The End of The Beginning

I was reprimanded by four of my supervisors, in an Emergency Meeting, when I worked for Sears (in a thankless job in one of their merchandising offices) for something I didn't say, but that many people thought I said. This happened over 30 years ago, and now, probably everyone that was in that meeting except me is dead, but I still remember it. I was told, "It isn't important what you said or didn't say. What is important is what everyone thinks you said." And that it was my fault that the person who misheard me spread this rumor all over the office. I was also told to use more caution.

I'm less inclined, in my personal life, to be railroaded today, but I still see evidence of this prevailing mentality: The Facts Don't Matter. It is easier to base our actions on a well-publicized lie than deal with the truth.

I should probably add a word of warning right about here. I am about as left-leaning of a liberal as you will ever meet, so if that kind of writing offends you, leave now. When I started this blog, I made a barely-critical comment about G.W. Bush and a couple of people stopped by to pee all over my post about it. I revised the article to comply with their sensitivities. They probably never even noticed. Too busy whining somewhere else? Well, those days are done. This blog is mine. Part of being a waiter, later, is not having to suck up to people, pretending to be something I'm not. Fair warning, then, that if you stumble upon this, I didn't write it to offend you, but I'm not changing it to please you either.

I think the dog and pony show at Sears is on my mind today because I've been thinking about other instances of stuff that isn't true that people react to as if they are because "it's important what everyone thinks you said." I think it's more important to go back and identify that original lie. Dispute the false evidence that the claims are made upon.

For instance: Standardized testing in public schools.
We know this doesn't work. People do not learn the same way, have the same skill sets, express themselves identically, etc and we would be in one helluva mess if they did, but we evaluate students, and their teachers' performance, based on the premise that all of this is true, and excuse this travesty by claiming we "must have standards." The lie is that the only standard permissible is conformity. I wonder, how has it happened that our teachers are the last people we look to for answers about how best to educate? Instead, they are accused of being lazy, their job security and wage structure are attacked, and they are told how to teach - by people who have never taught a day in their lives. The standardized method is class warfare. It is a method of indoctrination and a tactic for weeding out critical thinkers to create a paint-by-numbers hoard who will do as they're told (by their privately educated peers of the wealthier class).

Another instance that gives me the same knot in my stomach as my Sears days is the whitewashing that's being pulled on the American public with tort reform.

In spite of the fact that measures are already in place to deal with abuses against the court system, we have been snookered into thinking that some sweeping, generalized cap limit on the amount of money we are allowed to sue for damages. This, supposedly, is to protect us, keep services and merchandise affordable, and weed out all of those people who take advantage of the court system.

WTF!

We're going to neuter due process, but let the corporations run wild - unregulated, no holds barred - for our protection? There's A Modest Proposal if I ever heard one.
 
And the third really upside-down rationale floating around right now is about guns.

The Second Amendment so clearly states that being permitted to own guns is for the purpose of a well-regulated militia. When the Supreme Court elected to redact the 13 words that precede our right to bear arms, we became more loyal to "what someone thinks they said" than to what they actually said. And this has become the basis for a defense for people buying guns for their kids, allowing all manner of assault weapons with multiple rounds of ammunition, and giving criminals easy access to weapons by blocking gun laws. We don't want to know the truth, and we don't want to fix the problems of rampant gun violence. We want to protect the corporations that manufacture the guns because this is about protecting assets more than lives.


When I waited tables, my job often required me to acquiesce to a customer's unreasonable demands and cover for the inadequacies of my employer or the inferiority of their product. Slowly, but surely, as I distance myself from the mindset of pleasing others and learning how to stand up for myself, I see that none of us are doing each other any favors by accepting these commonly used lies about standardized tests, tort reform, or gun control. Rather than allow the folks who benefit from these abuses to set the playing field for our discussions, we ought to be revisiting their initial flawed premises. If I could go back 30+ years, I would say to these bullies at Sears, "Yes, it IS important what I said, and if you are willing to ignore what I said in favor of something that is not true, I can't trust you."

Still, if I hadn't lost that crappy job, I might never have taken that Greyhound bus to Denver with $300 in my pocket, and begun my glamorous life as a waiter. (And he lived happily ever, after.)

Bar Experience

I was tending bar when Susan was hired to be our new Supervisor. Mini-skirt, 4-inch high heels, push-up bra and press-on nails (she lost one in someone's salad once. Yuck.) Mark, the lecherous putz of a Food and Beverage Director, said she had "a lot of experience working in bars" but we all wondered on which side. Apart from flirting with the cooks and just about anything in pants, Susan liked to decorate the Happy Hour buffet table. All well and good, but she didn't ever seem to take into account just how that table was going to be used, so plates could wind up just about anyplace and items that should have been placed in near proximity could be at opposite ends of the table. Susan's deal was "making it look pretty."

One particularly memorable "pretty" buffet was for a Mexican themed variety of hors-d'ouevres. Lots and lots of crepe paper strewn all around the legs of the chafing dishes - plenty of streamers and confetti and paper mache shared the table with candles and several large cans of Sterno. In a word: Kindling. As soon as someone walked in the front door, the wind blew the streamers into the open flame, setting off a kind of fuse that soon had the entire ten foot table erupting in flames. I managed to put out the fire with a couple of nearby pitchers of water and a wad of table cloths, while Susan said  things like, "Hurry!" or "Oh, gawsh!"

From time to time, she'd come behind the bar to "help." This usually meant, I helped her get her high heels unstuck from the floor mats while she helped herself to my tips. She didn't know how to make a drink, and she couldn't use the register, so mostly she just talked to the customers, ate the cherries out of my garnish trays and got in my way. Inevitably, she mistook the relieved look on my face when she finished "helping" for gratitude, and always promised to show up again when she was needed. (I should be so lucky.)

If You Let Them Treat You Badly (They Will)

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 hour restaurants, 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, strand our hotel guests, and make the roads impassable, so the general manager 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."

Bass-ackwards

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.

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.

Working With Professionals

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.

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.

The Human Touch

"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.

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

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

"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.

It's Supposed To Taste Bad

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.

Worst Part of the Job

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.

Sales vs. Banquets

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!"

New patches

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.

Custer's Last Stand

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.

Being Unmanageable

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."