Tag Archives: Waiting Tables

Running really late for work

Sometimes I feel like I’m always running late, regardless of when I have to be up, or how much time I have at my disposal to be ready. For example, the other day my boss asked me to work a double shift. “No way,” I told him, “I hate working.” OK, I didn’t say that exactly, but I still said no. Not taking no for an answer, he countered “OK fine,” he told me, “How about you can come in at noon?” And I was like, all right, fine, that sounds doable.

And I started planning out how the day would go. I’d wake up at eight-thirty, get like three blog posts done, take my dog Steve for a long walk, make a nice breakfast, maybe even get some reading done. Let’s do it!

The next thing I know my cell phone alarm clock is blaring at the periphery of my consciousness. I’m trying to get out of bed but my body is completely unresponsive. My cell phone alarm is so loud, so grating. I don’t know if everybody is familiar with the iPhone alarms, but I always use the one that sounds like the red alert from Star Trek. It’s intense. But it’s the only one that even stands a remote shot at waking me from a deep sleep.

What happened? Eleven o’clock already? Jesus. I usually wake up a lot earlier. I barely had time to get up, shower, shave, and then take the dog for a walk before I grabbed my bike and pedaled to work at a pace I usually reserve for outrunning taxis I’ve accidentally bumped into in traffic. OK, that’s not really true. I don’t outrun taxis. I just got a little carried away with the length and dramatics of that sentence. Although I did love Premium Rush.

But still, I was right on the verge of being late for a shift that I was already told to come in late for. I really was biking to work a lot faster than I usually do. For the first time in the better part of a year, I had left the house without so much as putting a morsel of food in my mouth. More importantly was coffee, or the lack thereof. Brewing and waiting and sipping, it was all completely out of the question.

I made it on the floor of the restaurant literally at the very minute. And I’m not one of those guys to throw around the word literally. Like I actually punched in and it said 12:00. I made it to work and the floor manager sees me and goes, “Finally! Rob’s here. Where have you been?” That deal that the general manager made with me? That whole thing about working a double and then telling me to come in at noon? Did we seal the deal some kind of a secret handshake? Because he didn’t tell anybody else. So I had to explain myself to the other managers, telling them I actually wasn’t late, but even when I hunted down the GM, “Right?” I asked him, “Remember you said I could come in at noon?” “Right …” he had that look on his face, like I might be making it all up, like he couldn’t really pinpoint the agreement I was talking about.

The day is over. I made it through. I just can’t get over the fact that, with two extra hours added to my day, I wound up being later than ever, later than I am on a regular day when I have to be at work at my regular time. I missed breakfast, I missed coffee, and I didn’t get to write anything. My whole day at work was thrown off balance. I was having what I assumed to be a lack of caffeine induced headache, even though normally I don’t believe in those. And I was starving. I was starving and serving people delicious, delicious lunch. It was torture.

When did I become so dependent on coffee? I never drank coffee in college. I don’t even remember when it became this habit. I honestly don’t know how I got to the point where I need three cups of coffee just to feel like myself in the morning. That’s kind of crazy, right? But tons of adults drink coffee. Maybe I’m more of an adult than I’m letting myself admit. You know, aside from the whole almost being late to work at noon thing.

An intermediate guide to wine

Maybe like four months ago I wrote about how I don’t know anything about wine. I’ve since switched jobs. My old restaurant didn’t have a liquor license, so I didn’t need any alcoholic knowledge. Every once in a while some stuffy Manhattan couple would come in and, before I even had a chance to say hello, they’d instruct me to go fetch them a couple of glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. And I would just stand there, staring at them, not saying a word, waiting for them to realize that I hadn’t moved, that I was just staring straight at them, and when they would finally give in, finally look up to me to make eye contact and say, “Well?” I’d instantly flash a crazy smile and say, “Sorry! No alcohol! How about a Diet Pepsi?” It’s the little things that get me through the day.

But this new restaurant is, to slam my previous gig and, for lack of a better description, actually a real restaurant. Like I have to wear a tie. It’s ridiculous. And they’re all about wine. They pride themselves on their wine list. They do tastings with the staff whenever a new bottle arrives. When I applied for the job, they made me take this whole wine test. It was written. Pages and pages. I kind of expected it, but as is my pattern of not taking life seriously enough, I spent only about ten seconds online researching wines before I got distracted and started wasting time on Reddit.

Whatever, I told myself, I know enough about wines. Which is only about ten percent true. I drink red wine. I know the names of the popular grapes. I never spend more than ten dollars for a bottle. So I figured, just get in there and charm your way through whatever questions they ask. That is, I had assumed it would just be a manager talking with me about wine for a while. In that scenario, I probably could have done fine. But like I said, they sat me down with a written test.

I immediately knew that I was fucked. There were all of these questions about regions. I know Napa is in California, but that’s about it. And then there was fifty percent of the test dedicated to white wines. I never drink white wine. The last time I took a sip of white wine was at this Chinese restaurant called Silk Road that everybody went to in college. You sat there, ate Chinese food, and for two hours they gave you free white wine. Yeah it was out of a box. Yeah it was disgusting. But it was free booze. The last time that we went there during senior year, I was eating Chinese food, pounding back glasses of white wine, feeling fine, and then at the end of the meal I stood up to leave. It was like all of the alcohol had accumulated in my legs, just waiting for me to get up so it could attack my brain all at the same time. I was instantly like black out drunk. But not even. I wish I had blacked out, because I got so sick, really sick, everywhere. And I remember all of it. I still can’t drink white wine.

And now I’m staring at this white wine test. I wouldn’t know how to bullshit my way out of any of these questions. The worst part about the test was the last few pages were a direct photocopy of the restaurant’s wine list. Did I mention how much pride they take in their wine list? Certain wines were blanked out and I had to fill them in. Like I was supposed to study their wine list. Come on. That should have been the easiest part of the test, because it was just rote memorization. But I didn’t study.

So I’m taking this test at one of the tables in the restaurant. Five minutes go by and I figure, well, I can either get a zero, hand it in with some half-assed joke about not knowing too much about wines, shake somebody’s hand as they say, “Yeah. Thanks a lot. We’ll definitely be in touch.” Or, I could just take out my phone and look all of this stuff up.

I’m not a good cheater. I could never cheat on anything, even in high school, and not for any moral reasons really, because I think testing is just a bunch of nonsense anyway, but I was mainly afraid of getting caught. I’m the worst, constantly looking around, sweating. It’s all a dead giveaway. But nobody came over. I had enough time to take out my phone and look everything up, even on New York’s super overcrowded wireless network.

I filled out the red section one hundred percent correct. And then I thought to myself, shit, that was probably a mistake. What if they get suspicious, think to themselves, wow, this guy really knew every single question? Did he cheat? That’s what I would think if I were giving the test. But I filled it out in pen. What was I going to do, ask for a brand new copy of the test? They’d ask why. I’d say because I made some mistakes and I want to start over. They’d say just cross them out and keep going. What am I supposed to cross out the obviously correct answer and rewrite an incorrect one, to make it look more natural? I told you I’m a bad cheater.

So I figured I’d make up for it by not doing so well on the whites. I made up some incorrect answers. I left some blank. Whatever. And then I handed it in. The manager looked it over and said something like, “Wow. You really nailed the reds. I guess we’ll just have to work on the whites.” And I kind of just let out this internal sigh of relief, like I couldn’t believe I actually got away with it, like I couldn’t believe nobody even gave me one verbal question to make sure I hadn’t cheated through the whole ordeal.

But I’ve been at this job for a few months now and I’m pretty sure that I didn’t really need to know anything about wine. I still barely know anything about wine. When people ask for a recommendation, I literally point to a random wine and start going off, really convincingly, “Oh this one is just delightful. Unlike your typical Chardonnay, this one’s got a lot less of those oaky overtones. And there are so many complex aromas. You can detect vanilla, passion fruit, shnozzberry. It’s wonderful.”

But even that is super rare. I think I’ve been asked for a recommendation maybe twice. Usually people come in and are just like, “Give me a glass of the house Cabernet.” At this point I’m supposed to direct the guest to our wine list, to show them that we have three house Cabernets, that we take our wine very seriously. But whatever, I know what they want, the cheapest, and I want to minimize the number of words that have to come out of my mouth directed at that person.

The best is bottle service. Somebody buys a bottle of wine, even the cheapest bottle, and it’s already doubled the price of the check. Some of the other waiters are really good salespeople, adept at hawking off hundred dollar bottles. My strategy is a little more modest, only because I know I could never pull off those rare vintages with a straight face. If someone asks me for a good bottle, I always point out the second least expensive. The customer will look at it, think to themselves, well, out of all of these wines, this waiter is pointing me in the direction of a moderately priced bottle. I’ll take it. Which for me is a win, because I’m just assuming that the majority of the people I deal with will always default to the cheapest option. That’s what I would do anyway. And so in most scenarios, I’m bumping them up to the second cheapest option, which, done regularly enough, is a huge win for me. But like I said, I’ve only been asked for a recommendation maybe twice.

The one thing I picked up way too fast was the whole opening the bottle at the table. I say too fast because, after a month or two, I felt so confident in my opening skills, that it just escaped the realm of my imagination that anything could go wrong. So one night I had this group of four men, they each had like three glasses of Scotch at the bar and started ordering bottles of wine at the tables. The first bottle went smoothly. The second bottle went even smoother. So smooth in fact that the cork offered basically zero resistance as I pulled it out. And not expecting such an easy job, the hand cradling the bottle automatically jerked down a little bit, expecting somewhat more of a fight. The result was that half of the bottle splashed out directly on top of two of the guys I was serving. Like they were soaked. Like I couldn’t even try to clean anything up, because it was all over the both of them. It looked like they just gotten out of a red wine shower. I had to fetch a new bottle of wine because this one was noticeable depleted. What a disaster. I comped the bottle and told the manager that these guys had a little too much to drink at the bar.

Crisis averted. I think. Maybe one day I’m going to go into work and the boss will just be like, “All right buddy, this has gone on far enough. You’re not fooling anybody. Name me four types of Chardonnay right now or your fired.” And I’ll just have to be like, “Yeah, sure. But, can you hold on one second? My mom’s in the hospital and I just want to text my dad and see if she’s OK.” And then I’ll really hope that the wireless network is moving quick as I’ll open up my phone’s browser and try to load up the restaurant’s wine list.

Working hard or hardly working? Both.

I always hear variations of the same quote, something about if you love your job, you’ll never feel like you’ve worked a day in your life. So that’s my first clue as to how I know I don’t love my job, because I totally feel like I’m going to work every single time that I’m going to work. I guess I could go through my whole work history, but as of right now I’m working as a waiter, serving food and drinks and smiling and saying things like, “Coming right out, sir,” and “Hope you had a great time, folks.”

I’m not complaining, really. I’ve had enough terrible jobs where I’m at a point that I don’t hate what I’m doing, and so that’s definitely a good thing. And regardless of what the job is, I think work isn’t a question of labor; it’s really all about time. Considering the fact that most of us have to do something considered work, I’ve found that my personal satisfaction on a day-to-day basis stems from how much time I have that I can consider my own vs. how much of my time that I have to be someplace outside of my house doing things that I really, really don’t feel like doing, which is exactly what going to work is.

Because like I said it’s a matter of time. With my current job, I have some set hours, but it’s really such a loose structure. At my restaurant we have twelve waiters working per shift. With two shifts a day, that’s twenty-four spots. On a weekly basis, I’m only scheduled to work five of those spots. Mostly every other employee at this job is some sort of an entertainer, performer, or actor, so these people are constantly looking to swap shifts and make trades.

As a wannabe writer, this always works out in my favor. Seeing as how I do my writing on my time, I really don’t have to set aside any specific hours. So every week I can basically shape and mold my schedule as I see fit. It’s great because, and I’ve been doing this a lot lately, I can work three double shifts in a row and then have off for four days. It’s like taking those thirty-five hours that I once upon a time spent sitting in an office from nine to five, Monday through Friday, and just compressing them into a pill that I can choke down in one oversized swallow.

It’s no picnic, by the end of that last shift I feel like I’ve lost just enough of my humanity, like I’m almost capable of walking outside and mugging a complete stranger, but it’s totally, totally worth it to have four days off.

And this is what I’ve been trying to get at from the beginning of this essay. That whole quote about loving your job so much that it doesn’t feel like work. I feel like it’s a great idea, and if you’re able to make that a reality for your life, then that’s amazing. Consider yourself very fortunate, because that’s the dream, right? Personal and professional fulfillment. But it’s not practical on a large scale. If everybody had that, then there wouldn’t be any garbage men or bank tellers or people who go down in the sewers to do repairs or guys who have to scoop up elephant dung at the circus or waiters and waitresses to get you another Diet Coke.

I think that, for maximized happiness, on a global scale, it would be within everybody’s best interests to find some way where your work time is never greater than your free time. I think, as a society, as a species, that’s what we should be striving for. There are enough people on this planet to make it a reality. There’s no reason that companies should set thirty-five, forty hours a week as this arbitrary holy standard of productivity. Based on my own experiences in the office world, an absurd majority of this time is spent mindlessly cruising the Internet, clicking on some bullshit spreadsheet whenever a boss walks by, but the boss probably doesn’t even care, because she’s got a Scrabble game going on in her office, and she resents the fact her bosses make her get up every now and then to walk around and make sure everyone’s being productive.

And if you think my idea is stupid, just look to the New York City Department of Sanitation. Workers have a very important, very messy job to do, but they get it done, they hustle their asses off, and they pick up all of the trash on their routes. And if they finish before it’s quitting time, then, whatever, they’ve done their jobs, there isn’t any more trash to be picked up, so they get to go home and still clock in for a full day’s work. Oh yeah, plus they get some of the best benefits in the city. Oh yeah, plus they get full retirement after twenty years. And, oh yeah, there’s something like a four-year waiting list just to get one of those jobs.

I’m not saying we should all aspire to work less. We should all be working smarter, not harder. Nothing’s worse than doing your job fast and efficient, only to have some boss turn around and go, “Oh, don’t have anything to do? I’ll give you something to do,” and then giving you some sort of a busy-work, some meaningless drudgery that’ll make you think twice about doing your original work faster ever again. It hinders productivity. Employers should be hiring people for jobs, not time. Let me do my job as fast and efficiently as possible so I can get out and go home.

Changing jobs

I changed jobs a while ago. The restaurant I had been working at for a couple of years decided, amongst other poor decisions, to ignore the advice of the Department of Health. “I’m going to come back here sometime in the next few weeks,” the health inspector said, “and if I don’t like what I see …” then the restaurant’s C grading would stand. For anybody that doesn’t know, all New York City restaurants are given an annual rating of A, B, or C. So the restaurant changed nothing, the guy came back, was like, “are you kidding me?” gave them the C, and left. As punishment, the general manager came downstairs in a cocaine-fueled rage, fired the closest busboy, screamed out something like, “and there’s more where that came from!” to the rest of the staff and then disappeared.

So I figured, yeah, you know what? As much as I adored my indentured servitude, maybe a change of scenery would do me some good. But I wasn’t sure. I needed to make a list, some pros and cons. OK, so, pro: all you can eat ice cream. Believe me, I took advantage of that one. Pro: Only tourists came in, meaning no regulars, meaning if I didn’t feel like acting nice I didn’t have to, because even if they did complain, pro: the managers didn’t do anything except hide out in the office, and wouldn’t know how to deal with a pissed off guest anyway.

But the con side of the list brought everything into sharp relief. No benefits, no regular schedule, constant yellings and screamings from the psychotic GM … whatever, I don’t feel like reliving my lousy job by complaining. I do enough of that in real life.

So I went online and checked out some job listings. One restaurant immediately caught my eye because they offered benefits, something pretty rare in the service industry. I walked in, went through the interviews, and here I am, new job. My old job didn’t take it so well. Even though I gave a five-weeks notice, the general manager looked me square in the eye and told me I’d never work in the restaurant industry ever again. Seriously, what a nut job.

The only problem I had in switching, and it sounds like a minor detail, but there is always so much time spent waiting around while you’re filling out applications. It’s almost enough of a deterrent in itself to actually finding a new job. I walked in the door of the new restaurant. I had to introduce myself to a hostess and tell her I’m responding to the open call. She gives me an application and tells me to take a seat somewhere to fill it out. There are like two hundred other people filling out applications. First of all, I don’t get this application stuff, because it’s all right there on my resume. Why don’t you just take a copy of my resume? Everybody puts so much weight on the resume, but every single time I’ve interviewed somewhere, they always make me waste twenty or thirty minutes refilling out everything by hand on some generic application form.

Whatever. I filled it out. I handed it in. “Thanks a lot, somebody will be with you in a second.” And I hate to ask, but I know from past experiences that I have to, “Where should I wait?” because if I don’t ask, I’ll just kind of wander around aimlessly and try not to look like I’m too worried that I’m waiting in the incorrect area. And then the waiting starts. People are being selected at what seems like totally random to sit down and chat with somebody in a suit. I wonder why people who came after me are being interviewed first.

I tell myself, don’t think about it Rob. Get out of your head. Just act natural. But acting natural only works if you’re not thinking about it. And if I really wanted to act really natural, I’d be at home on my couch taking it easy. That’s a little too natural. So I always engage in an anxious type of weird self-coaching. Sit up straight. OK, not too straight. Stop furrowing your brow. Stuff runs through my mind like, where do I look? I want to look engaged with the world but not scatterbrained. I want to look focused on something without staring off into space. I don’t want to seem fidgety, but I don’t want to be like a statue.

Finally I got called. The manager gave me a brief interview, looked at my then-current former job and said something like, “Wow, you must love it there. That place is really busy. Why are you leaving?” and I have to make up some crazy sounding answer about wanting more flexibility or growth opportunities or something like that. Nobody wants an interviewee to start badmouthing their current job. You have to stay positive. So the manager tells me to hang tight while he gets some more papers for me to fill out. More waiting.

Maybe fifteen minutes later he comes back with a personality test. It was one of those “1 for strongly disagree, 5 for strongly agree” type of tests. Stuff like, “I just hate being bossed around by women,” and I’d mark a number one. My thing is, even if you’re the biggest sexist on the planet, can’t you see right through that question? Don’t you realize that any job is going to want you to say, “no problem?”

I fill out that test. Then came an intelligence test. Then they set up another interview. Then another one. Then a uniform check. I get through all of them. What I can’t believe is that I made it through the waiting in between each round. Just showing up at the restaurant, I’d immediately be directed to a seat to wait. Indefinitely. Then someone would come with something for me to sign. “I’ll be right back to take that from you.” Half an hour of more waiting.

I got to thinking that all of that waiting had to be a part of the interview process. They had to be looking specifically for people that could go for long periods of time while sitting still. Anybody who knows me knows that that’s not who I am. So I just had to fake it. I had to clench my fists as tight as I could while trying not to go for my phone every ten seconds to check if that email wasn’t maybe something more important than one of the twenty-five emails Barack Obama sent me asking for some more reelection campaign money.

I got the job. All is well. I just feel like a lot of what inhibits me from going for new jobs is stuff like spending hours waiting around doing absolutely nothing. I know it’s incredibly shortsighted to not want to go out there because you’re afraid of waiting. But can imagine how awful I would have felt if, after all of that sitting around, they just left me there? They wouldn’t even tell me I couldn’t work there, they’d just ignore me, keep me waiting, the restaurant getting busier and busier until finally, a hostess or a waitress would come up to me and be like, “Can we help you?” and I’d try to explain that I’m waiting for somebody to come back with some papers, but they’d never show up. The dinner rush would end and finally someone else would come by and be like, “We’re closing up. Locking the doors for the night. Let’s go.”

And none of that happened. But it all went through my mind as I was sitting there, wondering what was taking so long, hoping I didn’t misunderstand some social cue, worrying that I’d somehow been overlooked or forgotten about.

I should start a blog where I only write stuff about waiting tables. But what would I call it?

I work in a restaurant, so naturally every time I sit down to write something, the first thing that pops in my mind is something about the business, something about waiting tables. But I don’t want to be that guy. There’s a really talented guy who writes about waiting tables, and he did it already, he wrote all about it. I’m pretty sure I don’t have anything novel to add to the conversation. But still, I spend a good chunk of my waking day serving food, and sometimes it just begs to leak out onto the page.

So I’m thinking about maybe, just this once, letting myself write some restaurant stuff. But everything that’s coming to mind immediately sounds so boring, so tired. I’d say trite, but that word is really trite. Everything is just going to come off as whiny. It’s one thing to write about stuff in a funny way, but I’m worried that once I get started on the little things I feel I need to get off my chest, it’s going to snowball into this giant Death Star of bitterness.

How do I do it without sounding too angry? How do I do it without giving everybody a huge lecture on how to behave at a restaurant? Because nobody wants that. I get it, you don’t go out to eat for the benefit of the staff; you go out to eat for your own enjoyment. And so even after I complain to myself in my head about certain things that bug me, another voice in my head starts saying stuff like, “Well, it’s your job. If you hate it that much quit. Or stop complaining.” And I hate it when that side of me butts into my inner monologue, and I get even angrier.

But a lot of my troubles all boil down to the fact that there really isn’t a cohesively American restaurant etiquette. Everything, little things, big things, they might all be done differently at different restaurants. Don’t pay your waiter, pay at the register. Don’t pay at the register, pay your waiter. You have to ask for extra here. Over here you don’t ask, it’s automatic. I recently switched restaurants, and I’m just shocked at some of these differences in the way service is carried out. At my old restaurant, I had my section, my tables, everybody had to go through me. And there were benefits to this, like I knew exactly what I had to do and I could figure out how to prioritize my actions in the short term. All while keeping my head above water and trying to make some money. I mean, that’s the idea.

But at this new restaurant everybody is supposed to be available to anybody. So a random customer asks me for a Coke and now I have to get it. At my old restaurant I would have just pretended not to see him waving. I’m only kidding. Sort of. I joke around about how I can be this huge dick, but really I had my own little tasks that I had to take care of, and so pretending not to see him was actually nicer than the alternative, me just kind of saying to this guy who wanted a Coke, “Your waiter’s coming right over.”

But customers don’t know how the staff operates from restaurant to restaurant. And the guy just wanted a Coke. Maybe he was really thirsty. I hate that whole, “I’m not your waiter,” business, even when I was working at that old restaurant and I had to do it every ten seconds. Who hasn’t ever found themselves sitting at a table for way too long without a drink? It happens. But customers get cranky and the staff gets upset for the customer getting pushy and, ultimately, if he or she is pissed off enough, they won’t get a good tip.

Tipping. It’s a pretty crazy way for people to make a living. It’s all so arbitrary. What do you do about that table that received great service but still only left fifteen percent, or less? And why? Why did they cheap out on the tip? Because they’re allowed to. Because restaurants don’t have to pay their staff a decent wage, they can leave it to the discretion of the customer. And a lot of the time customers are jerks. Why pay more when I can pay less? I’m giving myself a discount on the dinner, and in life, by being a bad tipper.

What’s the theory behind this, that without the expectation of a tip, the waiter or waitress wouldn’t work as hard, right? Let me tell you, it’s total bullshit. If I knew that I were to receive an automatic twenty percent from every check, everybody would be having a more pleasant dining experience. Because I wouldn’t be stressed out over a tip. I wouldn’t be trying way too hard to be fake nice or running around the floor like a crazy person, trying to show all of the customers how hard I’m working. I would just be chill, relaxed, and I’d perform my duties with a lot less nervous energy.

And another reason why tipping is detrimental. I don’t know about other servers, but I can only take so much disappointment in one shift. After three or four shitty tips, I basically just lower the level of work that I’m putting in for the rest of the night. Because I’ve worked hard already for money that just wasn’t coming in. Why bother? Just shift into autopilot and keep that mediocre money flowing in.

But nobody wants to hear this stuff. That’s why I’m not going to write about it. Except this one anecdote. Really quick. The other night I had these two women who refused to leave the restaurant. It was like an hour and a half past closing and I was the only waiter left, because I had to wait for them to leave so I could clean the table. Finally I begged the manager to kick them out and he eventually approached the table. They knew right away, they were like, “Yeah, yeah, we know …” and got their coats on and left. And I was just standing there, holding back the explosive rage inside, wanting them to turn around and see the look on my face as I wiped down their table, tell them thanks a lot for their shitty twelve percent tip. But I can’t do that. Waiters are strictly prohibited from being rude to a customer, even if they were rude to you by not paying you what you were owed. “Don’t you dare talk that way to a customer! Or look at them funny! Smile! Now! We’ll fire you! We pay you a special minimum wage, special in the fact that it’s comically lower than regular minimum wage, which is already comically low in and of itself, to be nice and friendly and subservient and obedient!”

And they didn’t look back anyway. They were just oblivious to my existence, not a care in the world regarding the fact that, not only did they waste my time, but they didn’t even pay me enough for the job I did for them. That’s how this works. You don’t get table service at McDonald’s so you don’t have to tip. In any other profession you complain if your employer doesn’t give you all of your money. But waiters have to stand there and smile. “See you next time! Get home safe! You forgot your doggy bag miss! Wouldn’t want to forget those two shrimp!” Come on. Who sits in a restaurant that long? Get a life. Go out to a bar. You’re just going to sit? Can’t you sit somewhere else? Like at home? Don’t they realize that other people want to get to their homes, get some sleep? Just completely inconsiderate of other human beings. It’s unimaginable.

See? That was way too bitter. I’m scowling right now. I think I’ve aged a whole month in like half an hour. I could never do this, the whole writing about being a waiter gig, because I can’t even make it funny. It just gets dark. And I don’t want to be dark. I don’t want to complain. Nobody wants to read it. Everybody’s got to work. I wouldn’t want to read somebody writing about how much it sucks to be an accountant, how these idiots come in at tax time and have no idea how to manage their own numbers, these jokes of human beings who didn’t save any receipts or bring any of the papers they were told to bring in order to have their returns processed properly. That would be super lame. And I would get pissed, thinking, hey, that accountant is talking about me. I’m not stupid. And so I’d stop reading. And I’d probably stop going to him for my taxes.