Well done, good and faithful servant

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; 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."

Happy New Year

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.

The Right (way) To Marry

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.

The Only Boy

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.

Shiny Happy Syrups

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.