me to her tables as "My gay friend, Guy," she was a good sport about the pranks I pulled on her. I knew Becky wore half slips, so from time to time, when she had the juice machines as part of her sidework, I'd wait until she climbed up on a milk crate to pour the juice concentrate from a huge carton into the top of the dispenser and I'd run by and yank her half slip down to her knees. The crate was too tall for her to jump down so she'd wail until someone would take the carton out of her hands so she could pull up her slip and climb down. My other favorite was to linger behind a couple or three waitresses when they were gathered together talking and tie their apron strings to each other or to one of the legs of the counter. It was rare to get three at once, but funny as all heck when one or all would start to walk away from the group. They got to where they were so panicked about it that they'd flinch if they saw me walking away and reach back to make sure they weren't attached to anything or each other.

Sometimes we fought like barnyard cats, and those women could swear better than anything I've ever heard at the movies. The fights rarely carried over to the next day because we couldn't afford to let them what with all the grumpy morning customers. The only way to make money on that shift is volume and we had to be able to count on each other. I'm sure I'd have a stroke if I tried to work that hard now, and it's probably just as true now as then that the men in those places really prefer a waitress instead of a waiter with their morning coffee, but I do miss being the token boy in that pink collar world.

Fun With Cops

2010-08-25T23:46:00.003-05:00

I'm a little stressed right now. I've got a traffic ticket I'm fighting tomorrow in court - no lawyer, just me - for supposedly "following too closely." It's the cop's word against mine, but that doesn't mean I'll win. I'd just feel even worse if I didn't at least stand up for myself. I know that, because I've been on the side of just being a victim with the cops.

Several years ago in Denver, I was working at a downtown restaurant, driving two other waiters home after our shift ended, when I needed to detour around one of the big festivals that was in the process of being set up on the streets. Unfamiliar with the area, I inadvertently turned the wrong way down a one way street. It turned out to be a one way street for one block only, but that block was smack dab in front of the police station. A few seconds later, I saw flashing lights behind me and pulled over. The officer had me and one of my passengers get out of the car while he and his partner frisked us. In my case, the officer put both of his hands in the front pockets of my uniform pants at the same time and groped me, and then grabbed my cash tips for the night and asked, "What is this?" The other waiter said he was also groped. It was a disgusting and humiliating experience, but there was no way to prove it. Still, I've been angry about that for years and I always wish I'd at least stood up for myself in court instead of just paying the fine. I might lose my case tomorrow, but at least I won't be a wimp.

The Body Slammer

2010-08-25T03:33:00.003-05:00

It was 28 years ago that I met The Body Slammer. We worked together at a pancake house; she was on the day shift and I worked nights. Every once in a while our shifts would overlap and those were some of the best times I had at that restaurant. I loved to hear her laugh - she's got kind of a husky voice and she can really cut up. She knew I loved Tammy Wynette, and she would strike a pose at the end of the service station and sing just the one line, "Staaaand by your maaaan!" and then crack up. She used to tell me stories about the older day waitresses that would have me in stitches, too, like when one of them was walking out of the service area and didn't see the buscart that was blocking the entrance. The cart was about waist high, and stopped the waitress, but it didn't stop the tray of cheeseburgers she was carrying and it went sailing out into the dining room - packed for lunch hour - like a flying saucer. Another time, one waitress we both liked was waiting on the founder of the restaurant with the board of directors. He'd ordered the fried chicken special for lunch and told her, "Carol, this chicken is cold." She said, "Just like a picnic!" and the board spent 20 minutes trying to decide if she was a great waitress because she had a quick and cheerful comeback, or if she was a smart-alec and needed to be written up.

The Body Slammer is a year older than I, but we did go out drinking a little before I was actually supposed to. When I turned 21, she went with me to The London House, a popular nightclub at the time that had three different sections: A disco, a big band dance floor (with an actual live big band), and a lounge. We got drunk as skunks, and stumbled our way back up Colorado Boulevard to our apartments when the bar closed, laughing all the way. Back then, we used to drink pretty often but not always together because of our different shifts. When I could, I'd join her at La Plaza for two-for-one happy hour, and if she worked a graveyard shift, she might come out with the rest of the wait staff to open the bar at Coco's. They could start serving liquor at 7:00 a.m. (maybe it was 8:00) and one Sunday (still Saturday night for us) I had way too many Manhattans there. There's just nothing quite like being drunk when the church crowd starts coming in. I had to work that night - Lord, I was hungover - and the cooks all knew it. When I'd go back in the service area to pick up an order, they'd ring their bell, bang on pans and wrap their arms around each other's shoulders singing, "Staaaand by your Manhattan!"

I just got in touch with The Body Slammer again through Facebook. It's been a long time since we've seen each other, and I'm glad we're going to be able to catch up. She moved back to North Dakota, married, raised kids and divorced, and I moved to Texas (and didn't do much of anything except get old). We haven't talked on the phone yet - different schedules and all - but we're fixing to. Her friendship meant so much to me when I was just getting on my feet in that big city, and yet I never did find out how she got that nickname.

Deliah

2010-08-22T20:17:00.004-05:00

Deliah was a drama student at the University of Colorado who worked as a waitress to pay her living expenses while she was in school. She was a terrible waitress, but a nice young woman, prone to extremely dramatic moments, usually when talking to one of her tables while completely oblivious to the other five tables in her station. She'd get so wound up in her stories, her arms would fly all around her expressively and more than once knock something off another waiter's tray or hit someone in the head. Her customers were always asking the other waiters about their food, or even if they could order. Deliah couldn't be distracted from her performances.

The cooks at the restaurant where we worked insisted on black ink on all the tickets, and one night when Deliah and I were at the hostess stand picking up charge slips with our ticket folders, I noticed the pen had been switched out of my folder and replaced with one with blue ink. I always carried two or three pens, but I noticed Deliah had my pen so I said, "Is this your little pen with the blue ink, 'cos I think you've got one of my Bics." In one of the loudest stage voices I've heard, Deliah said, "I HAVE A BIG BLACK BIC!" and when I started laughing, she slapped me. It was worth it to hear people at their tables giggling - I guess we all had dirty minds - and the slap didn't really hurt.

Slime Dog

2010-08-22T02:05:00.004-05:00

I worked a little in food service before I was a waiter; Taco Bell and a ball park concession stand every summer for five years and my first "real" restaurant job as a dishwasher at Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour in Eugene, Oregon. Farrell's is getting popular again, at least in some areas (I don't think the one I worked at is there any more) and in the 1970s it was a really big deal. They have a full food menu, but their specialty is gay 90s era ice cream soda fountain creations served in real silver dishes and heavy beveled glass. The whole staff dressed in black and whites with "straw" hats (they were really Styrofoam) that had red, white and blue bands on them. The overall effect was sorta like an indoor political rally for William McKinley (or William Jennings Bryan, if you were a Democrat like my ancestors).

To make the atmosphere especially festive, there were constant pranks played on the customers: A large ice cream sundae called "The Trough" was served in a silver boat resting in a wooden caddy made to look like a pig's trough, and the dishwasher, bussers and cooks were enlisted to grunt and snort in the microphone whenever one was served. Also, announcements would be made over the P.A. telling folks there was "a blue car in the parking lot" to get people up, thinking they'd left their lights on. The best known of all the antics was the serving of what was called, "The Zoo." It was a huge silver bowl with several scoops of various flavors of ice cream and sherbet, covered with bananas, cherries, whipped cream, nuts, and little plastic animals (until, I understand, someone choked on a giraffe and they had to stop doing that). The Zoo served 8 people and was presented by two runners carrying it (running with it, literally) all over the restaurant on a gurney while someone played a bass drum and sirens wailed. I was often one of the runners.

The silly stuff about the job was fun. I was only 16, and I hadn't gotten bitter yet. The job itself was really hard, though. The real silver dishes held on to their heat from the dish machine, and they were painful to handle. The dishwashers were called "Slime Dog" because our aprons were always covered in slime from the food and ice cream (we took these off when we ran food), and the job was lonely. Only one dishwasher worked each shift and they worked constantly, so there wasn't much human contact beyond, "Slime Dog, we need more soda spoons!" Also, the only black shoes I owned were platform heels and my feet would ache like crazy after a shift.

I didn't work at Farrell's for very long. I got a job in an office and I thought I'd never work in restaurants again. Silly me.

Embracing Change

2010-08-21T02:37:00.004-05:00

"A little integrity is better than any career."
-Ralph Waldo Emmerson

I was a banquet captain for several years, and it was probably the best suited I was to any of the work I've done. I enjoyed being the contact point between clients, waiters, management, sales, kitchen and housemen. I was a "working" captain, too, so I was part of the wait and bar staff and I think that made the connection we had as a team even stronger. Until Russell came along.

Russell was always complaining about something. If it meant being asked to French serve rolls or not liking a more complicated napkin fold, he'd bitch and get the rest of the staff wound up, blaming me for making too much work. Didn't matter that we had the time and the cost of the meal demanded something extra; he resented me being the one who suggested it. He spent a lot of time sucking up to the new banquet manager, gossiping and telling jokes and she was completely enamored of him. I knew what he said behind her back, and that he was just brown-nosing, and I heard from my staff that he liked to find fault with the schedules I made or how a room was diagrammed, but I didn't know until later that he wanted my job.

To this day, I'm not certain if it was Russell's suggestion, or the banquet manager thought of it herself, but one afternoon she told me that the hotel would like to "promote" me to Banquet Supervisor on a salary because they were phasing out my position. It would have meant a substantial cut in pay and I would no longer be part of the wait and bar staff. I said I didn't want the job and resigned, so Russell stepped up to the plate. At least I had the satisfaction of hearing about how miserably he failed - and how hard he worked (that was the best part!) He'd always thought it was so easy to hold it all together with the different departments, but he turned out to be a much better critic than a performer. He lasted about four months.

It sucked to leave the job on a sour note but the important thing was leaving. I was in a no-win situation, and it was time to get out. No use holding on to how good the job had been. We accept the things we can't change and change what we can (if it needs changing). I've dealt with a couple of Russell-types in my life, but my answer is always to just walk away. The truth comes out eventually, and there's some redemption in that. In the meantime, there's no sense flogging a dead horse.

Balloons

2010-08-20T17:33:00.003-05:00

I've blown up a lot of balloons in my years of working banquets (thank goodness for those helium tanks, or I'd have never made it) and while not appropriate for every occasion, they do a nice job of filling out a room and adding color to New Year's Eve parties and birthdays. It's funny that, even though balloons are relatively cheap, at the end of the night there's almost always someone who wants to "save" them. More power to them, but I wonder how they ever drive with a car full of 'em (more on that later) and, well, what they get out of having balloons in their house. I guess I just don't have a balloon-type apartment.

One night after a huge party when we had dozens of balloons left over, the banquet staff decided it would be cool to let them all go at once from the loading dock of the hotel. About six of us gathered together all the balloons we could each fit down the hallway, wrapped around our wrists, and on the count of three let them all go into the sky. As we watched them sail over the nearby buildings, Alice said, "You know, it kills the birds, honey. They choke on 'em." I didn't know about the bird thing, but from that moment, I've have never, ever intentionally let go of another balloon outside. Which led me to my own experience of trying to drive with a car full of balloons.

I decided that it would be nice to give a bunch of balloons to the kids at Children's Hospital (which was pretty close to the hotel I was working at) that we had left over from a function. They were all brightly colored and I seem to remember a lot of purple ones, and lots of kids like purple, it would be a great surprise for them in the morning ....I had build the idea up pretty well by the time I started my drive in my little hatchback to the hospital ten blocks away. The balloons wouldn't fit in the car, so I held them outside the window.

I know.

Or, at least I know now. My God those things nearly beat me to death after the first two blocks. I just never imagined that kind of wind force. I wound up parking the car and - determined more now than ever - decided to walk the rest of the way to the hospital. It was about Midnight, but I was so focused on my mission, I didn't think what kind of a spectacle I might make walking through the streets of uptown Denver in a tuxedo with a huge bunch of balloons. In the block just before I reached my destination, I was met by a group of young women who wanted to know where I was dancing.

"Dancing?"

They thought I was a birthday stripper.

(Oh, and it turns out Children's can't let kids have balloons in the rooms, but they do give them out when they go home with parental permission, so it wasn't a total bust, but I didn't try it again.)

The Human Touch

2010-08-19T01:27:00.006-05:00

"Honey, we've been at this so long, Margie and I waited on The Last Supper."
-Phyllis

I don't have a lot of experience using computers to wait tables. I know it's been pretty common for the last 20 years or so, but I managed to dodge around their introduction into the service industry by switching over to banquets, working in mom and pops or doing off-site catering. I was around for the early years of them (it was a mess!) and I did get back into waiting after they had become standard at the end of my career.

The first terminals I worked with were pretty simple, but it wasn't long before the entire operation of the restaurant was controlled by the computer. If it went down - everything stopped. The cash register wouldn't open, orders couldn't be rung, waiters couldn't clock in or out. And nobody had the sense God gave a pig to have a backup plan for any of it. Our managers were so intimidated by the corporate office that they wouldn't let us just write a ticket or call an order, and in those early years, the computers went down all the time.

One of the saddest casualties of the computer invasion was my very favorite cook at the pancake house, Beau. We used a ticket that had a box on it for every item, and a little bit of space to write special order abbreviations in standard waiter slang. There were about 130 items on that ticket and Beau had memorized where every one of them was, because he couldn't read. I don't think a lot of people knew it, but he confessed it to me when they were first talking about getting rid of the tickets. We didn't stay in touch after he left, and I don't know if he ever did learn to read or what he wound up doing, but he was a really great cook and I loved working with him.

I know the point of sale (POS) system is supposed to help out with inventory and, for a certain style of bartender or cook, it is probably easier to deal with than actually talking to a waiter, but I miss the old days of calling stuff "on the fly" when I needed it quick and the rhythm of working with people instead of just working in the same building as they did. I know some people wrote a lousy ticket, and I know some cooks and bartenders could be jerks and ignore or "not hear" some orders, but for me, it beat the heck out of searching through screen after screen for "modifiers" and I could sure write:

G/T
J/C
MAN X
Dew/ spl

faster than I could find the keys for GIN add TONIC, BOURBON, JACKDANIELS, add COKE, MANHATTAN/ ON THE ROCKS and DEWARS, add SPLASH OF WATER. And I could write it while they ordered or on the way to the bar. I didn't need to find a terminal. By the time I'd typed in my order I could have served two tables. When I was cocktailing, I mostly just called the drinks when I put up the ticket and the bartender didn't even read it - he'd just red-line it.

The other thing I don't like about using a computer in a bar or restaurant to place orders is that order changes or sometimes coupons or discounts need to be handled by a manager, and managers were the least dependable of all the people I worked with in almost any place I worked. If they weren't locked up in their office, they were outside smoking or wandering around someplace where nobody could seem to find them. The longer I had to wait for manager, the angrier my customers would be and the less money I'd make. Two circumstances like that would sandbag my whole night: Say, one table had a birthday coupon for 50% off and I needed the Rib-eye taken off someone's ticket because the kitchen didn't let us know it was 86'd. Could be ten minutes lost right there when it used to be just as simple as crossing something off the ticket, and while I understand management's fear that people might take advantage of the system, that system worked just fine for at least a century before.

There's a win and lose to both, but one method plays the hand from the assumption that waiters steal, inventory control takes priority over service, and automated communication is more efficient than face to face contact. I could pace my tables and communicate better with the kitchen in person. When you put a machine in between the waiter and their cook, or their customer, you've lost something that can't be immediately quantified, but eventually amounts to less camaraderie among the employees, more red tape and a less intimate dining experience for customers.There might not be specific column for those on an accountant's spread sheet, but that doesn't mean they don't show up in the bottom line.

Ice-breaker

2010-08-18T03:04:00.010-05:00

When I was 21 years old, I moved back to my home town and got a job working at what was - for my home town - a kinda fancy restaurant. It was listed in the local "Gourmet Restaurant Coupon Book" and they had Surf and Turf on the menu, so if you didn't look too close, and you didn't know they made the base for the lobster bisque by boiling the caps of the old ketchup bottles, you might think it wasn't half bad. The first night I showed up for work, I was the only employee in the front of the house. All the waiters and bussers had chosen that time to quit, so there was no training ... nothing but a really frantic owner calling people on the phone and trying to find out why they weren't at work. I wound up just winging it - reading the menu right along with the customers.

The cooks were really nice to me, though one of them was also especially flirty. I wasn't exactly sure if I was gay or not -- pretty sure, but not really out, and not dating. The flirty cook was the sous chef, Rodney, and he was probably about the age I am now, late 40s, when I worked with him. He loved to make suggestive comments about menu items - double entendre kind of stuff - and goose me or surprise me in the walk-in cooler. He wasn't threatening and he was so good-humored, I didn't mind, even if I did blush from head to toe sometimes.

The best prank he ever played on me was on a night I was opening the restaurant for dinner. We were closed for a couple of hours after lunch, but I'd come in a half hour before re-opening to set up the salad bar - a huge red curtained pagoda in the middle of the room - and make sure the tables were all in order. All the various salads were stored in the walk-in, so I wheeled a rolling table in to gather them up to set out in the crushed ice around the perimeter of the pagoda. (Rodney always filled up the ice ahead to support whatever ice sculpture he had carved for the evening's centerpiece.) This particular night, I had brought the salads out to the dining room, and pulled back the curtain to reveal an enormous phallus. Made completely from ice ( and with remarkable detail) it must have been over two feet tall. Rodney couldn't have hoped for a better reaction when I dropped the curtain and let out a shriek. He was hiding around the corner in the bus station, laughing so hard he'd rolled himself up in a ball. When he recovered, I think he turned the sculpture into a dolphin, but I was always a little apprehensive after that about what I'd find behind the curtain.

Cheap Labor

2010-08-17T09:48:00.003-05:00

Some restaurants take advantage of the fact that waiters only make 2 bucks an hour by piling on all kinds of extra sidework. Depending on how close it was to time to pay rent or how tight the job market was, I might put up with it for a while, but I usually wound up refusing, or just quitting. A lot of what determined if what was being asked of me was excessive depended on how much money I was making, the size of the business and how well they treated me.

I worked for a hotel that had, of course, a full housekeeping staff that regularly cleaned the community areas of the hotel, bar and restaurant until management decided they needed to cut back on labor costs. They cut the hours of the housekeeping department and made the waiters do the work at the end of our shift. Not only did the waiters not like cleaning for 2 bucks an hour, we didn't want to take hours away from our friends in housekeeping, so we made sure we did a really crappy job of it. The vacuum cleaner was always mysteriously breaking and we were forever losing the brass polish . . . Once, my friend Jill and I got busted for just leaving the vacuum cleaner running in the middle of the restaurant while we went to the break room to have a cigarette. The manager's office was in a little broom closet around the corner, and we figured so long as she heard the vacuum running, she'd never check to see if the floor was clean. I still think it would have worked, but we didn't count on her needing to use the restroom.

"It's not a gun, it's a wine opener"

2010-08-16T00:03:00.004-05:00

Quinceaneras are coming out balls for Latinas, held on their 15th birthday. They were some of the most elaborate parties I ever worked: 15 tiers of cake usually stair-stepped with seven tiers on each side leading up to a beautiful cake top and sometimes incorporating fountains or other props, 15 "bridesmaids" with 15 different colors of dresses, and the quince girl dressed in a white gown - just like a wedding gown - with a tiara. There would be a mariachi band and a rock 'n' roll dance band that alternated, with the mariachis roving around the room. And all the time, the Mexican Mafia in their black suits standing guard. Or at least we knew them as that, but also by another name I can't remember right now. I don't know if they were the Mexican Mafia. They were more like very solemn escorts that we knew carried guns, but not so they were showing. They stood at all the entrances to the room from the outside, the hallways and the kitchen and never ate, drank, talked or smiled. In a way, it was a comfort to have them there, but in the back of my mind I was always afraid I'd drop something or move wrong and wind up getting shot.

I wonder now at the expense that went into these parties, the wealth in those families, and all the kind of underworld stuff that was going on that we just ignored. The hotel where this took place was a kind of front for other properties and there were questionable details about who actually owned what. Sometimes there would be so much merchandise from another new property that had been acquired stored in our hallways and kitchen that we could barely move, and other times we'd be scrambling to find a teaspoon because all the equipment was needed "at another property." We were paid in cash, and we didn't ask questions. Even now, I'd be uncomfortable revealing too much about who, where and what was involved.

Televised Sports

2010-08-14T21:08:00.007-05:00

"Hi ladies. Would you like to watch "National Tractor Pull" or "World Wide Wrestling" tonight?"

I worked in a hotel bar when big screen TVs first came on the market. At first, my boss rented movies and showed them over and over, but we got so many complaints from regular customers about the same films always showing or from people who didn't like coming in on the middle of a movie that he decided the TV was exclusively for sports. Didn't matter if the Academy Awards was on. Probably wouldn't matter if martians had attacked Kentucky. It had to be sports - or we'd be fired. Really, he was that much of a jerk.

Come late night hours on a Wednesday or Thursday, there's not usually much to choose from and the patrons of that bar - closer to the theater and business district - were decidedly un-sports-like, older and usually international. This was before all of the cable and satellite stuff so mostly, the volume was off on the TV and people just pretended like it wasn't there.

Years later, I worked one of the oddest cocktail receptions of my career in the suite of another hotel while folks gathered around the television watching the O.J. Simpson low-speed chase through L.A. Talk about a subdued crowd.

Got Milk?

2010-08-13T06:30:00.004-05:00

I'm really good at putting my foot in my mouth now, but it didn't used to happen that often. I don't think it was that I didn't notice it ... I really think I was smarter, or more sensitive, or just more articulate. Mostly. Because there was one morning, halfway into a double shift at House of Pies, I remember embarrassing myself so badly that I felt like my hair would melt off.

I was waiting on a table of three young mothers with three very young children, ranging in age from about one to two and half years old. They were sitting at a booth and I had already served food to them when I went back to refill coffee. One of the kids, a darling little blonde girl, was seated next to her mom at my left side as I went around with the pot of coffee. She was smearing chocolate cream pie all over her face and I laughed and said, "Looks like a good time to me!" Except by the time the end of that sentence had gotten out of my mouth, I was looking into the eyes of the woman on the right side of booth who was at that moment breast-feeding her child. Of course, I don't have any issues about breast feeding and she was being very discrete. So discrete that I hadn't even noticed until I made a jackass out of myself by appearing to indicate her baby was having the kind of "good time" that I would like to enjoy myself. My face was hot as I tried to explain that I was talking about the girl on the other side of the table, but the more I stuttered, the more I just made myself look like it was the first time I'd even seen a woman feeding her child.

Not to tempt fate, but these days when I'm goofy, I can always look back on that "good time" and be thankful that at least now, people don't usually think I'm hitting on lactating women.

Last Impressions

2010-08-10T14:06:00.002-05:00

Did you read about the Jet Blue flight attendant who got fed up with his job (last straw, a passenger wouldn't stay seated, cussed at him and hit him on the head) so he said some dirty words on the microphone, grabbed a couple of beers and his carry-on luggage, activated the automatic slide and exited the plane? I don't think I'd ever have the nerve to do it, but I can sure understand the desire.

I worked with a cocktail waitress who said her fantasy was to win the Lottery and then go around applying for jobs in cocktail lounges. She said she'd work until one of the customers was rude to her and then she'd pour a large glass of tomato juice on their head. She wanted to have enough money that she could move to several different cities and do this over and over again.

The best way I ever quit a job was when the restaurant I worked at scheduled me for days they had already given me off for my second job. It was around Christmas, so I left a message with my answering service that, if my employer called to give them this message: "'Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la. I quit."

It's Supposed To Taste Bad

2010-08-08T12:42:00.008-05:00

Our new food and beverage manager, Carol, was eager to make some changes. It didn't matter to her or the brilliant general manager who promoted her from the front desk that she had never worked in any capacity of food and beverage in her life - not even as a cashier at Dairy Queen - she was gonna straighten things out, particularly in the banquet department.

One of Carol's first moves was to get rid of the coffee that all of our customers loved and replace it with Starbucks. At the time, Starbucks was what all the yuppies were lusting after - the status symbol of coffee drinkers who didn't really like coffee in the first place, but sure liked holding that Starbucks cup so everyone could see how "hip" they were. Starbucks' banquet/institutional coffee service demands that only Starbucks' equipment is used, coffee is never to sit on any kind of warmer, and that it be served using Starbucks' own thermal pots, so we had to practically re-design the whole banquet kitchen to accommodate the switch. An early clue as to how successful this change was going to be could be found in the training Starbucks provides to waiters to convince customers that their coffee is actually "higher quality" than the coffee that the customer prefers. It's essentially a convoluted way of telling them they don't know their butt from a bulldog.

You know the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"? Well, Carol didn't. Half of the comments we got from clients were complaints about the coffee. It wasn't just because Starbucks coffee is bitter (it is), it was that it didn't stay warm in the pots they provided (that we were required by contract to use) and the pots were unwieldy (probably 20 inches tall) so they made it nearly impossible to serve at a round top without pulling the cup and saucer completely away from the table (dangerous in banquet service) and the pots leaked. (We learned the hard way: Pouring from a pot that tall put the bottom of the pot in the face of the patron to the right, sometimes clipping them on the chin, and caused the pot to drip on their plate.) Bitter, lukewarm coffee poured from a leaking pot is really hard to sell as "higher quality" to anyone, let alone groups that had been meeting regularly at our hotel for years and were perfectly happy (even pleased) with the coffee we had been serving all along until the status queen showed up.

There are some very basic first rules to a successful banquet: Good coffee, good bread, and a full water glass. If you've got all those things going for you, you can screw up a lot and still manage to please most of your customers. By the time Carol went on maternity leave (to give birth to her designer baby, no doubt), she had all but destroyed the client base we had by getting rid of the homemade bread rolls in favor of some brand name earth grain crap that had to be warmed and was frequently found to be molding upon delivery, and imposing her Starbucks fetish on the department. The waiters were so busy dealing with complaints about the bread and coffee, they barely had time to pay attention to anything else. Even stranger is that the new bread and coffee were so much more expensive than what we had been serving, but the new stuff had brand names Carol thought were more "in line with the clientele we would like to attract."

Carol exemplified the shift in those yuppie years from integrity to pretentious phoniness that still prevails, and not just in food and beverage. One of the last full time jobs I had was in sales, and I was under pressure to perform to a strict quota. I explained to my manager that I was looking for features in the product that I could sincerely identify as valuable to my clients. He said, "Oh I can help you with that. I have some sales pitches that sound really sincere." You know, that boy will probably never understand the difference.

Bend Me, Shape Me

2010-08-07T19:19:00.009-05:00

I hate it when people start re-arranging the furniture in a bar where I'm working. Especially the people who push round tables together to make a larger table. Jesus wept, I barely made it through geometry the second time and I know better than to do that. Inevitably, you'll wind up with a situation where a bunch of drunks are trapped in a conglomeration of tables that looks something like a diagram of a complex protein chain. The waiter can only reach 5 or 6 people out of a group of 16 and everyone at the table is too self-absorbed, oblivious or drunk to make any effort to pass drinks down to the folks they've blocked in. Stuff gets spilled, other people can't get past the mega-table, and the waiter loses seating for half the bar because eight tables that could have sat four each have now become one table that seats 16. People wind up sitting farther away from each other than if they'd sat at the original tables, so they're not really "together" anyway, and the new arrangement makes it hell to wait on them or anyone else.

On the upside, one year when I was working as a cocktailer, I won a limbo contest because it was part of my job on a daily basis to literally bend over backwards for people.

The Fool

2010-08-05T17:54:00.008-05:00

I had a crush on a guy I had briefly dated, but never seemed to get over. We both contributed to the twisted un-relationship we had, him telling me, "It's not that I want to go out with you. I just don't want you to go out with anyone else." And me saying, "I just want you to ask me out so I can tell you no." Looks bizarre from a distance, but it was True Love while I was in it. Anyway, I said that to say this: The guy I liked had a roommate who was the most annoying, whiney and helpless thing I'd ever met. We'd all be out at the bars together and inevitably, the roommate had to go home because he felt dizzy, or didn't want to use the restrooms in the bar or spilled something on his shirt, etc. Of course, he couldn't drive himself home, so I'd wind up alone.

One night, we were all gonna have coffee after hours, and whiney-boy had too much beer (probably two of 'em) and was complaining that he couldn't walk. I didn't want to miss out on spending time with my crush, so I said, "Here, I'll carry you." I picked him up (he outweighed me by about 40 pounds) and took a few steps on the wet pavement and slipped. I went down - him on top of me - landing on my knee, turned sideways. I didn't know I'd fractured it at the time. I was too busy trying to calm him down, first because his neck hurt, then his back hurt, then his head hurt. Brother. We all went to coffee. I was limping a little, but I thought it would pass. I went home that night about 3:30 and woke up at 6:00 with my knee about twice normal size and every shade of purple imaginable. Right away, I called the hotel and told them I didn't think I'd be able to make it to work that night. (I had to use a bar stool for a walker to get around my apartment since I didn't own crutches. I think of that every time I hear Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck if ..." ) Turns out, I was in a full cast, non-weight-bearing for four months. Even after I got the cast off, I wound up working PBX for a couple of months because I couldn't put much weight on the knee. Twenty years later, I still have trouble with it.

One of the first gigs I got sidelining outside of the hotel after I was back on my feet was at Coors, working for ARA, a huge concessions conglomerate that handles convention centers and the like. I was told the job involved some "light cooking" and I said I thought I could handle that. 30 minutes into the shift, I called the food and beverage director of ARA and told her, "I will never, ever, ever and forever work for you again. Barbecued chicken for 300 people is NOT 'light cooking'! I don't even know how to make this for ONE person, let alone 300!" She asked me if I was walking out and I said I didn't do that. I'd finish the job I contracted for, but she was a liar, and she should be ashamed of herself. And she needed to tell me how to cook the damn chicken. In addition to preparing the chicken, I baked cookies and put together tossed salad and filled bowls with potato salad, set up the buffet (including the tables), bussed, broke everything down and washed the dishes (pans and serving stuff, since it was all paper plates). I was working with one other "waiter" who told me about some place he worked once where they had people who "didn't do nothin' but wash dishes all day." I don't think he got out much.

An Unfamiliar Face

2010-08-04T22:47:00.004-05:00

Most customers don't know what you look like.

Sure, there are the occasional few who leave greeting cards on the windshield of your car or look up your number out of the phone book, but I always think of those as stalkers who just happened to have eaten at one of my tables. The real customers wouldn't know me from Adam. Or Eve.

To prove this point, one night Suzy, a waitress I worked with at the pancake house, smeared fudge sauce all over her face, sprayed on some whipped cream eyebrows and stuck a cherry on the end of her nose (I think she had sprinkles on her cheeks, too) and brought a fresh pot of coffee out to her new table.

"Hi folks, how are you tonight? May I start you off with some coffee?"

Barely a nod and a grunt. They kinda motioned at their cups (I guess that was to make sure she didn't pour it in her shoes) but they never even looked up at her. When she walked back to the service area, we were all practically falling down from laughter. Suzy just wiped her face off and walked back out on the floor to take their order.

Would You Like To Hear Me Drink?

2010-08-03T06:22:00.004-05:00

I worked a wedding reception at a country club where the bride's family were members. I think the family sent champagne back to the kitchen employees because the dishwashers had gotten drunk toward the last half of the event. About every 30 minutes they would stand at the entrance to the kitchen and sing "Happy Birthday" in thick Spanish accents. Nobody sent them home, because nobody wanted to wash dishes.

Shiny Happy Syrups

2010-08-02T00:27:00.022-05:00

Have you ever been in one of those restaurants that had the flavored syrups on the table? Apricot, strawberry, blackberry and blueberry were the flavors at the restaurant where I worked. (In theory, anyway, because when you've been working all day and you've got to fill those damn things up as part of your sidework, it is really easy not to give a rat's ass whether the blueberry winds up getting mixed in with the blackberry or vice versa. Most people just taste by color anyway.) It's probably more accurate to say that that's what the labels on the dispensers read.

Syrups were supposed to be poured into buckets every week, the clear glass syrup dispensers run through the dishwasher and dried and then refilled and set out on the table. Never mind there were four of them on every table and each waiter had about 12 or 13 tables, and there were 12 or 13 sugar caddies to be filled and wiped down with the black dots on the edge of the sugar packets all facing the same way (who even knew there were black dots on those packets?) and exactly ten Sweet'n'Lows lined up on the edge of them, salt and peppers to replenish and an ungodly amount of cleaning, refilling and prepping to do in the back (Oh, God, please don't let me have salad station again!) The dispensers were filled from plastic buckets that were filled from industrial sized cans of syrup that were kept in the store room - half way to Kansas. In spite of the obviously over-the-edge, split-nerve Magic Marker scrawl on each syrup bucket notifying us which one was the BLACKBERRY!!! or BLUEBERRY ONLY PLEASE!!!! those two were always getting confused, and about every three weeks a manager or an over-achieving new waitress would 'discover' that the syrups were mixed and ALL of the blackberry and blueberry syrups on the tables had to be dumped and refilled.

That thing about pouring out, cleaning, drying and refilling was the 'procedure' but here's what usually happened: One waitress would keep a lookout for the manager or stall them in the office over some personal problem. During this brief window of opportunity, food service would come to a halt while the rest of the wait staff would grab the syrups, caddy and all, off of their tables, load them on flat racks and send them all through the dishwasher with the syrup still in them. They came out looking really clean. Then we'd fill the ones that needed filling, put them back on the tables and save ourselves and the company about 30 minutes each on the clock. (Hey, at $2.01 an hour, that can add up!) The downfall to this system was that eventually the syrups, after having been exposed to 180 degree heat, would begin to ferment. Sometimes, this would be apparent in the tiny bubbles that started to gather at the top of the dispenser or they might foam over a little - particularly the ones at the tables by the windows that had already done a little ripening on their own. I remember one Sunday in particular when one of our regular customers, a mentally challenged young adult woman, yelled across the dining room at our manager, "HEY JANE! THESE SYRUPS TASTE JUST LIKE BEER!" Apricot, strawberry and blue-blackberry beer.

Sooooo, everyone had to gather all their syrups off their tables, pour them down the sink, and refill them. Inevitably, some of the blackberry pitchers would be filled with blueberry, and some of the blueberry with blackberry and some with a combination of both that had already been mixed when the buckets had been refilled. And then the whole thing would start all over again.

Just a word to the wise: It's a good idea to stay away from any condiment that remains on a table through bar rush. If you've got to use one of them, at least unscrew the lid and look inside first, 'cos there's no telling what some drunk might have done to it.

Bear or Bare

2010-08-01T00:34:00.011-05:00

I almost had to work in a bear costume one time. The girl who dressed up as Village Inn's mascot, Bucky Bear for special promotions had to go visit a dying relative or some damn thing so management was looking for a replacement. Basically, the lower you ranked on the schedule, the more vulnerable you were to being chosen. The only thing that eventually saved me was I was too tall for the costume, so honors went to Brittany. She was the right size and was already scheduled that Sunday. She told me about it afterwards and about how hot it was inside Bucky and how bad it smelled and the way the kids pulled her fur. She had to stand in front of the restaurant and hand out coupons and coloring books and talk to the kids in whatever she could come up with for a bear voice. At the time, it was something I dreaded, but looking back I kinda wish I had it on my resume - even for one day.

A few years later, I wound up in a completely different kind of costume, serving coffee, sodas, sandwiches and other light food to a group of nudists in a gay coffee house in Denver's Broadway Terrace neighborhood. The coffee house closed on the first Monday of each month for this event, and one night while I was playing cards there with my friends, the owner asked me if I would consider waiting on them for the next get-together. My uniform this time was a purple and black leopard print G-string and a pair of sandals.

At first, I was reluctant because I'm pretty self-conscious, but then I started to think about all the times that self-consciousness had held me back from participating in life. I told my oldest niece about being asked to work the party, and that it was on January 8th. She said, "Elvis' birthday? Oh, I think that's a sign you should do it." And I did. For three or four months, I was the waiter for the nudist group. It's fun to say these many years later that I worked in a G-string, and the experience was not without its lessons: If you're putting dollars in someone's underpants, bikini, G-string or T-bar, always crumple them up a little bit first. Crisp bills hurt.

Wayne

2010-07-31T05:36:00.010-05:00

I worked at a few different Village Inn Pancake House restaurants in Denver, where the chain is based. (One night I worked at three of them, starting at 5 in the afternoon and ending at 7 in the morning.) There were so many in town that were corporate owned, so I was still working for the same company and there was no need to reapply. It was just agreed that whichever chain "borrowed" you after you went over 40 hours would pay the overtime.

After about six months of working at my first Village Inn, I transferred to another that was, at the time, the busiest one in the nation. I was scheduled either swing or graveyard shift, and there was a host there that I thought was dreamy. Only just beginning to wonder if I was gay, I didn't completely understand the crush I had on Wayne, but ... oh, my. He was Latino, kinda little (but he had the biggest hair that was feathered back and he wore huge platform shoes, so that made us about the same height) and I loved his crushed velvet jackets and pencil thin mustache. He was also about five years older than me, so he seemed very mature. I was only 20 at the time.

One night, Wayne and I went out drinking at a couple of the popular discos. After we had gotten a little drunk, he wanted to go to a strip bar on Broadway called Nathan's. I'd never been in one. Technically, I wasn't old enough to be in any bar in Denver unless it was a beer joint, 'cos 18 was only drinking age for 3.2 beer at the time and for liquor you had to be 21, but I looked old for my age. I didn't own a car, so we took Wayne's, an early 70s Monte Carlo (or maybe a Cutlass) with a couple of the windows busted out in back that Wayne had covered with clear heavy plastic and duct tape. The car had character.

Nathan's was a real dive with expensive watered down drinks, and the strippers danced completely nude. These were middle-aged women, mostly, and I remember them being a little on the chunky side. They would get quarters from the customers to put in the juke box and walk around on a couple of the pool tables to songs like "Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay" or "There is a Tavern in the Town" with about the most bored expression on their face possible. Wayne was really into it. He kept buying drinks for the women, and before I knew it we had two or three of them sitting at or on our table. When the bar closed, we decided to go for breakfast at a popular cafe I would end up working at myself a few years later, but on the way there the cops pulled us over. I'd never been stopped by the police, so it was pretty scary for me. They had us get out of the car, they frisked us, and they started searching under the seats and in the seat cushions. That's when they asked me for my driver's license.

"Why do you want my driver's license? I wasn't driving?"

"Yeah, but you're the one with the knife!"

I was shocked to see the knife in their hand, mostly because I knew it was stolen.

"Wayne! What are you doing with a Village Inn steak knife?!"

Turns out, Wayne had used the knife to cut out the windows for his car and had stashed it under the front passenger seat. It would barely cut hamburger, but it was over five inches long, so the cops were calling this a concealed weapon. I started laughing when I heard Wayne's explanation, they figured out I wasn't dangerous, and we got away with just a warning. Times were different, and today I'm sure it would have been a DUI for him and some kind of ticket for me for being a minor and intoxicated in public. Maybe even a charge of terrorism for the knife.

That was the only time I went out with Wayne. I was still a long ways from discovering I liked men, and I think Wayne was straight anyway, but he sure could wear the heck out of those platform shoes.

My First Survey: Dining Alone

2010-07-30T06:34:00.006-05:00

It had never occurred to me until I read another waiter blog tonight complaining about people who eat alone that anyone thought there was anything wrong with a single diner - a one top. I waited tables and tended bar for over twenty years and I don't recall ever resenting a customer for being by themselves. Sometimes, I sensed the customer's discomfort, but I always thought it was because they didn't like hearing being identified as being alone, as in, "Table for one?". Could I have been overlooking a fear of being rebuffed by their server all this time?
When I recall my favorite customers, they were almost always singles, and there are two of them who became personal friends (one, I rented a room from, and another loaned me the money to buy a car) that I am still in touch with today - 25 years after we met.
I did a little searching and it turns out there are some waiters who hate waiting on singles, and even some restaurants that don't seat parties of one during dinner rush! I never knew this. I go out to eat, to plays and to movies alone probably 90% of the time. It had never crossed my mind to think I was in anyone's way. I feel like I've been wearing my pants backwards for 48 years and am only now discovering my freakishness.
I might not have enough waiters or former waiters following me to get any comments from them from the serving standpoint, but civilian comments are welcome also. What are your feelings about the one-top stigma? Do you feel guilty taking up a table? Do you feel resented or dismissed?

Worst Part of the Job

2010-07-30T00:57:00.003-05:00

I've had some odd job reviews. One restaurant/bar manager was particularly obsessed with my hair. One year he wrote: "Guy has been late to work on a couple of occasions, but his hair is always perfect." Another year he said, "Guy's hair color has been a problem in the past." (It wasn't anything like pink or blue ... men were just not allowed to have "two-tone" hair, and mine was hi-lighted.) Another manager complained in my yearly review that I was not good at telling her how to manage me.

Once, a manager asked me to quit, explaining that he didn't have any reason to fire me, but he just didn't like me. He'd been messing with my shifts for a month, trying to force me into leaving, and I didn't like him either, so I agreed to go, but I told him I could think of at least a dozen reasons for firing him (and did have the satisfaction of hearing he was let go a few months later).

If only the customers were all we had to worry about.

Jimmy

2010-07-29T03:34:00.010-05:00

Jimmy was a six foot four, two hundred eighty pound, wildly flamboyant some-time drag queen waiter I met at House of Pies when we were hired within the same week. It'll be 25 years ago this November since we worked our first shift together. We eventually shared a couple of apartments and I was also friends with his Mom and brother for many years.

Jimmy was always kinda high-strung, and though he covered his tables well in a rush, he could be a hoot to watch because he was so dramatic when he was busy. I loved playing pranks on him and one of my favorites was to get him to proposition the dishwasher in Spanish. I knew just enough dirty slang to get him in trouble, and he would fall for the same joke over and over. We'd be slammed and he'd ask me, "How do I say, 'I need water glasses in the back station?'" Two minutes later, Jimmy would be running away from the dish area screaming, "What did I say? What did I say?" with two or three guys from the back of the house cat-calling him. The dishwashers and bussers were in on my joke - they were the ones that taught me those phrases. After a while, I think Jimmy was doing it more for our entertainment than out of his own naivete.

Likely the worst fun I ever had at Jimmy's expense was the night he farted in the middle of his station. We were really busy, and he was mortified that someone might have heard him. I found him in the back service area trying to rip a hole in his pants so he'd have an excuse for what he said was a fart "so loud it sounded like a Buick backfiring." I told him that I doubted if anyone even noticed, convinced him to stop ripping his pants and we went back out on the floor. My station was right next to his, so as soon as we got to our tables, I said (real loud), "PHEWWW! What's that SMELL?!" Jimmy turned 13 shades of purple.

I may have been the better prankster at work, but Jimmy got even at home - even if he didn't always mean to. The first apartment we lived in together was a shotgun. There was a window over the door in the kitchen that led to a small pantry, and if that window had been left open, when you opened the front door, the window would slam shut and sound every bit like someone going out (or in?) the back door. I didn't know that yet the night I came home about 7:00 to Jimmy's car in his parking space, but no lights on in the apartment. When I walked in and heard the slamming sound, I called out for Jimmy. There was no answer - I was scared - and I picked up the first thing I could reach inside the door (it was probably something stupid like a magazine) and started doing my best Sabrina Duncan moves through the apartment. We didn't have an overhead light in the front room, so the first light switch I reached was the bathroom, and when I flipped it on I saw blood all over the mirror. It looked like Jimmy had tried to write a message, but I couldn't read it and I was dreading finding his body ... he must have been in pretty bad shape to actually write with his own blood.

I searched the rest of the apartment and there was no sign of Jimmy, but I was really puzzled about why his car would be there and he wasn't. Had he been kidnapped? I finally drove up to the restaurant where he worked and darned if he wasn't waiting tables! I was so mad and so relieved at the same time, I almost cried. When I told Jimmy the story about the "blood" he said, "Oh, I just wrote myself a note with lip gloss on the mirror so I'd be sure to see it. It must have melted." I asked, "What about your car?" and I found out he'd gotten a ride with another waiter. And to think I came within inches of beating someone to death with a magazine.

Jimmy and I had a few more adventures - and they usually involved me teasing him, and him scaring me - until we parted company about two years later and he moved in with his boyfriend. He died as the result of a fall about ten years ago, and I stayed in touch with his Mom for three or four years after, but we'd always wind up talking about Jimmy. After a while we just stopped calling each other.

Pretty, Dangerous

2010-07-28T00:57:00.005-05:00

Denver is home to at least a couple of "Gentleman's Clubs" that date back to the 19th century. These aren't strip clubs; they are essentially societies - places for networking, gaming, lectures, parties - and I applied at one of them, The University Club, established 1891. I'd heard from another waiter friend that private clubs were a good place to work because waiters had steady work (not so seasonal) and some club members were very generous with tips on top of a higher hourly wage than what was paid in restaurants.

When the University Club called me about my application, I was expecting, at the very least, an interview. Instead, they asked me if I could be there in 45 minutes to work lunch. I hightailed it down to the huge red brick castle of a building on Sherman Street and before my hair had dried I was fitted with a white dinner jacket that did NOT fit and began schlepping shoulder trays of double-plated entrees with real silver plate covers up five flights of stairs (I think it was two basement levels and three above ground) to "The Library." The building was very old, and the staircases were very tiny and steep with a turn at each half flight and a set of double swinging doors at each full landing. My God were those trays heavy by the time I got to the top floor. Of course, when lunch was over, we brought everything down the same way.

Most of the wait staff were black men around 60 years old who had been working at the club since before I was born. They were very formal, and excellent waiters, but there was a distinct feeling of distance between these professionals and any of the young waiters (that's me ... I was young then). The china, silver and crystal was beautiful and the rooms very elegant, but I was told that only the Ladies Dining Room and one other room were open to women. The rest of the building was exclusively for men, and I never did see any female employees.

When lunch had been served and the tables cleared, the wait staff clocked out and was permitted to enjoy an excellent meal. I can't remember now what it was, but it was some of the best food I'd ever tasted and we ate in the Ladies Dining Room. Then we hung up our jackets and were told to come back in three hours to set for dinner. I never returned. Never collected my pay ... nothing. I just knew it was only a matter of time before I went ass over teakettle down those stairs and it wasn't worth the risk. Still, it was interesting to be inside (and especially in the back of the house) of such a distinguished club, and I did get a really good meal out of it.

Rex

2010-07-27T00:52:00.006-05:00

Rex (another waiter on swing shift) and I were working the front two stations of a coffee shop one night, filling sugars when one of Rex's customers got up from the table with his pants and underwear around his ankles, shuffling toward the front door. He left the woman he was sitting with alone at the table - I don't know if it was a dare or he was just trying to embarrass her, but Rex started calling after the guy, "Sir! Sir! Sir!" He was really flustered, but of course nobody, Rex included, was gonna stop him from walking out 'cos we didn't want to touch a naked customer. I told Rex that we could all see the 'Sir' part, and he turned back around and said, indignantly, "I was trying to be polite!"

Rex was funny; kinda fastidious and I think he was from a small town and not really used to as much variety as we sometimes got at that restaurant. The funniest story he told on himself was when he bought a cock ring to wear under his jeans when he went out to the bars. He'd never owned one before, and he said the first time he had it on, he had just walked in the door of a bar and the ring - too large for him - slid off, and fell out the leg of his pants clattering on the floor behind him. Rex said, "I just kept on walking."

Nicknames

2010-07-26T03:56:00.005-05:00

(From the days before POS and chits, when everything was handwritten)

I trained a waitress who couldn't remember table numbers to save her soul. I didn't realize she'd been having so much trouble until I was expediting orders for her tables "Preg" and "Bald." She said, "Oh, I was going to cross that off the ticket before I gave it to them."

Call Me

2010-07-26T01:44:00.011-05:00

Much of my banquet work was on-call. I would anchor at one or two places and work my way up the list to establish myself as regular staff, and then fill in my remaining time with shifts at hotels that didn't pay as well or do convention work. One year I had 18 W-2s. Tax time was messy.

I captained at some of the larger venues because I could make more money, but sometimes that meant leading an entire staff of employees from temporary agencies who didn't have a clue about banquet service. At an awards event with 1300 members of the U.S. Marine Corps in attendance, we were just about to open the doors to the banquet hall when I noticed that all 15 waiters in my section (I was one of four captains for the event) were standing at attention with their backs to the front door. I'm not sure why they thought the guests were going to enter through the kitchen, but I had about 30 seconds to get them to turn around. I was motioning with my hand, making circles with my finger and the faster I did it, the faster they turned. It's a wonder they weren't dizzy by the time they realized the rest of the room was facing the other way.

Some of the regular staff at the hotels could be just as odd. I worked with a waiter who bit trays whenever he got nervous and managed to put teeth marks in nearly all of them by the time he quit. One waitress would remind everyone after the functions that she could telepathically change the traffic lights on Broadway Avenue so "Anybody going south, just follow me." (The signals were timed for the speed limit, but we just let her think she was special.) There was another woman who had fingernails that were so long she couldn't button the top button of her blouse without stabbing herself in the neck, so she was always needing someone to "do me up" and help her put on her bow tie.

I worked with some quirky people and I worked with some that were so amazing they could run circles around me. Keeping myself "on the circuit" opened me up to a lot of different styles of service and it helped me through off-season. Sometimes I'd wait on the same people at two different hotels in the same week, and it was funny to see it dawn on them why I looked so familiar. When I busted my leg and was out of commission for four months, it was the contacts I made through my on-call work that got me back to earning enough money to pay my bills.

Beyond the Tipping Point

2010-07-25T01:08:00.004-05:00

Dealing with the same silly questions or the same comments day after day can wear anyone down. When I worked for Sears, I remember hearing one of the gals from the catalog sales department say over and over again, "What is your telephone number so I can look up your order. . . Yes, your telephone number. . . . Because if all the customers were listed under the same telephone number you'd be waiting all day." She was a woman on the verge.

I have my own pet peeves. I get awfully tired of the people who, when they find out my name is Guy, say, "Like Guy Smiley!" or "Hi Guy! hahahaha" and when I was waiting tables, it bugged me to have people ask, "So what's your real job?" Some things I found ways to work around, like the Super Salad issue. "Would you like soup or salad?" became "Would you like salad or soup?" but I admit I lost my cool over some other stuff. At the pancake house, we served coffee in thermal pots and one night when the eleventy-millionth customer of the night asked me "Do you have restrooms?" I said, "No. That's why we put the pots on the table." Kinda smart-ass, but I smiled, so I got away with it.

The most dramatic thing I ever did, though - my biggest tantrum - happened at one of those turn and burn chain restaurants. I was swamped and tearing through the restaurant with a shoulder tray of hot food when one of the customers in a booth reached out and grabbed me. "We are ready to order NOW!" I pulled my arm away and used it to completely wipe all of the condiments and place settings off the empty table next to them and set down the tray of hot food in its place, and then turned to them and said in the sweetest voice, "Sure. What can I get you?" They were shocked and asked me if I didn't need to serve that other food first. I said, "Oh, you're right! I'll be right back" and I picked up the tray, served the food, and acted like nothing had happened. I felt insane, but I think they were scared not to be nice to me after that.

Curb Service

2010-07-24T16:18:00.003-05:00

For many years there was a place on the corner of 1st and Broadway in Denver called Mary and Lou's Cafe. Homemade pie, biscuits and red-eye gravy and other down home food. In the early 90s, it was remodeled and renamed The Hornet. About a week after the new place opened up, someone drove their car into the corner of the building. They repaired the building, re-opened, and a couple of weeks after that someone else did the same thing. When they repaired it the next time, they put a big sign on the corner window that said, "Drive-Thru Now Closed."

Beep Beep

2010-07-24T03:47:00.004-05:00

I used to supplement my income from waiting tables with office work so I wasn't on my feet all day and night. One of my first "second jobs" was setting up appointments for pager salesman. (This was when beepers were first becoming popular and way before cell phones.) I made the calls cold from a publication that listed the company with the president, vice-president, office manager, etc in descending order of rank. My instructions were to "start at the top." The funniest call I had went like this:

"May I please speak with David Brown?"
"Mr. Brown passed away two years ago."
"I'm so sorry. Is Dan Jones available?"
"Mr. Jones died last October."
"Oh dear. Well, I've got one other individual recommended as a contact for your company. May I speak with Charles Smith?"
"Mr. Smith is out sick today."
I didn't know how to respond. Then we both started to laugh and I said,
"I'll bet he's worried."

Speaking of beepers. One of the restaurants I worked at decided to replace the lighted sign that let a waiter know when their order was up (I haven't seen these in years, but they used to be common) with pagers. Instead of looking for our number to light up (and/or checking the kitchen) we were supposed to stay on the floor and wait to be paged. The pagers were checked out at the hostess stand every day, so you had to have them coordinated with your waiter ID. They were supposed to have a volume button on them, but one unit might be turned all the way up and could barely be heard, while another was loud enough to rouse a team of huskies in a neighboring state.

The experiment didn't last very long. For one thing, every time a waiter's beeper went off, 8 or 10 people got up from their table and reached for their pocket or purse. It annoyed the crap out of the customers to have beepers sounding every time someone's food was ready. When the restaurant was busy, it sounded like a video arcade. Another problem was the cooks who just liked having the power to call waiters back to the kitchen like puppets on a string, whether their order was up or not. It was just one more of those ideas that probably seemed great in a corporate boardroom, but hadn't been thought out to what it would sound like in a restaurant with 12 waiters with over 100 tables between them.

I think about it now and wonder why they didn't just try pagers that vibrated, or if they made such a thing back then, or if maybe they did try it and they just didn't pan out. At any rate, I was awfully glad not to have one more thing to clip on to me. We went back to using the lights and everything worked out fine just like it had for years.

Erase, erase erase

2010-07-24T01:26:00.006-05:00

I've got a filter for most icky people. If I don't like someone, I usually forget their face, their name, and everything about them. I've written about some of them on this blog that, for whatever reason, stayed with me, but not by their real names ... I couldn't recall those for love or money.

When I waited tables or tended bar, I could remember what someone ate or drank even years after they ordered it if I liked them. If I didn't like them, I could forget I had a ticket hanging, I was that eager to make them disappear. My rose-colored glasses kept me from hanging on to bad energy, but they also kept me from recognizing some of the same bozos who came in more than once to stir up the same trouble. "EVERY time I come here the food is LOUSY!" was one I should have braced myself for, but I would only realize I had heard the same words from these people after they ordered, ate all their food, and tried to get out of paying for the third or fourth time.

Some of the people I really liked weren't necessarily good tippers, and some of the ones I despised might tip me fairly well. The money didn't have that much to do with my feelings, even though it was hard not to take it personally when I'd done everything but crochet their napkins for them and I made a lousy two bucks on a four-top. I had some customers that were just a pleasure to see; I liked knowing they were on the same planet. There was a beautiful elderly woman who attended meetings with a couple of different groups that I remembered the second time I saw her. I said, "You look familiar to me" and she smiled and said, "Oh, but I am." and then she winked. I think I blushed all the way to my toes, but it was the sweetest moment, and I'll probably always remember her. There was another guy I ran into in a supermarket years after I'd worked at a restaurant where I was his waiter. He said, "Hi" and I instantly thought, "Corned beef hash and eggs over hard. Rye toast." 25 years later and I still remember.

If I had a bad shift, and I wanted to forget the whole thing, I would spend my tips before I got home at another restaurant, a bar, the grocery ... it didn't matter, so long as that tainted money didn't come into the house with me. I think that's what helped me start fresh the next day. It didn't protect me from being hurt again, 'cos I don't think I've ever been very good at separating some people's need to lash out at strangers and my own reaction to being attacked. I worked in the dining room of a hotel that hosted assertiveness training classes where attendees were instructed to practice their assertiveness skills on their waiter during the lunch break. I blew a lot of cash on days I waited on them. Somebody wasn't doing a very good job of explaining the difference between "assertive" and just plain "ass." Maybe my being available to be their punching bag kept them from beating their wife or kicking their dog. I like to think some good came out of it.

Cow Patti

2010-07-23T06:29:00.003-05:00

When the health craze was making one of its rounds of being in vogue in the early 80s, the restaurant I worked for came up with a recipe for pancakes with bits of granola stirred into the batter. They were going to call them "Trail Cakes" until a few of us already familiar with that term recommended they reconsider.

Sales vs. Banquets

2010-07-22T04:02:00.009-05:00

As a banquet captain, I had my share of run-ins with the women of the sales and catering staff. I'd be hard pressed to pick my least favorite of the two I dealt with most. One of them, Debbie, was a little pixie with a passive-aggressive streak a mile wide. For instance, one night as I put the finishing touches on an Italian-themed buffet, she peeked in the door and commented, "Neat centerpieces! Where did you steal that idea from?" If my staff had gotten rave reviews about their service from a client, she'd be sure to say something like, "It's too bad we can't get that kind of response all the time!"

The other woman, Kristen ... padded shoulders, a little bit of a trampy soccer mom look with the most insincere, snarky demeanor imaginable. She was always in the way, completely clueless and just plain evil. After a hellish weekend when Kristen and I got into an argument because she was bossing around my wait staff, she wrote me up. The waitresses were outraged and wrote a letter supporting me, to no avail, but they managed to get even with her one morning about a week later.

Kristen came click-click-clicking in her high heels and tight business suit into the banquet kitchen for her morning coffee and as she was filling her cup my lead waitress, Alice, a woman of about 60, asked her, "Honey, is that a maternity outfit?" Kristen sputtered for a moment and said, "No, why?" and Alice just smiled, "Well, you know there's a lot of that going on around here. I just thought it looked like it might be. It is a little snug." She said it so sweetly, there was no way Kristen could fault her for it, but as soon as she was out the door, the rest of the wait staff was howling with laughter. Alice looked at me and said, "Don't FUCK with an old lady .... or any of her friends!"

A Familiar Face

2010-07-21T14:48:00.007-05:00

It was usually a good thing to have "Regulars" and it was touching when they would wait for my station to open up. Sometimes, they'd tell me that they had come to the restaurant on another night but decided to go someplace else when they found out I wasn't working. Also, there were the regulars that never wavered from the same order, so I could see them walking in the door and have their food in front of them before they were halfway through a cup of coffee, and we only talked if they felt like talking. It was nice for both of us.

But sometimes .... oy! Sometimes I felt like I would explode if I had to wait on a particular "Regular" for one more meal. Always the same complaints, the same criticisms, the same stories ... they'd been telling me the same thing for a couple of years, two or three times a week, and I just couldn't take it. Funny enough, I know they liked me. They would ask for me, but every once in a while, I'd have to get away for my own sanity and I would pay one of the other waiters to take care of them with the excuse that I was "just going on break." I didn't do it too often because it usually meant I'd have to hear for the next two or three weeks about "how awful that girl was."

One of my regulars I remember in kind of a bittersweet way was at the pancake house I worked at when I was just starting out. He was an old man who'd come in about 9 at night maybe twice a week and sit at table 4, a little deuce against the wall. He would order a side of dry toast and a side of bacon with coffee, and then a side of dry toast and a side of bacon 'to go' when he was about halfway through his meal. It was always the same, so I'd drop the toast and call the bacon automatically, but I still went over to the table so he could order it each time. You get a feel after a while for people that like to be anticipated, and the ones that get pleasure or feel empowered by getting to place the order, and he just seemed like he enjoyed making that second order. One night I mentioned his 'one to stay, one to go' to another waitress I worked with and she said, "I'll bet that second order is for his dog." After that, I'd just about cry every time I waited on him. Maybe I knew subconsciously that one day I'd be an old man with a little dog waiting for me at home.

New patches

2010-07-20T22:46:00.009-05:00

At some of the hotels where I worked, they changed general managers almost as often as I changed hair colors. At one of them, the first thing the new manager did was to direct that the underground parking lot walls be painted a different color. Four different managers at that hotel, and four different color schemes for the garage just in the six years I worked there. There were so many things wrong with the building - serious things like faulty electrical wiring, closed off rooms in need of repair, and holes in the carpeting - but they went untouched. Got to be, whenever there was a change in the guards we'd say to one another, "I wonder what color they'll paint the parking garage?"

At another hotel, where it seemed like our food and beverage managers hung around just long enough to send out a couple of memos misspelling their own name and commit a half-dozen acts of sexual harassment (some of them worked quick and could do this in one week), the plan was to change the uniforms for the restaurant and bar staff. We changed uniforms about eight times over the years. One combination I remember was black pants, rainbow suspenders and a white short-sleeved polo shirt with simulated paint spatters that one of the bartenders dubbed, "Gloria Vanderbilt on mescaline." Suspenders are not meant for everyone. The guys didn't have a real problem with them (except some of them that didn't like having them snapped by pranksters) but we had some pretty big chested waitresses that were forever having to adjust them because they either made a wide bow around their chest that pushed their boobs in or a tight line down the middle that shoved them to the sides. Another uniform was pink tux pants, tux shirt, cummerbund, bow tie and suspenders. Not only was this second one an impractical color for schlepping food, but it made all of us look like Easter bunnies. (The effect was even worse when several of the waiters stood together.) The pants had a button inside the fly, one inside the waist band, the zipper to the fly and the clasp for the pants, as well as the clasp for the cummerbund, the clips for the suspenders, buttons and studs for the tux shirt and the clasp for the bow tie to deal with. The first time I put it on, I said, "If there's ever a fire in this thing, I'll never get out of it."

Whether is was the parking garage or the uniforms that the boss changed, it really came down to a dog marking his territory and wanting to smell his own scent about the place. Waiters make their living judging character, and we had a good idea of which one of the new managers was gonna last (that being a relative term for managers) but even when it came to good managers, the paint in the garage and the seat of my uniform pants always lasted longer.

Feeling needed

2010-07-19T23:51:00.006-05:00

I used to work all of the holidays because I didn't have any family in town and I wanted to give the other waiters and waitresses a chance to spend as much time with theirs as they could on those days. One Thanksgiving, I had stayed all the way through the day shift and halfway into swing when I finally was cut, and I decided to take myself out to dinner at a buffet and have my own celebration. I arrived at the restaurant about a half hour before closing, but I didn't feel too guilty since it was a buffet and I wasn't gonna be camping. What I hadn't taken into account was that most of the food was gone! I would have been so much better off going home alone than trying to convince myself that I was actually celebrating anything. The meager scraps of pressed turkey and crusty bits of dressing made me lonelier than ever for my family.

After that experience, I had a new motive for working on the holidays. I was determined that each person I waited on on Christmas and Thanksgiving (not all the time ... I wasn't a fanatic!) felt valued and noticed. I still covered the shifts, but I wasn't just doing it for my co-workers anymore. I've always liked to feel necessary, and there were so many customers who were eating alone on those days. Now I knew what it felt like to be invisible in a crowd of people on Thanksgiving.

Eventually, there was a diner I worked at exclusively on Thanksgiving and Christmas, whether I pulled any other shifts for them or not. For about seven years, I committed to serving holiday meals there and got to know people over time and establish my regulars. It was almost like visiting family. I've got some great memories of those shifts. Heart-wrenching, in some ways. There were some customers who were so frail, I wondered if they would make it the next year and serving them what might be their last holiday dinner was a real honor. I think about some of them still .... an elderly woman who dressed to the Nines, so polite and soft-spoken, who loved the cherries in the Waldorf salad, so I always made sure she had extra .... a couple, one of whom had wasting syndrome and could barely swallow who held hands while they ate ... I'm glad I got to be the one to be certain that they got the best we had to give.

It made me feel good when people told me it was their "best ever" or how much my service meant to them, and I didn't feel the pressure on those days to work for tips. It's too bad I didn't have that attitude every day, and I don't really know why I didn't. So much of my feelings about waiting were affected by how I chose to look at the situation. I'm thankful I had at least two days out of the year when I chose to feel glad to be a waiter.

Custer's Last Stand

2010-07-19T02:23:00.013-05:00

One convention I dreaded every year at the hotel where I was a cocktail waiter was hosted by the Native American Housing Authority. This is a lobbyist organization that would meet in Denver to discuss their grievances with the United States, which usually boiled down to grievances against white people. There's some history behind all of that. Oddly, the event coincided with the Annual Stock Show and Trade Fair. The same dates.

In spite of the fact that our particular hotel was filled almost entirely with Native Americans, in one of the grandest gestures of insensitivity, the hotel management insisted that we all dress like cowboys ... "for Stock Show." My favorite bartender used to describe this week as "Custer's Last Stand."

The last year I worked at that hotel, I cocktailed $1300 worth of drinks (at about $1.50 to $4.00 each) on the first night of the convention and made a total of five dollars in tips. That's about 450 drinks. I ran my butt off and I was yelled at, catcalled, pinched, grabbed and insulted all night, but I didn't have any support from the hotel because the room revenue was where they were making their money. Also, in spite of the alcohol classes the hotel had started requiring the f&b staff to take to lower their insurance premiums, they insisted that we continue to serve people who were clearly drunk "because they were staying in the hotel and weren't driving." (Never mind that bartenders and waiters are still responsible for the patron's safety if they fall down and hit their head or OD on booze.)

On the last night, after most of the conventioneers had gone home and only a dozen or so remained in the hotel, I was tending bar when a woman from their group walked in just before last call. The woman seemed relatively sober, and she sat at the bar in front of the taps and ordered a draft. These taps had the kegs sitting right underneath them, so at that area of the bar there was an extra 18 inches or so between me and the customer. I set the beer in front of her, she took one sip, put it down and started to go over backwards dead drunk.

Now, this woman was NOT small. I reached out quickly and grabbed ahold of her arms, but she must have outweighed me by 100 pounds (at that time .... only by about 40 pounds today). I held on as best as I could and started screaming for Chuck, the security guard, but she was pulling me over to her side a little bit more every second. By the time Chuck arrived, I had the toes of my boots hooked against the drain board of the beer taps and I was hanging by my waist off the edge of the bar. I was about to let her fall 'cos her head was only a couple of feet from the carpet by then and I didn't wanna go sailing over head first myself. Chuck got a good grip on her and let her down easy and she never did come to until we splashed her face with some water.

I learned later that there is a genetic mutation that aids in the metabolizing of alcohol that Native Americans do not have, so they are much more prone to its effects. I don't know if that would have made a huge difference in my feelings about waiting on that group, 'cos it's awfully frustrating to do that much work for so little money and to be abused that way. Mostly, it makes me angry that the hotel fueled that situation by threatening me with my job if I didn't keep serving them booze. (I'm pretty sure the cowboy getup didn't help matters either.) Thank God I'm not working there any more.

Dollus Interuptus

2010-07-17T18:07:00.008-05:00

"Wow. You made these yourself?" was all I could think to say when the bride's aunt delivered the enormous bride and groom dolls. Each about two feet tall, designed to look like toddlers in a tux and an antebellum gown, they might have been mistaken for "children from a previous marriage" if they hadn't been so quiet and (for the most part) well-behaved. The aunt insisted the dolls were to be placed on the cake table as a surprise gift for the happy couple. More likely a shock, but family trumps good taste. The cake topper was the traditional bride and groom (represented as adult figures) and the giant dolls stood sentry on either either side of the cake, like mutant offspring, easily 8 times the size of their "folks."

About halfway through the cocktail reception before dinner, our banquet captain, Paul, made some last-minute adjustments to the flowers arranged around the cake, and accidentally knocked over the giant girl doll. Apparently, the dolls were set up using some kind of spring mechanism located inside that had sprung when she fell. Obviously flustered, Paul had turned the girl doll upside down and had his hand up her dress almost halfway to his elbow when one of the waitresses let out a shriek, "Paul! What are you DOING?!"

The whole room froze. Paul's face was beet red - he did look guilty - and yet I don't think the scene would have been nearly as disturbing if the dolls hadn't been so close to the size of actual children. The rest of the wait staff helped him by doubling over with convulsive laughter. For the rest of the event, we kept after him, saying things like, "What was she wearing under that dress?" and "You know she's not real, don't you?" and "Really, Paul. Couldn't you have waited till you got home?"

Stiffed

2010-07-17T04:00:00.013-05:00

I was used to people just pointing at their coffee cup when I asked them if they'd like coffee, so when the old man kinda waved his arm toward his side in front of him, I figured he was one of those kind that just didn't feel like answering me. Oh Christ, another weird one. The restaurant was packed - both dining rooms. It was a Sunday about 1:30; a pancake house on Colorado Boulevard, way too close to too many churches (and the lunch rush that followed services) for my sanity. I had the front station - just barely inside the door with a big round as the main table. I was working three 4-tops, two or three 3-tops and about 5 deuces along with the round where the old man was sitting with five other members of his family. I poured coffee for him, told the folks at the table I'd give them a moment to look at the menu and I'd be back to take their order. In the time it took me to turn around and get to the service entrance, the gentleman had flipped over the back of his chair and bitten off his tongue. I didn't see a thing (unless you count the arm spasm, which I found out later was actually a heart attack ... he may not have wanted coffee after all).

I was picking up an order and my manager came rushing up to me and said, "DID YOU SERVE ANY FOOD TO TABLE 20?!! DID YOU SERVE ANYTHING TO TABLE 20?!! ANYTHING?!! It kinda freaked me out that she was being so crazy but we were really slammed and it just wasn't registering with me that table 20 was my new 6 top. I went back around the corner with a ham and cheese omelet, hash browns and toast for table 3, saw the old man lying on the floor on his back with blood all over his face and someone starting to give him mouth to mouth, but there was nobody at table 3! The first thing I wondered was how that man had gotten so bloody, but almost immediately I panicked because I thought he was my customer from table 3 (hardly anyone is recognizable after they've bitten off their tongue) and I was sure the cooks were gonna kill me if I wasted that order. I went back to the kitchen with the plates, put the omelet in the window and said, This man is dead, but I think you can save the hash browns." I was right. They were pissed.

Just about that time, (maybe 30 seconds or a minute after it had happened) I just forgot everything that I was about to ring up, which orders were about to come down ... just all of it. I went back out to my station, and my customers who saw the whole bloody mess were walking out, whether they'd eaten, paid, still had to order or had already placed their orders. They were totally grossed out. I had one table that was around the corner though, table 18, that couldn't see what was going on. They screamed from across the dining room, "Where the hell is our food!" I had to step over the man's legs to get to them, but when I reached their table, I said, "I'm sorry" (in my nicest voice) but one of my customers has died and I wasn't expecting it. Let me check with the kitchen." It was so surreal. They weren't even shocked. Just hungry and mad and indignant.

I walked back through my station, stepped back over the man's legs and around the corner to check on table 18's order. I don't remember if it was ready, if I served them, or they walked. By this time - maybe 2 minutes into it - I was coming unraveled. People were moving into my station from the other tables to watch the resuscitation efforts, but since the customers that were supposed to be at those tables were gone I couldn't make hide nor hair of any of it. About this time I remember the son (or son-in-law) from the round table saying, "I can't believe this. This is just so embarrassing. I can't believe this is happening." There were three kids with them, all under the age of ten, and (I guess) his wife ... the kids' mom, anyway. I was trying to comfort her 'cos she started getting a little hysterical, and just about then the EMTs arrived. They injected the man with a huge needle - I mean HUGE - and zapped him with those paddles as they were getting him on the stretcher.

I know during some of this, people were asking for more coffee and wanting me to tell their waitress that they had changed tables. I kept stepping over the man's feet (and eventually, the man's feet and a bunch of equipment) to get through my station and my boss was still asking me if the guy had eaten anything. It was only then that I realized she was worried that those people were gonna sue the restaurant, like she thought he might have cut himself on the food. In the meantime, the man was dead and I was so wigged I couldn't have told you my name. I asked if I could have a minute to calm down and smoke a cigarette, but my boss said I needed to clean the blood off the floor because we still had people waiting to be seated. It was a spot about as big as two dinner plates. Who knows why I didn't walk. It was just a really crazy moment.

I did work through the rest of the afternoon and we found out the next day that the EMTs were able to bring the old man back to life. I never did thank my customer at table 3 (who was probably most responsible for saving him). I didn't even ask him if he'd like another omelet. It was all so sudden and, I think because it happened in the middle of such a huge rush, everything kind of exploded in my head. I guess you can tell by the choppy way I remember everything - kinda like 30 snapshots or really short pieces of film strung together with gaps in between - that I was in shock. For a while after that, I was really freaked out if anyone even coughed or moved suddenly. I wanted to take their pulse before I took their order. "How are you today?" had a ring of sincerity to it that had never before been a part of my delivery. Unfortunately, this wasn't the only one of my customers to die in my station, but I'll save the other one for another blog. Just remember: If a customer doesn't answer you when you ask them for a beverage order, it doesn't necessarily mean they are ignoring you.

Good accoustics

2010-07-16T04:15:00.005-05:00

I walked into the men's room of the bar I work at one night a couple of years ago and there was a woman standing next to a man who was using the trough-style urinal. I must have looked surprised because she said, "Oh it's okay, he's my brother. We were just talking."

Born A Waiter

2010-07-15T03:24:00.015-05:00

And if you're born a waiter
you're born to be hurt
You're born to be stepped on,
lied to, cheated on and treated like dirt

-Sung to the tune of "Born a Woman"

Occasionally, I hear someone talking about an "easy" job like bartending or waiting tables, or maybe I'll read about "all those tips" waiters make, and I know that anyone who hasn't done the job just couldn't possibly understand the tremendous pressure, risk and vulnerability a waiter experiences. Granted, some never have to put in any time at a rough cocktail lounge, diner or 24-hour restaurant, so they might be spared some of the more vulgar incidents, but it's never "easy."

I have worked in some rough places, and in my time, I've had my clothes ripped, been cussed at and called names, made fun of, threatened with death, pushed, tripped, grabbed, flashed, groped, accused of ejaculating in someone's eggs Benedict, and even hit in the face with a plate of two over-easy ("Is there something wrong with your eggs, ma'am?" was my response). I've had to clean up blood, vomit, pick up used condoms, dirty disposable diapers, hypodermic needles, cups of tobacco spittle, snotty tissues, and even someone's partial plate (as in, dentures) - all in the course of waiting tables. And that's not counting the tantrums thrown by the cooks - many of them on jail release from halfway houses or suffering from PTSD which isn't exactly conducive to a high stress environment.

One hotel bar I worked at was down the street from a tavern where the bartender had been shot and killed by someone who came in for a drink after last call. Two other restaurants I worked at were held up. The first one, the assistant manager was the only one at work, but the second one happened while the restaurant was packed with people lined up out the door (I was one of the customers in line - I'd come in on my day off). At another restaurant (one which deserves its own blog entry) the cops refused to come "unless a weapon had been used." It wasn't enough for someone to just produce one - that's how common of an occurrence it was.

I'm proud of surviving all of that. I never went to college, and I've never been wealthy, but I can measure my success in my endurance - my resilience. There are plenty of people who couldn't handle such an "easy" job.

Disaster Planning

2010-07-13T15:31:00.012-05:00

Working in the banquet department of a hotel can be like booking passage on the Titanic, knowing full well before you sail that the ship is going to sink. You even know why it's going to sink.

In banquets, you're provided with an outline of the menu, program, seating arrangements, number of guests ... all the details any reasonable person (sales and catering staff are obviously excluded from this description) would need to predict impending doom. The banquet department is where the sales staff gets to realize their creativity without actually having to do any of the work. If they dreamed of pink fluffy clouds, leprechauns and seating for 400 in a broom closet, it was up to the banquet staff to "take care of the details."

I remember one ongoing fiasco - a collaborative effort of the entire sales and catering staff, most of whom barely spoke to one another - of which I was the primary "detail" person. For an entire Summer, I acted as the poolside bartender for a complimentary cocktail and hors-d'oeuvre party the hotel hosted to drum up new business. These events were co-sponsored by liquor distributors and often featured gimmicky new cocktails such as the "Lynchburg Lemonade." Sometimes, we couldn't even get people to drink the stuff for free. A series of colorful flavored rum schnapps was still sitting on the shelf of the lobby bar 5 years after their debut at a Pool Party. Every once in a while, someone would ask, "What's that?" but nobody wanted to drink them.

There were a couple of things right off the bat that really sucked about these parties. One was the weather. The pool was an outdoor one, located on the 6th floor of a downtown hotel and open to the air. Standing rules were that the party was to proceed, regardless of rain, hail, lightening ... the hotel had invited people and we had an "obligation" to come through. Even if it wasn't particularly stormy, the winds can really kick up in Denver from time to time, so trying to run a buffet and serve drinks often meant dealing with billowing table cloths and skirting, napkins and promotional materials blown into the pool, Sterno flames blowing from underneath chafing dishes like flame throwers. One afternoon, I was nearly knocked unconscious by a 10 foot hard plastic Spuds McKenzie (Bud Light's bulldog mascot of the 80s) the distributors had attached to the railing surrounding the pool deck. The wind knocked the sign loose and Spuds' foot landed on my head, knocking me to the ground. I remember the catering director being especially concerned about the dog. "It didn't break, did it?"

Another problem with the parties was knowing how many people were actually going to show up. The rule was we had to keep the food going for two hours and, in theory, each person was supplied with two free drink tickets with their "invitation." The invitations were passed out randomly on the mall downtown; just a flier that entitled the bearer to two free drinks and free hors-d'oeuvre at the hotel on Wednesday, starting at 5:00p.m. The event was supposed to end at 7:00, but the sales staff was so eager to please that these parties frequently went on past dark. The kitchen would estimate how many people were going to attend, based on how much free food the Chef was willing to give away. That usually meant we had half of what we needed just to get through the scheduled part, and anything more required the patience of Job and finagling that would have been daunting to an Enron executive. The sales staff demanded, the kitchen refused, and I was stuck between them, facing a patio full of people who had been promised something that was not being delivered.

One afternoon, I had the party set to go, was dressed in whatever promotional t-shirt I was required to wear for the day (shivering in the wind because it was not the kind of day anyone would choose to wear shorts and a t-shirt unless they were doing it to keep their job) when people started showing up with blank pieces of pink paper. No details about the party ... no "2 free drinks" mentioned, and nothing about how long the event was supposed to last. One of the sales execs had taken it upon himself to pass out the "flyers" on the mall that afternoon without bothering look at them first. Instead of grabbing the stack that the printers had delivered, he just handed out these blank sheets of paper and told people to show up on the 6th floor of our hotel at 5 o'clock for free food and drinks. And they did! It's hard enough to limit people to two drinks at a host event anyway, but when they don't know about any limitations, it's pandemonium. As usual, it was my job to land on my feet as best I could and balance the demands of the guests with the resistance of the kitchen and the spinelessness of the sales staff to create a "party."

From my Summer of bartending on Wednesdays at the pool, I accumulated almost no money. I wasn't allowed to have a tip jar and the grat was only based on the food that was supposed to be served, not what actually went out; my bartender fee was split with the sales department and my wages were negligible. About the only perk to the event was the free t-shirt I got each shift as my uniform, and most of those were stained by the time the shift was over. I look back on that time and so many like it and I wonder why I stayed. It must have been something like Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe I was just waiting to get even with Spuds.

Making Excuses

2010-07-12T01:57:00.001-05:00

One of the waitresses at a hotel I worked at called in sick for her shift the next morning, telling me that her husband had shot and killed himself that night and she "had a lot of blood and stuff to clean off the walls."

(So, technically, she still could work. She just didn't feel like it.)

Being Unmanageable

2010-07-10T22:30:00.006-05:00

There have been a couple of times that I've been suckered into "cross-training" for assistant manager positions. It wasn't that I ever intended to be an assistant manager ... I was just trying to get some hours while we were slow. One hotel made it a policy for a while to cross-train the entire wait staff. There wasn't much to the training - just minor closing paperwork stuff - but I do remember one manager who took this training very seriously. He had devised a series of trick questions that he would run by his trainee randomly throughout the night. The only point to the questions seemed to be to get the person to answer incorrectly. For instance, he would paint a scenario like "A customer comes up to the register to pay their check. What do you do?" As you went through the steps of asking the customer about their dining experience, processing the method of payment, etc, he would hold up his hand, eyes twinkling with excitement, and say, "Wait! Trick Question!! The customer doesn't bring their check to the register! The waiter is supposed to do that!" It was his big ol' "Gotcha" moment and he just lived for it. Consequently, even when we knew were being set up for one of these little traps, we just humored him. He had so few pleasures. It was especially fun when got him to "trick" us 2 or 3 times over the same thing. Shucks. When would we ever learn?

One of the hotels I worked for participated in a program with a University that facilitated placement of individuals attending their Hotel and Restaurant Management School in exchange for tax credits. These students were going in debt so they could work twice as many hours as the people they would "manage" for a fraction of their earnings. You've just got to admire that kind or dogmatism. I like to think we did our best to save them, but there were some who probably still slipped through our fingers who were just beyond help.

The students hadn't been taught anything about how to wait tables, but the course appeared to be heavy on methods of discipline and these kids could hardly wait to jump in and kick some waiter ass. I remember one of the gals who worked for a semester with us would run white glove inspections of the service areas after closing, often resulting in ridiculous directives, like the time she told another waiter and me to throw away ten pounds of coffee that had been prepped in filters for the morning restaurant, banquet and room service rush. She insisted we were not going home until that coffee had been "removed." Well, you can't put it back in the bags, even if you did drag them out of the trash, so I turned to the other closing waiter, pointed my finger at the stack of filled coffee filters and commanded, "CURTIS! EAT. THOSE. GROUNDS!" and then we both laughed ourselves silly.

Another management candidate was fascinatingly unpleasant in both appearance and demeanor. Very pale skinned, at least six feet tall, quite heavy set with an unruly mop of curly red hair that she kept tied in a nylon stocking (as in pantyhose - I'm not kidding) she would thunder through the dining room and scream at whichever server had been seated, "FOUR!!!" or "TWO!!" regardless of whether you were already in the process of taking your table's drink order or introducing the specials. She had been trained to let servers know how many people she had seated in their station, but she was unable to bypass this "training" when it was no longer needed. Precisely because she was such an imposing physical presence (with a voice like a litter of cats in a wringer washer) she did more than just startle the crap out of the customers, she frightened them. If she's working in the food and beverage industry today, it would almost have to be someplace like a cafeteria in a reformatory school.

I've worked with almost every variety of managers: Compulsive liars, coke heads, control freaks, sadists, drunks, corporate puppets, thieves, sexual predators, and the occasional reasonably sane individual. Restaurant and hotel managers were mostly people to work around, rather than any kind of asset to the bar and wait staff. I wasn't the kind to leave just because business was slow or tips sucked, but if I had to work with an unmanageable manager, well, "I was looking for a job when I found this one."

The Big Chill

2010-07-10T01:54:00.000-05:00

When I was a young waiter, from time to time I'd have customers (mostly women, but a few men) who liked to flirt with me pretty aggressively. I was so naive, and I embarrassed easily, so I can see why it was fun for them, but it wasn't usually so much fun for me.

There were two gals in particular who did their level best to shock me. They dressed in short skirts and bustiers with fishnet stockings and high heels. Kinda like drag queens (if I had known what a drag queen looked like at that age - I wasn't out yet). One night they came in to the restaurant, asked for my station, and ordered dessert. Lots of lip licking and playing with their straws and other suggestive movements, and then, "I want a banana nut crepe ... with a REALLY BIG banana!" The other gal ordered her dessert, probably just as tauntingly, but it's the crepe I remember.

Brother.

I called the order for the crepe (the only part of the order the cook handled) and when it came up, I made the dessert ... 3 little balls of vanilla ice cream rolled in the crepe, covered with hot fudge, sliced bananas over the top, whipped cream and chopped nuts, all on a dessert plate. Then I braced myself for the inevitable finger in the whipped cream or the "Nice nuts" comment; I just wanted to get it over with.

I set the dessert in front of the woman - very buxom in her bustier - and those little balls of ice cream, warmed by the hot crepe, shot out the end of it straight into her cleavage. I was laughing so hard I fell down. I really couldn't have aimed any better if I'd been trying. It's still one of my favorite moments from waiting tables, but after that I did learn to serve the crepes flat side forward.

That Familar Smell

2010-07-09T01:37:00.001-05:00

When I moved to Texas, it was with an office job. The mutual funds company I worked for closed their office here during the dotcom bust and there was very little opportunity in that industry, so I wound up with a few odd jobs before I decided to go back to waiting tables for a while. One of those jobs was in "Guest Services" (customer service/returns) at a Super Target store.

One night, I was working the counter with a young female employee. She had just finished exchanging something for a customer and she came over to me so upset she was almost crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said, "I just can't believe that woman spoke to me like that! She asked me if I thought she smelled like cock!"

Granted, that was pretty weird. I said, "Tell me all of what she said. Maybe you misunderstood?"

"No, I know that's what she said. She told me she'd been on her knees all day and said she probably smelled like cock!"

I asked her what the woman was returning.

It was a tube of caulk.

Corporate Idiocy

2010-07-08T13:20:00.000-05:00

Corporate restaurant executives and their suck-up store managers are notorious for not knowing their ass from page five. I don't think it's only because they've never waited tables themselves. I truly believe that they are either selected for their capacity to be completely delusional, or those kinds of jobs just naturally draw the reality-impaired.

The worst corporate restaurant experience I had was working at a Marie Callender's. It was also my last restaurant job. What a bass-ackwards mess they could make of the simplest tasks. For instance, when you key in your order, the terminal spits out a copy of the chit for the cooks and one for the waiter. The waiter is required to hang their copy above the server side of the window. When the food comes down, the cook throws away the kitchen copy of the chit, so the wait staff has to be on constant watch for their orders 'cos there's no ticket with the plates. Furthermore, they've gotta scan the other chits hanging up on the window to make sure they're not getting another waiter's food. When I asked why the kitchen didn't just drop the ticket with the food, the manager said, "That is not the Marie Callender's way of doing things."

Also among the Not-Marie-Callender-Ways are:

Closing the bus stations next to the open stations and leaving the bus stations in the back of the restaurant open so waiters had to walk the full length of the restaurant to make Cokes or iced tea.

Mixing all of the six-slice and five-slice pie servers into the same bus tubs so that every time you reach for a slicer to cut the pies, you've got to make sure you've got the right size (pies to go are cut one way, served pies are cut another .... there are about 70 of the six-cut slicers and maybe 10 of the 5-cut). You need a new slicer for each pie, the pies are at the front of the restaurant which is a really long haul for the back stations, all the slicers look the same when you're in the weeds, and if you cut a pie wrong, you've ruined it for serving. A separate place to keep the 5-cut slicers? "Too much trouble."

Not allowing the huge, overflowing salad bowls to be served with dinner plate underliners. "They have to ask for a plate if they want one" (Which they always do.) A large salad order automatically means two trips from the kitchen.

Not fixing the keys on the order terminals, so "Breakfast #1" actually ordered "Breakfast #3" in the kitchen, and "Breakfast #3" ordered something else entirely.

It was like waiting tables in a Far Side cartoon.

The day I left Marie Callender's, I was working a brunch. I told the manager before the restaurant opened that we only had 3 bottles of Tabasco sauce total for all three dining rooms. I offered to run to the store and buy some. (Brunch in Texas without Tabasco can get ugly.) He declined, so I spent my entire shift swapping out one bottle from table to table ("Excuse me? May I borrow that for the table next to you?") and shooting myself in the foot for tips. After I'd been on the floor with a full station for 7 hours without a break, I told my manager that my station was covered and I wanted to step outside for a cigarette. He said, "Now, Guy, I told you that not everyone smokes, so when you want a cigarette, you need to say, 'I would like to have a break now.'" Was I pissed? I told him, "For God's sakes, I'm over 40 years old. I'm not gonna play "Mother May I?" with you. I'm going to smoke. When I come back, I'll cash out my tickets. I won't work here anymore."

Streaker

2010-07-07T18:59:00.000-05:00

I used to work at a very popular diner on Colorado Blvd in Denver called "House of Pies." Breakfast served all day with 80 kinds of pie baked on premises. The restaurant was typical California diner-style with huge plate glass windows running down the side facing the parking lot and a little strip of shrubs and landscaping in between the parking lot and the windows. Uniforms for the guys were khaki pants and and a white shirt, but the women had to wear a white blouse with a kind of wrap-around brown polyester jumper skirt that buttoned on the side and tied in back in a big bow.

One night, we were packed with people lined up to the door, and one of our waitresses was being dropped off for work by her boyfriend. When she got out of the car, she shut the bow of her uniform in the car door. Her boyfriend drove off and she twirled right out of that wraparound skirt/jumper and started screaming for him to stop. Really, she was lucky that there was so little holding that uniform to her, or I guess she might have been pulled with the car. It sure happened fast. It looked like one of those tablecloth tricks.

She ran for the shrubbery alongside the windows to take cover from the cars on the street only to realize that she was now the floor show for the entire restaurant, crouching next to the huge windows in a blouse and pantyhose. Her boyfriend finally heard her and stopped the car. Then she had to get dressed and walk past all the customers on the waiting list, knowing that these were the people she would be waiting on in a few minutes.

Goodbye, Friend

2010-07-07T01:39:00.000-05:00

I read today that a favorite waitress friend of mine passed away. It happened quite some time ago, and I only found out because I saw an article about the place where we used to work. The restaurant had been operating for over 40 years by the time some land developers came in and decided to tear it down. Edith had worked there for over 20 years. I knew her best as one of her regular customers; I'd come in when I got off work at the bar where I cocktailed. I worked with her when the diner needed extra help, like on Thanksgiving and Christmas, for several years, and then eventually I worked there full time. The article said she died the day after the restaurant was razed.

Blue Ribbon Texas Nibblin' Double Dribblin' Oink Oink Plate

2010-07-04T14:30:00.000-05:00

I never liked working on the 4th, but it wasn't because I had any particular burning desire to watch fireworks or barbecue or mark the holiday in any way. It's just the forced merriment of holidays in general, combined with the question that is always hovering in the air, "So, are you doing anything special for the 4th?" If they were asking me, the answer was, "Working." If I was foolish or insensitive enough to ask them, the answer was usually, "Just this." Oh, man. You really do have a crappy life if this is special.

Regarding "Specials: The 4th of July specials almost always had some "Blue Ribbon" or county fair kind of theme to them and it really sucked when they advertised the heck out of these specials all week and then ran out halfway through the shift. It's just mean to run out of anything "special" when your holiday crowd is made up of so many people who don't have families in town or didn't get invited to neighborhood barbecues. That's the one time you've gotta come through. It's especially mean when the restaurant has named the special (now 86'd) something rhyming or stupid that nobody wants to say in the first place. First you make a 40 year-old man say words that sound like they came out of a Dr. Seuss book and then you tell him he did it for nothing? They would be so much happier if you just said, "Same old shit today ... don't get your hopes up." Or even better, don't open the restaurant on the 4th of July. There are some of us who would rather go to a bar and drink about our independence than work on that day. We could take advantage of their 4th of July beer specials, 'cos Lord knows they never have to deal with depressed people on the holidays.

Waitered

2010-07-03T12:55:00.000-05:00

I can't seem to motivate myself, and I think it's because there isn't anything that I have to do. I spent so many years working under a time crunch, that when I don't have one I just stop. If you've ever worked a lot of splits or banquets or in the kind of restaurants that were so seasonally affected that half the staff disappeared in the off-months, you probably know what I'm going through. During the off times, you wait and re-charge. But what if there's nothing to re-charge for? (Sorry, for which to re-charge?)

Banquets were probably where the habit of resting between duties was ground into me most. There's no other way I could have made it through those 115 hour weeks during Christmas season if I hadn't figured out how to shut down when I had the chance. The problem for me now is that I don't work. I'm disabled, and I have one part-time job (5 hours a week) and a couple of volunteer things I do, and I usher at church once a month, so otherwise I'm "resting." I treat my time like I am just waiting until I'm on the schedule again, but otherwise I'm not moving. I don't clean house unless someone is coming over, and I don't even bother to wash my hair unless I'm leaving the apartment. Sometimes I don't even shave.

Granted, some of the resting is necessary, but I think it goes deeper than that. For instance, I learned early on that if I had to work a long night shift, I wasn't gonna do too much in the day. I probably wasn't even going to get up until a couple of hours before I went to work. I always tried to be as fresh and energized as I could be for my shift. I had to be, because work took every last ounce of physical and mental energy out of me. I measured it out through the shift, like you would balance the last drag off a cigarette with that last slug of coffee, and when the shift was over, I'd given all I had to give. I think I still hold back as if I had something to do later in the day - not wanting to use myself up before I have to - and then when the day is over and I haven't done anything, I just feel empty. I haven't acclimated myself to being off the schedule.

I miss the adrenaline rush of waiting tables, even as I know that I couldn't possibly handle the demands of the job any more. When breakfast, lunch, movie or bar rush hit, when a party broke and we had to turn a room in half an hour, when we were snowed in with the airport closed and a hotel filled to capacity, a skeleton crew to cover all the shifts and positions ... when I didn't have time to think about what to do with my time.

Sometimes I resent beating up my body the way I did, with my left hip higher than my right and my right shoulder shorter than my left from carrying trays, my varicose veins and swollen ankles, and the fact that I was always too tired from work to actually exercise. I can get to feeling bad about all the social activities I missed and the concerts and lunch dates, 'cos I was always working when all the "normal" people weren't. If someone was getting married, unless I was working the party, I probably wasn't gonna be there. On the other hand, I obviously miss the work, or I wouldn't be walking through "Guy's House of Memories" in this blog, recalling my glory years.

The point I hope I'm making today is that, while you're waiting, you may be thinking that the job is just something you're going to do until your real life starts, but it is your real life. There are some things about being a waiter that never leave you. You'll eventually get over checking for daylight in the salt shakers, facing the sweet and lows and straightening cutlery on empty tables, but you don't ever forget that there were moments when the whole future of the world rested on your shoulders and on whether or not table 16 got their damned extra side of ranch dressing for their fries before they walked. There were times when you were needed.

Please Like Me

2010-07-03T12:46:00.000-05:00

I never felt like I had the technical skills of a really great waiter: Organizing, prioritizing and multi-tasking were things I learned by trial and error. Some people are naturally gifted in those areas, but I wasn't one of them. I relied heavily on my people skills and my natural drive for acceptance. I was born with a need to be liked. I was usually extremely popular with about 90% of my customers and loathed by the other 10%. Not much in between.

Sometimes I really deserved the 10%. Here are some situations where I'm probably lucky I didn't get my ass kicked:

(On a night when half of the restaurant was filled with a meeting of the Clown Convention who had shown up without reservations.)"Hi Folks. 7 tonight? Did you want to sit on this side of the dining room or over there with the rest of the clowns?"

(To a woman standing at her table with an empty coffee pot held straight out in front of her.) "I almost didn't notice you. I thought you were the Statue of Liberty! Is there anything I can bring for you?"

Customer: "Do you have restrooms?"
Me: "No. That's why we put those little (coffee) pots on the tables."

(And to the Titanic Society as I'm spilling 8 glasses of ice water on their table): "Lifeboats!"

**The last one did get me a big tip, though everyone was soaked. I was carrying all eight stemless glasses without a tray. I learned not to show off after that.

Sleeping with the customers

2010-07-02T10:11:00.000-05:00

I just received my first blog comment and, oddly enough, it mentioned the very thing I came here to write about today: Waiter nightmares. I'm sure most waiters have experienced them, and even former waiters like me still have them from time to time. I used to work with a waitress who would sleepwalk while she dreamed about still being on the floor. Her roommate found her in the kitchen once at about four in the morning with the refrigerator door open muttering, "Table 18 needs mustard." Another waitress friend of mine told me she dreamed she had taken jobs at two restaurants about 6 blocks away from each other and was scheduled to work the same shift at both of them. She said she was running down Colorado Boulevard with trays full of food 'cos she had accidentally hung tickets for the wrong restaurant on the other one's wheel.

One of my most vivid nightmares was of the classic "I'm the only one working and there are way too many customers" variety. A little background to this one: In the days before brewed decaf coffee (I can still hear that shrewish screech, "Do you have BREEEEWWWED decaf?" when it finally did come available) we used to serve instant Sanka packets with small thermal pots of hot water. They were the same ones we used for hot tea and no matter how many times we ran them through the dishwasher, the plastic always held onto a sort of mixed tea/Sanka odor. The pots held about a cup and half of water that they didn't really keep hot and were likely to leak all over the table and the customer when they tried to pour from them. There were also only about 8 Sanka pots for a restaurant with seating for 400. "I'll have Sanka" was enough to make me feel like I was having a stroke.

In my nightmare, I'm in the service area and I can hear a low rumbling that is building to a frightening volume. When I walk out into the dining room, it has become an endless sea of toothless women with white curly permanents, banging little plastic pots on the table and chanting, "SANKA! SANKA! SANKA!" (except it sounds like "RWANKA! RWANKA! RWANKA!") A mob in polyester pant suits. They are angry, and I'm the only one working. That's all there is to it, but every time I dreamed it, I would wake up trembling.

Another one I had pretty frequently was where my station kept expanding. Working in a pancake house, you already have an ungodly number of tables, and if you're on a graveyard weekday shift, you will probably have the entire restaurant to yourself at some point. In this dream, there are construction workers building booths and knocking out the walls of the restaurant. I'm taking orders as fast as I can, but every time I come out with plates, the building has gotten longer until I can't even see the end of my station. I don't even think of quitting, but I know it's just a matter of time before the customers turn on me and pick my bones.

The one I still have from time to time is just about pure humiliation. I am working in a restaurant where I have no idea what is on the menu - sometimes when I look at the menus they're blank - and nobody will tell me. Customers are demanding their food, but I don't have any clue what they ordered, and every time I try to deliver food, the people are missing. The customers become more and more hostile and somehow I think the whole thing is my fault, even though I've never even seen this restaurant before and I have no idea why I'm working in it.

Even as bad as the dreams could be, the reality was usually worse, but I've never been more proud of the work I did than when I waited tables. Many times, I wasn't proud of the restaurant I worked at, but I knew that it took a lot to be a good waiter and the work was far more demanding than most people believed. It felt good to know I had earned every penny of what I made.

"I'll just have . . . "

2010-07-01T18:39:00.000-05:00

The first job I had was at a pancake house. It was also the 4th, 7th and 11th, or something like that, because I kept quitting and then coming back. I must have been a little bit of a masochist.

I started out working the night shift at a corporate store located next to a bowling alley ... with 80 lanes. Our location was the only one with two dining rooms because it was actually made over from an Italian restaurant and discotheque that was popular and then not-so-popular in the 70s. Someone had been shot and killed in the disco after hours and the rumor was the place was haunted. I believed those rumors every time both wheels were wrapped and I had been waiting 45 minutes for a short stack and a side of bacon. I could just feel the evil spirits hovering over my station. The place was far too big for the kind of turn and burn service we specialized in (it was 35 steps from the wheel to the closest table) but it was a great place to learn how to move fast - or die trying.

"Nights" were considered the inferior staff at the pancake house. The lowest on the totem pole, we often weren't even given bussers and sometimes split the whole restaurant between two waiters, closing the back dining room. It could be really slow at night, and that's why nobody wanted that shift. I remember an especially slow period of about 3 weeks that only ended when we discovered that the bowling alley next door was turning off our sign along with their lights when they closed. Ever since then, if we had a lull in business, someone would say, "Is the sign on?"

Admittedly, there were times when we didn't mind being slow. We'd sometimes play a game where we bet how long it would take for someone to walk out without being waited on, or we'd send one of the regular customers to the liquor store and use the strawberries and fountain glasses from the dessert bar to make strawberry daiquiris. However, getting too "relaxed" could really bite you in the butt if one of those big parties showed up like Amway or the "UFOs" (people that actually believed in UFOs ) or palm readers. Sometimes it would be an entire bowling league. Those groups never let you know when they were coming and they were really weird people. Completely out of step with how to behave in public. When you asked the first arrivals, "How many in your party?" they'd say, "Oh, I don't know ... 60 or 70 I think" and all Hell would break loose in the kitchen (the cooks always blamed the wait staff for their arrival), and whoever had seniority would be "On for one" with the whole front dining room. The other waiter would have to open up the back room.

These groups were always "Separate checks" and they were always in a hurry for their food. They expected to be served before they started their meeting and that usually meant you had less than 30 minutes to take their orders, ring them, hang them, serve their food and drop the check. We were not allowed to add a gratuity. The orders would run the gamut, from full dinners to, "Oh, I'll just have a chocolate shake." Never mind that I had to make that shake myself from ice cream that was frozen so hard I couldn't get it out of the 5 gallon tub with a blowtorch. There were a lot of menu items the waiters made ... desserts, salads, toast and english muffins, soft boiled eggs (cracking them) and grapefruit (sectioning) were some of them. Shakes were probably the worst. After you dug out the ice cream, you had to babysit the shake machine 'cos they were notorious for losing their grip and throwing your shake (and any others that were on the machine) across the service galley. There's a little clip on the shake canisters that is supposed to make them stick, but it was no guarantee -- even if you could find one of the canisters that had the clips.

The best way to work these parties was to diagram the room. I'd just number off customers and write their order on a sheet of notebook paper. When I got to the back, I'd re-write a copy for the cooks with all the stuff they had to make on one ticket (this was pre-computer days) and drop toast - loads of toast - and get to work on the drinks. Technically, our corporate office allowed us six minutes for the first customer and one minute for each additional, but these groups didn't see it that way. "All I asked for was a spinach salad, and english muffin and hot tea with lemon" was the usual attitude. Never mind that the only part of that order that I didn't make myself was the hot bacon dressing that came from the cooks who had enough to do cooking everyone else's order and could care less if they ever gave it to me.

That was another problem: The cooks. I worked with some pretty rough guys. Some of them on jail release. The waitresses had it easier, 'cos a lot of them were dating cooks or at least flirted with them enough to make that seem like a possibility, but a 20-year-old who "looks like a faggot" has a tough row to hoe. Once in a while, there'd be one who showed mercy, and after a time of proving myself I had a great team going with some of the guys. In the interim, though, I had food thrown at me, I was threatened, strangled, and called every name in the book. Being on the bad side of a cook could make your life miserable.

I have distinct memories of those harrowing rushes with the unexpected parties: Visions of plate after plate of curled toast sitting under the heat lamp (either because I'd over-estimated how many orders I needed or it was dead before the food came up and I had to toast more), the smell of maple syrup burning in the bottom of the warmer because nobody had time to put water in it, the feel of my skin burning after being hot-plated by a particularly nasty cook or the sound of a ham and cheese omelet as it hit the carpet face-down after falling off the back of my tray. Some things I'll never forget.

I'm really not sure why I kept coming back to that restaurant. It was some of the hardest work I'd ever done and the pay really sucked. It wasn't uncommon to get a tip of 35 or 50 cents, and though that might have been 10%, ordering the cheapest thing on the menu didn't make it any easier on me. Maybe I came back because I already knew the taste of that poison, and there was no risk. By the time I finally walked (the 4th and final time I was employed there) I had so many regulars that it felt like that movie "Groundhog Day" every time I went to work. By then, I was on days. I would see people in the grocery store and think, "There goes Crisp Bacon, Two Over Hard, Cottage Cheese, Rye Toast Dry, Butter On The Side." Of course, I would avoid all eye contact.

Take a chance, Columbus did

2010-06-30T17:52:00.001-05:00

When I was 20 years old, I rode a Greyhound bus to Denver with two suitcases, a sleeping bag and 300 bucks. I wasn't going on vacation; I was moving. I chose Denver because my car had broken down there the year before and it turned out to be a pretty easy place to find a job, my Mom had a friend that lived there (so I knew I could stay at least 2 or 3 nights with her), and there wasn't any work back home in Oregon. I found out right away that I didn't have enough money for an apartment. Even 30 years ago, 300 bucks wouldn't cover rent and deposit, and I didn't have any more money coming in. Luckily, I'd given the number of my Mom's friend to a gal that said she "might" be moving to Denver, and the day after I arrived she gave me a call and we found a place we could rent together. But I still needed a job.

I wasn't particular about what I would do to make money, but I didn't have much in the way of experience to offer anyone. I had done some office work, telephone soliciting, and fast food. I'd even been a hasher in a sorority. A hasher is the "boy" who serves "the girls" their meals, and listens for them to ring the little bell next to their place setting when they want anything - even more water from the pitcher that is sitting right in front of them. A hasher job basically paid in a free meal each night I worked and (I think) 15 dollars a week for five 2-hour shifts.

Anyway, back to my job hunt. The day we got our keys to the apartment, I walked up the street and started filling out applications: McDonald's first, then a movie theater, and then I walked into a family style restaurant and applied for: Waiter, Busboy, Host, or Dishwasher (I was pretty sure I couldn't be a cook). Years later, the woman who hired me said she could tell I didn't have any experience, but she'd never seen anyone so desperate for a job in her life. She hired me as a waiter. That was how I identified myself for most of my adult life.

I must have had just enough money to buy the uniform - all brown polyester - and I remember practicing how to walk. I'd always had a wiggle when I walked, and I was sure that I'd be ridiculed for it. Funny how that comes back now, but I know the walking part was a big source of stress for me. At that time, I didn't even know I was gay, but I'd been called gay enough (and a lot of that had to do with the way I walked) that I didn't wanna risk getting in trouble. Even after I came out, there was a long time before I stopped worrying about being called "faggot" or being mistreated because I was gay.

Besides butching up my walk, I also had to learn how to carry shoulder trays. The hardest part was picking them up correctly. I practiced expediting the other waiters' (actually they were all waitresses except one other guy) food until I felt pretty safe, though I still had a couple of accidents. I followed waitresses, learned how to write and hang orders (no computers yet), and bussed tables for five days. Finally, one of the waitresses I'd made friends with said, "They're not gonna keep you unless you start picking up some of your own tables." I was terrified. I didn't know how I was ever going to get up the courage to speak to people. So far, I felt lucky just not to be called names or be laughed at.

It turned out to be a real baptism by fire when my second customer ordered a chopped beef steak that (I would later find out) was just about a sure-fire guarantee to piss people off. I think it was mule meat. I delivered the steak to my customer - table four, I remember - and came back to check on him a couple of minutes later. Boy howdy. Red in the face and half standing in his booth, he had stabbed the meat with his fork and was waving it at me screaming, "Taste this! Taste this!" I'd never seen a middle-aged man have a tantrum in public before, and I wasn't all that comfortable even speaking to him, let alone handling that kind of outburst. Somehow, I got through it and days turned to weeks, to months and to years of learning to console, respond to, or avoid similar circumstances. In that time, I eventually became pretty outgoing, or at least I learned to fake it pretty well.

********************
This is my first post on my first blog. I haven't waited tables in a number of years, but I wanna use this as a place to look back on those years in food and beverage - over 20 of them - and perhaps also share a little of my life after waiting. I decided to write this after reading some of the blogs of others who are still waiting, and hopefully I'll have links to those later on. It's interesting to read the passion in their posts and to recall how overwhelming some shifts could be. I responded to a few of them, but I realized, we're coming at this from different angles. Those folks are still in there doing battle every day, and my stories are all old, and the wounds have mostly healed. I am from their tribe but - for now - I am off the floor.