A Perk

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.

Embracing Change

"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.

Ice-breaker

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.

The Fool

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.

Corporate Idiocy

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."