Living the Dream

I have been a waitress for a very long time; pretty much my entire adult life. Believe it or not, when I was a kid I actually wanted to be a waitress. For some reason it seemed glamorous to me, not to mention the idea that if you were good at your job and remembered that Betty wanted a Diet Coke no ice with lemon when you brought a refill, or that Billy wanted his mayo on the side and just a little cheese on his club sandwich, not to mention the hundred other things for your other tables, you would be both appreciated and rewarded for your trouble. I think that's what appealed most to me. Instant gratification and affirmation that I was doing a good job, not to mention the cash in hand.

I got a job as a busser at a family restaurant when I was seventeen. I was a little too good at it, so the management didn't want to move me up. Let me be clear that bussing (at least where I was working) is not hard. It's easy, and you barely have to talk to anyone other than the cranky servers who think you're not getting to their tables. As I rolled my cart from table to dirty table, it took pretty much zero brain power to clean and reset, and clean and reset, so I was inside my head way too much. This was slowly driving me insane, and I think it was the beginning of my spiral down from the sweet teenager who thought everyone had some good in them to the cynical shell that I am today.

Two things really stand out in my mind from my bussing days. All of the burgers, sandwiches, whatever, came with cole slaw and fries, and apparently most people, given the choice, will go for the fries. I would throw away more cole slaw in a single shift than most people see in their entire lives. I can't touch the stuff to this day. Bussing also made me wish that I had a super power which allowed me to see germs; like the so-so germs would be green, and stuff like the Ebola virus would be red. Not so I could totally avoid them; that would be impossible. I just wanted to avoid the red germs because I knew they had to be there.

Eventually management saw fit to move me up to serving, and with a few brief breaks, I've been a server ever since. Serving is what I do, and I'm damn good at it. I'm afraid though, that serving is becoming part of who I am. I've started this blog in order to vent my daily and long-term frustrations, and this will hopefully bring me back down to a more normal level of sanity.

I was told once that serving is one of the most stressful jobs in the United States, right after air traffic controller. I don't know if that's true, but it damn well feels like it. I would place serving on the stress scale right after jobs involving actual loss of human life, although if you forget Betty's lemon when you bring out her Diet Coke, someone, apparently, may actually die.

-Penny