Career Girl

A new server recently started training at the restaurant. 

After work the other night, we were chatting as we got dressed to go home.  I knew very little of her, except where she last worked.  And in the course of working a shift with her, I learned that she is sharp and has a take-charge attitude that can come in handy working in a busy, high-volume restaurant like the one I work in.

She mentioned something in the way-past tense about an old boyfriend, and I asked her if she's seeing anyone now.  No, she said.  I'm focusing on my career, she added with a bit of a grin. 

I knew she was talking more about not having a boyfriend and less about the career part.  But I asked anyway.

What's your career?  Waiting tables?  

She practically snorted her response.  This?  Yeah.  Like this would be my career!  

The disdain was unmistakable, punctuated by the rolling of her eyes.

It turns out that by "career" she meant that she is an actor, which, in this town, never comes as a surprise to me.

What does continue to throw me off guard, though, is the way so many servers seem to despise their jobs.  I mean, yes, we're in a position of service. Yes, we are sometimes treated like the lowly help.  Yes, we are constantly touching half-eaten plates of food and forks that have been in peoples' mouths.  Yes, we have an inconsistent income.  Yes, we witness customers being mannerless, socially inept, and downright rude at times. Yes, we deal with a lot of resentment from our underpaid, overworked kitchen counterparts.  No, we don't generally have company retirement plans, health care, sick days, vacation days, or profit-sharing opportunities.

But what job is without its drawbacks?   Waiting tables is, overall, a great gig.  The other night, Dave and Ellie, a couple of great regulars, were sitting at the bar.  Dave asked me a version of a question I get asked often:  So, are you hoping to own a restaurant one day?

The answer is so easy.

No.  

Despite all the things that make waiting tables a questionable career choice for some, I have some compelling arguments in favor of it:

• I never take my work home with me.  I show up, work hard, go home.  Done until the next shift.
• My work is physical.  I cannot imagine having to sit at a desk all day.  I like expending energy.
• I work around food.  Good food.
• My job is social but the interactions are fleeting.  I get a clean slate every time someone new sits down.
• I (usually) get paid well for what I do (I quickly admit that is not the case for every server or bartender).
• My job is fast-paced and challenges me every day.
• I learn a lot about food and wine, and sometimes the whole restaurant seems like it's one, big psycho-social experiment, which is its own kind of education.
• I have a flexible schedule.  This means not only that I can take time off when I need it, but I can also pick up extra work when I need it.

The corollary to Dave's question that I often get asked is What is it that you really do?  And when I reply, You're lookin' at it!, the person asking the question usually doesn't see that answer coming.  

Surely I wait tables to kill time until I become a published writer, get a degree, or land my big acting break, right?  Because who would want to do this kind of work forever?  I mean aside from the big-haired ladies in the pink, polyester uniforms who snap their gum and call you "hon"?

I would.

Don't get me wrong;  if someone were to throw me a book deal (ahem), I wouldn't shy away from it.  But serving good food and drink?  It makes for a career worth focusing on.

Poetic License

The announcement came as soon as I got to work yesterday.

Today is haiku day! Jonathan, one of the cooks, said. We're writing haikus about each other.

Haikus do not make for a typical Tuesday at the pizza mines. But I was game.

Julia had already gotten the poetic ball rolling with an ode to Jonathan and his pizza-making prowess:

heart shaped pizza pie
white cloud of flour and smoke
you control the flame

Service was off to a slow enough start that between mixing drinks and opening bottles of wine, I had time to jot down a few lines on the back of an old menu. My first attempt was for Julia, who had recently undergone Lasik eye surgery:

Look into my eyes.
Hindsight is twenty twenty,
and now so are you.

I eked out a few for Danny, Chris, and Jonathan, using the floor staff as my messengers, shuttling scraps of paper from the bar to the kitchen. Those haikus were just as bad as the one for Julia, so I won't make you suffer through any more than necessary.

Soon, the servers were delivering poems to me from the kitchen.

Julia's came first:

coppa, pancetta,
the slicer softly whispers
sopressata, please

On a c-fold, Jonathan wrote one about my baking compulsion:

She bakes all the time
for us. We love it so much.
Butter. Flour. Love.

Chris's haiku was part nod to/order for one of the kitchen's preferred mid-shift refreshments:

Mix, muddle & shake
Do you use maraschinos?
Four cherry Cokes please

It was followed a few moments later by this one:

No, seriously.
Thirst quenching is required
Four cherry Cokes please

Alright, alright. I can take a hint.

So I muddled some cherries with some cherry syrup and added some Coke and sent those drinks off to the kitchen with a final haiku. Unfortunately,

I don't remember
what I wrote, but I know I
did write "Bottoms up!"

Stay tuned for Sonnet Sundays.

Get a Room. Please.

Dear Bar 8 and 9,

If you ever manage to extract your tongues out of each other's ears, maybe you can then explain to me your ease at publicly sharing your moments of emotional and physical intimacy. I mean, you're in a restaurant, for Pete's sake. And I, your humble bartender, am trapped behind the bar, where I can do my best to avert my eyes, but really can only get so far away from you and your nuzzling, groping, and goofy gazes.

Love, or lust, or hormonal surges-- whatever they are, they're all a part of being human. And they can be kinda nice. I get that. And more power to ya! But holy schmo. Wouldn't you rather play out your mating ritual at home? Or at least in a car parked in an alley-- where no one has to watch you?

Think of how much more you'd be able to accomplish if you were actually able to, say, take your clothes off and not just feel each other up, à la junior high school. (I will thank you for actually being able to draw that line.) Given how free and open you are in public, what with all that tongue wrestling, I can only imagine how much more fun you could have in the privacy of your own home.

Well, I can imagine, but I really don't want to. I've seen plenty already.

I'm sorry that I didn't check in to ask you how your pizza was and that I didn't keep your water glasses filled; sometimes the best service is leaving people alone, especially if when it means not interrupting their foreplay. And if there's one thing I'm committed to doing as your bartender it's not interrupting your foreplay.

But I hope the rest of your night went as well as it seemed to be going-- our pizza makes for good carbo-loading!

Sincerely,

Your Bartender/Most Unwilling Voyeur

Second Wind

I just realized it's been over a year now since I started this blog. Of late, I've really not been on the writing wagon. And the reason smacks of irony.

I wanted to write this blog to aim some positive light on a much-maligned profession. I wanted to focus on why I love my job, why I feel like I'm lucky to be doing the work that I do, how serving and bartending are not just worthy of a little respect by customers and non-waiters, but by servers themselves who often seem to not take their jobs seriously.

I wanted to write about the funny stuff that happens, the ways in which the table-waiting list of pros outweighs the list of cons, how I can't believe that more people don't embrace food service as a meaningful profession and career in our culture.

What I very much didn't want to do was to spew complaints and gripe about my work. I didn't want to rag on customers and highlight their foibles. I didn't want to sound like I was complaining all the time, which is what happens rampantly in waiter blogs. I didn't want to add to that mix.

But I'm looking back at my posts, and I can see how I'm being seduced by the dark side. More recent (however infrequent) posts are cranky ones. There's little that I say that isn't grousing.

And I swore I wouldn't go down that path. That path of using my blog as a way to be negative about the work I do. That path of crabbiness. The path of bad juju.

But I'm having trouble focusing on what I set out to focus on, maybe because after eighteen years of doing this work, I'm feeling a tad burned out. Perhaps a lot burned out. It seems that when I'm at work and an idea for a blog entry strikes me, it's almost always because of something that falls under the heading of "whining/bellyaching"-- precisely what I was trying to avoid.

So, finding myself conflicted, I just keep my mouth shut. Hence the long periods of no writing. In keeping with adage, I can't find anything nice to say so I'm not saying anything at all.

I've thought a lot about where to go from here. Give in to the dark side? Make things up? Scrap the blog? After a little introspection, this is what I've come up with: 1) try harder to find and reap the good stuff and 2) be really bitchy if I want to be.

Is that the obvious solution? Probably. But in keeping with my default black-and-white thinking, compromise doesn't come easily for me. I'm willing to give it a shot, though, and hoping that it won't be long before that second wind kicks in.

Dear Bar 8

Dear Bar Seat Number 8,

I appreciate the great enthusiasm you have for wanting to pay the check. Really, I do. However, I am currently actively engaged in taking an order from the person sitting next to you (that would be Bar Seat Number 7), and when you try to get my attention by waving your hand in between our faces in a frantic chopping motion, it makes me want to swat it. Hard.

It is my job and not your job to manage the needs of the eighteen (no exaggeration) people who are currently demanding my attention, so I certainly don't expect you to know the crazed way in which I am juggling all those priorities in my head. In a way you made my job a bit easier by moving yourself to the top of the list.

But I don't think I'm quite at the stage where I can thank you for that.

I know you would like think you are my only customer, but when you're dining in a restaurant, you can expect that you are not your server or bartender's only focus. We all have to share our love-- spread it wide and far. We try to be fair. We try to act like you're the only person we have to take care of. We try to tap into our inner lap dancer and pretend like you are the only person that exists in the world.

But when it comes down to it, we have to see to lots of people. And sometimes that means you have to wait nine seconds for your check while I take someone else's order.

Or at the very least it means you needn't stick your hand in my face.

Anyway, I hope you got to where you needed to be, with a belly full of fennel salad and a refreshing Negroni on the rocks.

Sincerely,

Your Bartender Who Wishes More Than You Do That She Were Not Being Pulled In A Million Different Directions

A Dream About Bartending

last night's dream:

I am bartending at a bar that is in the upstairs bathroom of the house I grew up in, and it is on a cruise ship.

Five middle-aged, middle-American, white women are gathered around the bar, which is where the sink should be. One of them wants to order the rhubarb cocktail. [note: the restaurant where I work is, in fact, featuring a cocktail made with rhubarb juice right now.] Then another one wants one. And then suddenly they all want the same cocktail.

It's easier just to make five at once, I think to myself.

One of them says pipes up. I just looove rhubarb pie! she says.

I wonder if she knows what she has ordered, if she thinks she is getting pie.

It's a cocktail, not pie, I say.

Rhubarb pie is my favorite pie! she implores.

I let it go.

I begin to mix the cocktails. I do so not by shaking them in a cocktail shaker but by mixing them in my mouth and them spitting them out. But I don't even spit them into glasses; I spit them into shallow terracotta gratin dishes.

No one blinks an eye, but I think that the cocktail seems a bit low in volume and I wonder if it should have been more, if maybe I'd made them too skimpy.

The End.

[Oh, and just for the record, I have never spit in anyone's food or beverage nor ever would, lest any paranoidals accuse me of doing so. But any other pathology you can extrapolate from this dream I probably have no defense for.]

Dear Table 17

Dear Table 17,

I'm sure you hear this all the time, but what a toddler you have! She is just about as adorable as adorable gets in the whole spectrum of adorableness. That cute little face! Such an engaging smile! She appears to be nothing short of delightful.

You must be so thrilled to have such an animated little moppet to call your own. Just look at how she stands confidently on her highchair and waves her fork aloft. Was that a handful of pizza she just flung onto the floor with focus and commitment of a major league pitcher? Her feats of coordination and whimsy are the likes of which I rarely, if ever, see in a child who is barely verbal.

And I know she's so much more than just her darling looks and lively demeanor. I'm sure she's got wicked smarts, way advanced for her age. And sharp wit. And a heart the size of an island nation. With those traits I bet that one day she will burgeon into adulthood gripping the cure for cancer in one hand and the key to peace in the Middle East in the other.

Really, it's undeniable that she's destined for greatness. Just look at how she commands the attention of everyone in the restaurant as she calls out with great enthusiasm and authority. She sure doesn't let her lack of ability to speak actual words stop her from vocalizing-- at decibel levels that would send OSHA scrambling to slap earplugs on all of us working at the restaurant tonight.

And she doesn't let up. What persistence! She just keeps going and going. She barely needs to stop to breathe!

Your vacant stares suggest that you might be somewhat desensitized to her elevated utterances-- numb to them, even. You've probably had to learn to tune them out as a survival mechanism, assuming that her public restaurant behavior is similar to her behavior at home. But I can assure you that even if I were able to act as if the piercing, stabbing pain of her high-pitched shrieks did not exist, it would not mean that my eardrums would not still shatter, which I think they just did.

Well there she goes again! It sure has been a spirited last hour. You can tell by the gnarled grimaces and clenched teeth of the other sixty people in the restaurant right now.

Well, I could go on and on, but I really should go and try to sop up the blood coming out of my ears.

Hope you had a lovely dinner.

Sincerely,

Your Bartender Formerly Known As Able To Hear Normally