For a while there, I was in a slump at the restaurant. The hostesses seemed to seat me with nothing but two tops of old people and large parties consisting mostly of children. High maintenance but low checks. A lot of two dollar tips. I would get excited every time I saw guests over four feet tall with a full head of non-gray hair being led to one of my tables. Maybe, I would think, maybe they’ll order the ribeye and dessert and the kitchen won’t screw anything up.
All hope for a decent tip would leave, however, as soon as I stepped up to the table and the complaints began – why did they have to wait so long for a table? Why didn’t we have anything other than vegetable soup today? Why is their silverware dirty (spotty)? The answer to all of these questions was apparently that I am a bad server and screwed everything up. At least that’s what they told me through the tip they did not leave.
But I’d had enough. I’d had enough of the ass-kissing and unnecessary apologizing all in order to maybe squeeze out fifteen percent from these ungrateful bastards (Why is it taking them so long to recook that meal you dropped? It isn’t my fault that your server ran into my kid while he was chasing his brother around the dining room!). No more, I thought. No more will I smile politely while guests complain about stupid shit. No more will I answer their stupid questions as if they are perfectly valid. No more will I have to ask each and every guest in a party of seven the exact same thing because none of them are paying attention. No more.
Some examples:
Guest: I need more napkins!
Me: Sorry. One per customer. Perhaps you should have worn long sleeves today.
Result: Laughter and 20% tip. (I brought them more napkins obviously)
Guest: (after I knocked over a glass of water and broke it at the table behind them) Guess you have a case of the dropsies!
Me: Am I gonna have to cut you?
Result: Laughter. Man’s wife pats me on the arm. 23% tip.
Guest: I’d like a peach cobbler for dessert.
Me: I’m sorry, but we’re out.
Guest: That’s ridiculous! I came in here just for that.
Me: I’m very sorry.
Guest: I just can’t believe this. How could you run out?
Me: I’m not sure. I only ate seven of them before I came on shift.
Result: Guest stares at me for a moment, then laughs and calls me ‘cheeky.’ 30% tip and tells the manager I did an awesome job.
Guest: (looking around a full and very busy dining room) Why did it take so long for us to get a table?
Me: (as other servers and bussers fly past me in both directions) The Redskins’ game is on and we were all watching in back. Now can we make this quick? Half time is almost over.
Guest: Yeah, well what’s the score?
Result: 25% tip
Guest: My god! Did they have to kill the cow before cooking my steak?
Me: Yes, actually. We had one tied up out back, but some neighborhood kids keep letting it loose. Don't worry though, we had a couple of dishwashers chase it down. Your steak should be out as soon as we get some clean plates to serve it on.
Result: Everyone else at the table laughs. When I bring the steak, the guest asks what the cow's name was. I tell him "Patience." More laughter. 20% and a verbal tip (I used that to buy smokes on the way home)
For the past two weeks I’ve just been myself – my bitchy, sarcastic self – and it’s changed everything. I’d been holding back before, not saying what was on my mind, not becoming incredulous when someone asked why the food for their party of fifteen wasn’t already on the table when they ordered a whole ten minutes ago, apologizing for things that were beyond my control. I’m still not verbalizing every thought that comes into my head. I try to refrain from using the words ‘bitch’ or ‘alpha male jackass’ when standing at a table. But otherwise, I’ve pretty much let loose.
And I’ve been averaging about twenty-five percent every night. Sometimes more.
Go figure.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Christmas lights
For the past couple of weeks, another server and I have been checking out the Tacky Lights Tour houses here in Richmond. The first night was a Friday, and I’d had a particularly bad week and an even worse closing shift, so she helped me finish up my sidework and silver rolls and sometime around midnight, we headed out on a quest to find some holiday cheer.
Not only did we find cheer, but we found, I think, the source of the global warming we’ve been hearing so much about. These houses are crazy. Most of them have the entire house and any trees/fences/bushes/random cars outlined in lights and inflatable and plastic light up displays scattered across their lawns and rooftops. At one house, there was a light show timed to music. I took some video of a couple houses with my friend’s phone (wow, ten years ago that would have been an insane statement), which she was supposed to send to me. She did not. As consolation, I did find this video on the local newspaper’s website.
Since that first night, we’ve been wandering around after each shift we work together in search of more and more lights, spending an hour or so driving around before she takes me back to my car and I head home to the kid, who isn’t the least bit interested in taking the tour with me. We used to go (in Des Moines) when he was small, but somewhere the decorations lost their wonder for him. Not for me.
When I was a kid (yeah, it’s one of those stories) my grandparents used to load us into their stationwagon after the Christmas Eve service at church. They’d hand each of us a candy cane and a mug of hot chocolate, pop in an 8-track of Christmas music (yes, I'm that old), and drive us around town for hours while my parents wrapped presents. We would ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at every house that even bothered to put a lighted toy soldier on the porch. We were pretty easy to please. And a little high on sugar and caffeine and the knowledge that toys were being placed beneath the tree in our absence.
It was a tradition we held onto through the years – through our parents’ divorce, through our teenage years when we could hardly stand to be in the same room together, let alone a cramped car, and into our adult years. Even after my grandfather passed away and my grandmother stopped driving. Even after my son was a toddler and my dad and I would load him into the car, pick up my sisters and my grandmother and roam around town looking at the lights. Even after I stopped believing in the idea of a savior.
I haven’t made it home for the holidays the past couple of years, so I’ve missed out on the Christmas Eve service and the light tour. I guess it’s made it a little easier for me in some ways – not having to feel out of place at church, not having to tell my grandmother that I no longer believe in God, that I haven’t for some time and never wanted to offend her but can no longer lie and say I do.
But the truth is, I know I wouldn’t have felt out of place at church. Not at my grandmother’s church. They’re good people. Charitable people. Disciples of Christ, who honestly believe in the teachings. They would have welcomed me, embraced my heathen soul, and loved me just the same as they did when I was a toddler and the little old ladies would kiss me on the top of my head as we sang “God Be With You” as we left the chapel.
And after church, as we rode around and the glow from illuminated snowmen and reindeer evoked memories of years past, I would have felt the same kind of joy, the kind that comes from being with the people you love, and I wouldn’t have felt the need to tell my grandmother anything. Because in those moments, I would have believed, not in God but at least in some force greater than myself, and to paraphrase the words of that great Christmas icon Ralphie Parker, to be peaceful in the knowledge that all was right with the world.
A couple of weeks ago, as grandmas do, mine passed away. My father had called to tell me she wasn’t doing well, and though she was on a ventilator and couldn’t speak, he put the phone to her ear and I got the chance to tell her that I loved her and wished I could be with her then.
I can’t say I wasn’t prepared. She’s been in poor health for years and in the last few months she had steadily declined. And she had been starting to suffer the effects of dementia, becoming crabby and sometimes mean, complaining all the time, disparaging everyone, spouting off about how letting my nephew play with dolls was going to turn him into a homosexual and snapping at me when I told her I thought that would be just fine. The truth is that she wasn’t the woman I grew up with anymore. And I had already begun to grieve.
A few days after I spoke to her, as I was heading to the restaurant for a shift, my cousin called to tell me she had died. There was nothing I could do. My family was twelve hundred miles away. So I drove the rest of the way to work and served sweet tea and biscuits and went about the night and the next few nights the same as I had for months now.
Years ago, when my grandfather passed away, I still believed in God and heaven and found comfort in the thought that I would be with him again some day in some form or another. But that comfort is no longer there. I haven’t quite known how to feel and because of that, I just kept moving on, feeling sad and a little disconnected, but moving on. Telling myself that this is how life works, that someday it ends, that grandmothers pass away. Feeling guilty about not feeling worse.
The first night my friend suggested we look at lights, I have to admit I wasn’t that interested. It was already late and I’d had a long week. I just wanted to go home and fall asleep in front of the television. But she insisted and since she was helping me finish up my work so we could leave together, I could hardly say no. So we drove into the residential areas after work and found the first house on her list. It was well after midnight and the streets were empty and still – just us, thousands of twinkling bulbs, and a midi-playing snowman.
As we sat there, it all hit me at once. But instead of thinking about loss, I was feeling that excitement again, that joy, remembering all the years I had the privilege to spend with my grandmother, and feeling the love that she gave to me.
I’m sure my friend was just trying to cheer me up a little – that and she really wanted to go see some lights and didn’t want to go alone – but she can’t have known what a wonderful gift it was to me, how these little drives through the suburbs these past days have been the best present I’ve received in a very long time.
Not only did we find cheer, but we found, I think, the source of the global warming we’ve been hearing so much about. These houses are crazy. Most of them have the entire house and any trees/fences/bushes/random cars outlined in lights and inflatable and plastic light up displays scattered across their lawns and rooftops. At one house, there was a light show timed to music. I took some video of a couple houses with my friend’s phone (wow, ten years ago that would have been an insane statement), which she was supposed to send to me. She did not. As consolation, I did find this video on the local newspaper’s website.
Since that first night, we’ve been wandering around after each shift we work together in search of more and more lights, spending an hour or so driving around before she takes me back to my car and I head home to the kid, who isn’t the least bit interested in taking the tour with me. We used to go (in Des Moines) when he was small, but somewhere the decorations lost their wonder for him. Not for me.
When I was a kid (yeah, it’s one of those stories) my grandparents used to load us into their stationwagon after the Christmas Eve service at church. They’d hand each of us a candy cane and a mug of hot chocolate, pop in an 8-track of Christmas music (yes, I'm that old), and drive us around town for hours while my parents wrapped presents. We would ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at every house that even bothered to put a lighted toy soldier on the porch. We were pretty easy to please. And a little high on sugar and caffeine and the knowledge that toys were being placed beneath the tree in our absence.
It was a tradition we held onto through the years – through our parents’ divorce, through our teenage years when we could hardly stand to be in the same room together, let alone a cramped car, and into our adult years. Even after my grandfather passed away and my grandmother stopped driving. Even after my son was a toddler and my dad and I would load him into the car, pick up my sisters and my grandmother and roam around town looking at the lights. Even after I stopped believing in the idea of a savior.
I haven’t made it home for the holidays the past couple of years, so I’ve missed out on the Christmas Eve service and the light tour. I guess it’s made it a little easier for me in some ways – not having to feel out of place at church, not having to tell my grandmother that I no longer believe in God, that I haven’t for some time and never wanted to offend her but can no longer lie and say I do.
But the truth is, I know I wouldn’t have felt out of place at church. Not at my grandmother’s church. They’re good people. Charitable people. Disciples of Christ, who honestly believe in the teachings. They would have welcomed me, embraced my heathen soul, and loved me just the same as they did when I was a toddler and the little old ladies would kiss me on the top of my head as we sang “God Be With You” as we left the chapel.
And after church, as we rode around and the glow from illuminated snowmen and reindeer evoked memories of years past, I would have felt the same kind of joy, the kind that comes from being with the people you love, and I wouldn’t have felt the need to tell my grandmother anything. Because in those moments, I would have believed, not in God but at least in some force greater than myself, and to paraphrase the words of that great Christmas icon Ralphie Parker, to be peaceful in the knowledge that all was right with the world.
A couple of weeks ago, as grandmas do, mine passed away. My father had called to tell me she wasn’t doing well, and though she was on a ventilator and couldn’t speak, he put the phone to her ear and I got the chance to tell her that I loved her and wished I could be with her then.
I can’t say I wasn’t prepared. She’s been in poor health for years and in the last few months she had steadily declined. And she had been starting to suffer the effects of dementia, becoming crabby and sometimes mean, complaining all the time, disparaging everyone, spouting off about how letting my nephew play with dolls was going to turn him into a homosexual and snapping at me when I told her I thought that would be just fine. The truth is that she wasn’t the woman I grew up with anymore. And I had already begun to grieve.
A few days after I spoke to her, as I was heading to the restaurant for a shift, my cousin called to tell me she had died. There was nothing I could do. My family was twelve hundred miles away. So I drove the rest of the way to work and served sweet tea and biscuits and went about the night and the next few nights the same as I had for months now.
Years ago, when my grandfather passed away, I still believed in God and heaven and found comfort in the thought that I would be with him again some day in some form or another. But that comfort is no longer there. I haven’t quite known how to feel and because of that, I just kept moving on, feeling sad and a little disconnected, but moving on. Telling myself that this is how life works, that someday it ends, that grandmothers pass away. Feeling guilty about not feeling worse.
The first night my friend suggested we look at lights, I have to admit I wasn’t that interested. It was already late and I’d had a long week. I just wanted to go home and fall asleep in front of the television. But she insisted and since she was helping me finish up my work so we could leave together, I could hardly say no. So we drove into the residential areas after work and found the first house on her list. It was well after midnight and the streets were empty and still – just us, thousands of twinkling bulbs, and a midi-playing snowman.
As we sat there, it all hit me at once. But instead of thinking about loss, I was feeling that excitement again, that joy, remembering all the years I had the privilege to spend with my grandmother, and feeling the love that she gave to me.
I’m sure my friend was just trying to cheer me up a little – that and she really wanted to go see some lights and didn’t want to go alone – but she can’t have known what a wonderful gift it was to me, how these little drives through the suburbs these past days have been the best present I’ve received in a very long time.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Just a little something to tide you over
So I've been terrible about posting lately. It's not that I don't want to, I just can't seem to squeeze anything in before I leave work each day. That, and last week was a little difficult for me personally - more on that when I return next week.
If I had a computer at home, I could post at night after I get home from the restaurant. I'm always revved up then anyway, after running around all night.
The kid and I are heading back to Iowa for the holidays. The university will be closed for a week, so I get a free week off and I took time from the restaurant (and, no, they were not happy about my unavailability for the holidays). My mother is paying for me to rent a car, and the kid and I are going to drive home next week. I don't know if I'm more excited about the road trip or the week I'm going to spend on my sister's sofa, smoking, drinking and playing cards.
Actually, it's neither of those. I'm most excited about not working for thirteen days straight.
Thirteen days! NO WORK! Woohoo!
Plus, I finally get to meet my nine month old nephew. This is sooo going to make up for Thanksgiving!
If I had a computer at home, I could post at night after I get home from the restaurant. I'm always revved up then anyway, after running around all night.
The kid and I are heading back to Iowa for the holidays. The university will be closed for a week, so I get a free week off and I took time from the restaurant (and, no, they were not happy about my unavailability for the holidays). My mother is paying for me to rent a car, and the kid and I are going to drive home next week. I don't know if I'm more excited about the road trip or the week I'm going to spend on my sister's sofa, smoking, drinking and playing cards.
Actually, it's neither of those. I'm most excited about not working for thirteen days straight.
Thirteen days! NO WORK! Woohoo!
Plus, I finally get to meet my nine month old nephew. This is sooo going to make up for Thanksgiving!
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Not really a post . . .
First the good news: I’m alive!
The bad news: well, what isn’t?
Anyway, it’s been crazy busy for me in the office. Because of my skill with databases and other things, I’ve been assigned a few new projects which are taking up all of my time. My mother was right: hard work is always rewarded with more work. So, now that they’ve figured out I can do stuff, gone are the days of being paid to sit around and read blogs all day. But at least the time goes by a little faster.
A real post tomorrow.
The bad news: well, what isn’t?
Anyway, it’s been crazy busy for me in the office. Because of my skill with databases and other things, I’ve been assigned a few new projects which are taking up all of my time. My mother was right: hard work is always rewarded with more work. So, now that they’ve figured out I can do stuff, gone are the days of being paid to sit around and read blogs all day. But at least the time goes by a little faster.
A real post tomorrow.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Taking off my black hat
So this is how it usually works:
The kid’s grandmother (my ex’s mom) asks my son what he’d like for Christmas and his birthday (which is just a few days later). He tells her. She goes out and buys it right away, tells him that she’s bought it, wraps it up and makes him wait until Christmas morning to unwrap it.
As a kid, the fun of Christmas for me was wondering what was in those boxes under the tree. I always hated when the surprise of a gift was spoiled for me, and even though I don’t argue with the kid’s arrangement with his grandmother, I just don’t understand it. But, as I said, I don’t say anything about it.
This year, though, it has gone too far. Last night when I got home from work – my first night off in many nights – I was informed by the kid that his grandmother told him she would get him the new Guitar Hero game for his Xbox. No big deal. I was kind of happy actually because it’s somewhere around a hundred bucks and he really wanted it, but I knew I would have to pick up a few extra shifts if I wanted to get it for him. So good for him.
But there was a catch. It seemed she had also told him he could have it early if he wanted. I was slightly irritated by this – the kid has no patience and a lot of this is due to the spoiling he received while living with his dad and grandparents – but I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I just said something about not being disappointed when Christmas came and he didn’t have anything new to open from his grandparents.
I went to my bedroom and started changing out of my work clothes when the kid’s voice came through the door.
“Grandma said she would send you the money if we went out and got it. So can we? Go pick it up?”
I moved beyond irritated. I was pissed.
“No, we can’t,” I said, opening the door to see his pathetic face. “I don’t have the cash.”
“She said she would send you the money for it,” he argued as I walked past him and into the kitchen for a drink.
“I don’t have the money,” I repeated. “If she wants to send you the money to buy it, then I can take you out to pick it up when I have time, but I do not have the cash right now.”
He argued with me for several more minutes about how he knew I had that much (I have him count my tips each night and I try to keep him aware of, if not directly involved in our budget), and that his grandma would reimburse me so I wouldn’t be out anything.
I didn’t give in. For one thing, my ex and his family haven’t always been great about paying me back. They’re very generous with the kid when he’s living with them, but as soon as he’s with me, they seem to forget that he might need or even want anything (yes, there’s a child support arrangement, but that’s a rant – I mean topic – for another time). And I’ve paid up front for many things – airline tickets, shoes, school clothes – for which I was promised cash in return, only to be stiffed and put into a financial bind when the money didn’t come. I’ve learned my lesson and I’m certainly in no position for that to happen again. For another, if his grandmother wants to get him a present, then she should get it for him. She should get it. I’m already annoyed that I have to do the actual shopping, but I find no reason why I should have to do the paying too.
The part of it that really pisses me off is that she knows we’re on a pretty strict budget. She knows I’m working two jobs and that the holidays are coming and that I’m trying to put some money toward going to Iowa over the break, so she should be aware that I’m in no position to go out and purchase the kid’s Christmas present for her. Apparently, she isn’t aware.
So she told the kid he could have something and because I am unwilling/unable to go along, I am the perceived villain, and the kid moped around the apartment all night.
My ex and his family do this stuff to me all the time. One year, the kid wanted an electric scooter for Christmas. I shopped around all fall until I finally found one I could afford. When I discussed it with my ex, he said he didn’t think it was such a good idea. The kid was still fairly young and living with his father at the time, and he didn’t think they were very safe. I disagreed, but we’re in this parenting thing together (like it or not), so I didn’t buy the scooter.
On Christmas morning, the kid was a little disappointed that he didn’t get it, but he liked the other gifts I bought instead and everything was fine. Then for his birthday, his dad and grandma gave him cash and a gift card and took him to the store where they let him buy himself - you guessed it - a scooter. He was so excited about it. He immediately brought it over to my sister’s house, where I was staying, and drove it around the neighborhood. His little face beamed as he showed me the turn signals and the working headlight, and my heart broke a little that I couldn’t be the one to make his holidays so wonderful.
My mom used to complain about my dad doing the same types of things to her, always trying to make her look bad in our eyes, always trying to make her into the bad guy. One day a few years ago, when we finally started opening up to each other about our experiences with depression and the bipolar and therapy, she told me things really changed for her when one therapist told her this: “[dhf’s father] has his white cowboy hat held on with superglue. It’s never coming off his head, so stop trying to knock it off. All you can do is take off your own black hat and refuse to wear it anymore.”
I choked up a little when she told me that. Okay, so we had been drinking and I might have become a blubbering mess (two bipolar women drinking – I gotta tell you, it doesn’t get much more fun than that). I was angry with her over the years for various things – I was a teenager – but I never saw her as the villain, and it hurt to think that that’s how she saw herself for so many years, that that’s how my father made her feel. I told her that. I told her that her hat was always white in my book. And even though I know it didn’t take away the pain she felt for so long, I think it healed her in some ways. And we cried and had a few more beers. Well, I had a few more beers. She went to bed.
I know that it will be a long time before my son can step away and really assess our performances as parents. I know that he may never realize the ways in which his father failed us both, so many times, without remorse. And if he never sees his father without the glow from his gleaming white hat, I don’t really care. But I’m not wearing the black one. I’m not going to be the mustache-twisting villain, and I’m not handing over my gold just so he’ll like me. And maybe someday over a few beers, he'll put the white hat on my head.
The kid’s grandmother (my ex’s mom) asks my son what he’d like for Christmas and his birthday (which is just a few days later). He tells her. She goes out and buys it right away, tells him that she’s bought it, wraps it up and makes him wait until Christmas morning to unwrap it.
As a kid, the fun of Christmas for me was wondering what was in those boxes under the tree. I always hated when the surprise of a gift was spoiled for me, and even though I don’t argue with the kid’s arrangement with his grandmother, I just don’t understand it. But, as I said, I don’t say anything about it.
This year, though, it has gone too far. Last night when I got home from work – my first night off in many nights – I was informed by the kid that his grandmother told him she would get him the new Guitar Hero game for his Xbox. No big deal. I was kind of happy actually because it’s somewhere around a hundred bucks and he really wanted it, but I knew I would have to pick up a few extra shifts if I wanted to get it for him. So good for him.
But there was a catch. It seemed she had also told him he could have it early if he wanted. I was slightly irritated by this – the kid has no patience and a lot of this is due to the spoiling he received while living with his dad and grandparents – but I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I just said something about not being disappointed when Christmas came and he didn’t have anything new to open from his grandparents.
I went to my bedroom and started changing out of my work clothes when the kid’s voice came through the door.
“Grandma said she would send you the money if we went out and got it. So can we? Go pick it up?”
I moved beyond irritated. I was pissed.
“No, we can’t,” I said, opening the door to see his pathetic face. “I don’t have the cash.”
“She said she would send you the money for it,” he argued as I walked past him and into the kitchen for a drink.
“I don’t have the money,” I repeated. “If she wants to send you the money to buy it, then I can take you out to pick it up when I have time, but I do not have the cash right now.”
He argued with me for several more minutes about how he knew I had that much (I have him count my tips each night and I try to keep him aware of, if not directly involved in our budget), and that his grandma would reimburse me so I wouldn’t be out anything.
I didn’t give in. For one thing, my ex and his family haven’t always been great about paying me back. They’re very generous with the kid when he’s living with them, but as soon as he’s with me, they seem to forget that he might need or even want anything (yes, there’s a child support arrangement, but that’s a rant – I mean topic – for another time). And I’ve paid up front for many things – airline tickets, shoes, school clothes – for which I was promised cash in return, only to be stiffed and put into a financial bind when the money didn’t come. I’ve learned my lesson and I’m certainly in no position for that to happen again. For another, if his grandmother wants to get him a present, then she should get it for him. She should get it. I’m already annoyed that I have to do the actual shopping, but I find no reason why I should have to do the paying too.
The part of it that really pisses me off is that she knows we’re on a pretty strict budget. She knows I’m working two jobs and that the holidays are coming and that I’m trying to put some money toward going to Iowa over the break, so she should be aware that I’m in no position to go out and purchase the kid’s Christmas present for her. Apparently, she isn’t aware.
So she told the kid he could have something and because I am unwilling/unable to go along, I am the perceived villain, and the kid moped around the apartment all night.
My ex and his family do this stuff to me all the time. One year, the kid wanted an electric scooter for Christmas. I shopped around all fall until I finally found one I could afford. When I discussed it with my ex, he said he didn’t think it was such a good idea. The kid was still fairly young and living with his father at the time, and he didn’t think they were very safe. I disagreed, but we’re in this parenting thing together (like it or not), so I didn’t buy the scooter.
On Christmas morning, the kid was a little disappointed that he didn’t get it, but he liked the other gifts I bought instead and everything was fine. Then for his birthday, his dad and grandma gave him cash and a gift card and took him to the store where they let him buy himself - you guessed it - a scooter. He was so excited about it. He immediately brought it over to my sister’s house, where I was staying, and drove it around the neighborhood. His little face beamed as he showed me the turn signals and the working headlight, and my heart broke a little that I couldn’t be the one to make his holidays so wonderful.
My mom used to complain about my dad doing the same types of things to her, always trying to make her look bad in our eyes, always trying to make her into the bad guy. One day a few years ago, when we finally started opening up to each other about our experiences with depression and the bipolar and therapy, she told me things really changed for her when one therapist told her this: “[dhf’s father] has his white cowboy hat held on with superglue. It’s never coming off his head, so stop trying to knock it off. All you can do is take off your own black hat and refuse to wear it anymore.”
I choked up a little when she told me that. Okay, so we had been drinking and I might have become a blubbering mess (two bipolar women drinking – I gotta tell you, it doesn’t get much more fun than that). I was angry with her over the years for various things – I was a teenager – but I never saw her as the villain, and it hurt to think that that’s how she saw herself for so many years, that that’s how my father made her feel. I told her that. I told her that her hat was always white in my book. And even though I know it didn’t take away the pain she felt for so long, I think it healed her in some ways. And we cried and had a few more beers. Well, I had a few more beers. She went to bed.
I know that it will be a long time before my son can step away and really assess our performances as parents. I know that he may never realize the ways in which his father failed us both, so many times, without remorse. And if he never sees his father without the glow from his gleaming white hat, I don’t really care. But I’m not wearing the black one. I’m not going to be the mustache-twisting villain, and I’m not handing over my gold just so he’ll like me. And maybe someday over a few beers, he'll put the white hat on my head.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
What I did on my Thanksgiving vacation
As punishment for having a couple of days off from job number one, I returned this week to an extraordinary amount of work. And because I worked at the restaurant last Thursday, and picked up an extra shift on Saturday, I’ve been working twelve days straight now, so it doesn’t feel like I’ve had a break. I am, in fact, more tired than I was pre-holiday. But I have tonight off. Woohoo!
The above paragraph was not a ploy for sympathy, rather a sorry excuse for my lack of posts this week (as if anyone was sitting at their computer, damning me and the internet gods for not allowing them their semi-regular dose of this fem’s ranting).
So, backing way up to Thanksgiving, mine wasn’t so horrible after all. The kid and I had a nice breakfast and played some video games before I went to work and he went to dinner with our friends. The restaurant was insanely busy, but most people ordered the turkey dinner, which was a dip item and could be served very quickly, and those who did order something off the grill were pretty much alone so those meals came out fast too. I turned tables pretty fast and with few exceptions got twenty percent from almost everybody. I walked out with an apron pocket bulging with cash.
After the shift, one of the other servers invited us all over to her house for dinner. Her roommates are in the restaurant biz too – one is a server at a pizza place in the west end, and the other two are chefs at a pretty popular new restaurant in the Fan. So we were treated to a great meal. We sat around and smoked and drank, and I got into a really lengthy discussion about politics with one of the chef roommates.
It was really great to feel smart again.
Even though I work at a university, most of the professors in the department tend to only talk to me when they need something, or they briefly ask me how my day was or comment on the weather. They either forget or never bothered to find out that I have an education and they tend to dismiss me as “just a secretary.” It’s academic snobbery that I find very annoying. Then I go to the restaurant, where the guests tend to see me as beneath them because, hey, I’m serving them biscuits and sweet tea, which I would only be doing if I wasn’t smart enough to do anything else, right?
Anyway, the chef and I had a great discussion and started talking about fascism and at one point, after realizing I had been monopolizing the conversation, I looked around the room at a couple of my co-workers from the restaurant and they were just staring at me and one of them said, “Man, that’s some deep shit.”
Then they changed the subject to sports and I stopped talking and allowed the boys their swagger as they showed off their knowledge of which team topped the BCS standings and which players were going to be free agents next season in the NFL.
Apparently, though word got around the restaurant that I had a lot to say that night, and now I’m not only known as that damned hippie feminist chick, but as that damned commie feminist chick.
Sweet.
The above paragraph was not a ploy for sympathy, rather a sorry excuse for my lack of posts this week (as if anyone was sitting at their computer, damning me and the internet gods for not allowing them their semi-regular dose of this fem’s ranting).
So, backing way up to Thanksgiving, mine wasn’t so horrible after all. The kid and I had a nice breakfast and played some video games before I went to work and he went to dinner with our friends. The restaurant was insanely busy, but most people ordered the turkey dinner, which was a dip item and could be served very quickly, and those who did order something off the grill were pretty much alone so those meals came out fast too. I turned tables pretty fast and with few exceptions got twenty percent from almost everybody. I walked out with an apron pocket bulging with cash.
After the shift, one of the other servers invited us all over to her house for dinner. Her roommates are in the restaurant biz too – one is a server at a pizza place in the west end, and the other two are chefs at a pretty popular new restaurant in the Fan. So we were treated to a great meal. We sat around and smoked and drank, and I got into a really lengthy discussion about politics with one of the chef roommates.
It was really great to feel smart again.
Even though I work at a university, most of the professors in the department tend to only talk to me when they need something, or they briefly ask me how my day was or comment on the weather. They either forget or never bothered to find out that I have an education and they tend to dismiss me as “just a secretary.” It’s academic snobbery that I find very annoying. Then I go to the restaurant, where the guests tend to see me as beneath them because, hey, I’m serving them biscuits and sweet tea, which I would only be doing if I wasn’t smart enough to do anything else, right?
Anyway, the chef and I had a great discussion and started talking about fascism and at one point, after realizing I had been monopolizing the conversation, I looked around the room at a couple of my co-workers from the restaurant and they were just staring at me and one of them said, “Man, that’s some deep shit.”
Then they changed the subject to sports and I stopped talking and allowed the boys their swagger as they showed off their knowledge of which team topped the BCS standings and which players were going to be free agents next season in the NFL.
Apparently, though word got around the restaurant that I had a lot to say that night, and now I’m not only known as that damned hippie feminist chick, but as that damned commie feminist chick.
Sweet.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Fox News' number one rated sitcom
Last Wednesday night I was able to catch Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and he was discussing the recent accusations by Scott McClellan with Ambassador Joe Wilson. I was fairly excited to see that it was being discussed on television at all, seeing how so many of this administration’s deceits are discovered, get a one paragraph write-up on internet news sites, and are quickly pushed aside for more interesting and relevant stories on televised news. (The administration is making fake news casts and sending them out to local stations? Propaganda? No, let’s go with this one about Britney flashing her junk).
Of course, the glee was short-lived as I flipped to CNN and Fox News. CNN was running an in-depth story about some celebrity dance competition. On Fox, it was Hannity & Colmes recapping the day’s top stories. And apparently, there was only one top story and it was certainly not the new evidence that the investigation into possible treason in the White House was not as aggressive as the media had been led to believe. No, the top story on Fox was the re-arrest of three suspects in the disappearance of a pretty white girl in 2005. Coincidentally, the same time as the grand jury investigations into possible treason. Not so coincidentally, Fox favored the disappearance over the investigation then too.
I wasn’t surprised that Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes wouldn’t be covering the same story as that dirty liberal Keith Olbermann, but I was at least hoping they would. I wanted to see some squirmage. I wanted to watch someone in the 24% minority come on and defend their president.
There were no sitcoms on, and I needed a laugh.
And you know what? I got one. While Olbermann was on commercial break after interviewing Wilson and Constitutional Law expert Jonathan Turley, I flipped back over to Fox where they were discussing the arrest with Mark Fuhrman (ahem!) and some expert – I would give you the name and a link, but the transcript isn’t posted on Lexis-Nexis yet and the clip isn’t available on the Fox news site, and yes, I do fear that my computer may be infected now that I have even logged on to the site – yikes!
This forensic expert was responding to a question about the new break in the case. He talked about how despite the suspects having conspired to cover up what actually happened to the missing white girl, over time their stories have changed. And he talked about how that is often the case when a group of people have committed a crime and are trying to cover it up, that the lie deteriorates and becomes harder to keep up because there is a pressure for facts to come to the surface and people can only dance around the truth for so long before they need to let it out.
I wish I could find the transcript of this because it was brilliant. And by brilliant, I mean that word for word what he said could have supported the story on Olbermann, if you only changed the names.
Of course, the glee was short-lived as I flipped to CNN and Fox News. CNN was running an in-depth story about some celebrity dance competition. On Fox, it was Hannity & Colmes recapping the day’s top stories. And apparently, there was only one top story and it was certainly not the new evidence that the investigation into possible treason in the White House was not as aggressive as the media had been led to believe. No, the top story on Fox was the re-arrest of three suspects in the disappearance of a pretty white girl in 2005. Coincidentally, the same time as the grand jury investigations into possible treason. Not so coincidentally, Fox favored the disappearance over the investigation then too.
I wasn’t surprised that Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes wouldn’t be covering the same story as that dirty liberal Keith Olbermann, but I was at least hoping they would. I wanted to see some squirmage. I wanted to watch someone in the 24% minority come on and defend their president.
There were no sitcoms on, and I needed a laugh.
And you know what? I got one. While Olbermann was on commercial break after interviewing Wilson and Constitutional Law expert Jonathan Turley, I flipped back over to Fox where they were discussing the arrest with Mark Fuhrman (ahem!) and some expert – I would give you the name and a link, but the transcript isn’t posted on Lexis-Nexis yet and the clip isn’t available on the Fox news site, and yes, I do fear that my computer may be infected now that I have even logged on to the site – yikes!
This forensic expert was responding to a question about the new break in the case. He talked about how despite the suspects having conspired to cover up what actually happened to the missing white girl, over time their stories have changed. And he talked about how that is often the case when a group of people have committed a crime and are trying to cover it up, that the lie deteriorates and becomes harder to keep up because there is a pressure for facts to come to the surface and people can only dance around the truth for so long before they need to let it out.
I wish I could find the transcript of this because it was brilliant. And by brilliant, I mean that word for word what he said could have supported the story on Olbermann, if you only changed the names.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
I'm pretty sure he has cooties
Last Saturday while I was at a friend’s house, she received a phone call from one of her daughter’s friend’s mothers. It seemed that the mother had received an invite to Berkeley Plantation in Charles City, Virginia, where the president was to speak this week. She wanted to know if my friend’s daughter might like to join them.
My friend and her husband are both academics – my friend has a PhD in Political Science and her husband a law degree – and like most of the academics I know (and like most of the country) are highly critical of the president and the entire current administration. Though they are careful not to discuss many things in front of their daughters, politics is not among those forbidden topics. In their household, GW and his reign of terror are fair game.
But my friend (we’ll call her PS, for lack of a better pseudonym) didn’t want her daughter to miss out on a chance to meet our supreme leader, even if he is leading us somewhere no one wants to go. So PS agreed to let her six year old daughter join her friend on a trip to meet the president, and in preparation for such a trip, she and her husband had a brief talk with their daughter about propriety.
Some examples:
When addressing the president, you should call him Mr. President, or President Bush. You should not call him Bushie, or GW, or Son of Satan. Even if we do say those things at home.
If you get a chance to ask him a question, stick with something simple, like “What are you having for Thanksgiving?”
Do not ask him anything complicated, like “When will we be able to pull out of the Middle East?” He will probably just lie. Or make something up.
If he uses improper grammar or syntax, which he probably will, just let it slide.
We know that you are in first grade and are learning a lot about vocabulary and the English language, but it just wouldn’t be polite to correct him.
So PS’s daughter joined her friend on the trip to Charles City, where they were privileged *cough* enough to sit very near GW as he spoke about giving thanks and giving back. And after his speech, they were able to meet GW and very briefly greet him.
When recounting the story of her day to her mother, PS’s daughter told her that her friend had shaken the president’s hand, but when he reached out for hers, she didn’t take it.
PS told her daughter, “Well, I think it would have been all right if you shook his hand.”
Her daughter scrunched up her face as she thought about it for a moment, and said, “Well . . . No.”
I love that kid.
My friend and her husband are both academics – my friend has a PhD in Political Science and her husband a law degree – and like most of the academics I know (and like most of the country) are highly critical of the president and the entire current administration. Though they are careful not to discuss many things in front of their daughters, politics is not among those forbidden topics. In their household, GW and his reign of terror are fair game.
But my friend (we’ll call her PS, for lack of a better pseudonym) didn’t want her daughter to miss out on a chance to meet our supreme leader, even if he is leading us somewhere no one wants to go. So PS agreed to let her six year old daughter join her friend on a trip to meet the president, and in preparation for such a trip, she and her husband had a brief talk with their daughter about propriety.
Some examples:
When addressing the president, you should call him Mr. President, or President Bush. You should not call him Bushie, or GW, or Son of Satan. Even if we do say those things at home.
If you get a chance to ask him a question, stick with something simple, like “What are you having for Thanksgiving?”
Do not ask him anything complicated, like “When will we be able to pull out of the Middle East?” He will probably just lie. Or make something up.
If he uses improper grammar or syntax, which he probably will, just let it slide.
We know that you are in first grade and are learning a lot about vocabulary and the English language, but it just wouldn’t be polite to correct him.
So PS’s daughter joined her friend on the trip to Charles City, where they were privileged *cough* enough to sit very near GW as he spoke about giving thanks and giving back. And after his speech, they were able to meet GW and very briefly greet him.
When recounting the story of her day to her mother, PS’s daughter told her that her friend had shaken the president’s hand, but when he reached out for hers, she didn’t take it.
PS told her daughter, “Well, I think it would have been all right if you shook his hand.”
Her daughter scrunched up her face as she thought about it for a moment, and said, “Well . . . No.”
I love that kid.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Compromises
So my Thanksgiving gets even worse. Even though I do not work on Thursdays, have not ever worked for the restaurant on Thursdays, and Thanksgiving is in fact on a Thursday (prior planning on my part? Perhaps), I will be working this Thursday. And even though I agreed to come in and was offered the choice of a morning or evening shift and chose the morning shift, I have been scheduled for the evening. 2-10.
Retail managers have no souls.
Upon discovering that I had been scheduled to work in the afternoon, effectively killing any plans I had left for the holiday, I told the manager on duty that I had agreed to work in the morning and that I wouldn’t have agreed to work at all if it meant the afternoon shift. I do, after all, have a child at home. We have no family in the area. We made plans to have dinner with friends in the evening. My working a 2-10 shift meant that my son would basically be spending the holiday alone (since he is, after all, a teenage boy, and it is unlikely he will even get out of bed before noon) or with friends who he still doesn’t know very well.
The manager said he would talk to the scheduling manager and take care of it.
He didn’t.
And yesterday when I arrived at work, I found that our GM was “no longer with the company” (don’t know what’s behind that) and that the scheduling manager is now our GM. And our new GM told me that he already had too many people on for the morning, so he couldn’t fit me in, but that he really needed me for the afternoon. He offered to take the hit and let me have the day off completely, but he already gave me last Sunday off in exchange for working the holiday and since I did not work Sunday (my money day), I now have no real choice about it. I have to work the shift because I am still too poor to miss out on the potential cash.
I feel like a horrible parent, like I am abandoning my son. But it is only a month until Christmas. And the kid’s birthday is just a few days after that. I was planning to travel to Iowa for the holidays, which my son is pretty excited about. We stayed in Virginia last year, and he wasn’t very happy about it, even though he understood why we couldn’t go. I wasn’t very happy either, but I haven’t been with my family for the holidays for some time, so I am used to it. Regardless, I want to go this year. I haven’t spent any time with my mother in a while and I have a new nephew who I have never met. And I really want to spend a couple weeks playing cards and drinking with my sisters. But mostly, I don't want the kid to miss out on the holidays with his family again.
So it’s a trade-off. A crappy Thanksgiving for a good Christmas break. I hope the kid understands this. And doesn’t hold it against me until he’s forty.
Retail managers have no souls.
Upon discovering that I had been scheduled to work in the afternoon, effectively killing any plans I had left for the holiday, I told the manager on duty that I had agreed to work in the morning and that I wouldn’t have agreed to work at all if it meant the afternoon shift. I do, after all, have a child at home. We have no family in the area. We made plans to have dinner with friends in the evening. My working a 2-10 shift meant that my son would basically be spending the holiday alone (since he is, after all, a teenage boy, and it is unlikely he will even get out of bed before noon) or with friends who he still doesn’t know very well.
The manager said he would talk to the scheduling manager and take care of it.
He didn’t.
And yesterday when I arrived at work, I found that our GM was “no longer with the company” (don’t know what’s behind that) and that the scheduling manager is now our GM. And our new GM told me that he already had too many people on for the morning, so he couldn’t fit me in, but that he really needed me for the afternoon. He offered to take the hit and let me have the day off completely, but he already gave me last Sunday off in exchange for working the holiday and since I did not work Sunday (my money day), I now have no real choice about it. I have to work the shift because I am still too poor to miss out on the potential cash.
I feel like a horrible parent, like I am abandoning my son. But it is only a month until Christmas. And the kid’s birthday is just a few days after that. I was planning to travel to Iowa for the holidays, which my son is pretty excited about. We stayed in Virginia last year, and he wasn’t very happy about it, even though he understood why we couldn’t go. I wasn’t very happy either, but I haven’t been with my family for the holidays for some time, so I am used to it. Regardless, I want to go this year. I haven’t spent any time with my mother in a while and I have a new nephew who I have never met. And I really want to spend a couple weeks playing cards and drinking with my sisters. But mostly, I don't want the kid to miss out on the holidays with his family again.
So it’s a trade-off. A crappy Thanksgiving for a good Christmas break. I hope the kid understands this. And doesn’t hold it against me until he’s forty.
Monday, November 19, 2007
I have more to say about this, but it's 4:30, and I have to be at my other job soon
I was flipping through the channels this weekend and came upon a broadcast of a recent city council meeting. A citizen was asking the council members to do something about the increasing number of homeless in our city. I thought I might settle in and watch, as I thought this to be topic of importance. There are a great number of homeless citizens around these parts, especially near the university where I work and the apartment in which I live. But then the question-asker posed the following:
Don’t you think we should cut back on the number of services we offer for the homeless, you know, to cut down on the number of them coming here to get help?
I turned the channel. I couldn’t bear to hear the answer to this stupidity. And I was slightly bitter that this man had the privilege and time to attend a televised city council meeting while I only had time to sit on my ass and watch it in my pajamas.
Finding nothing else on to numb my senses, I kept flipping through the channels and again landed on the city council meeting where another citizen – this one a middle aged white woman who had not been forced by poverty to skip either a meal or an appointment with her stylist – urged that something should be done about the homeless. And, as had the previous citizen, asked if it was wise to keep offering them free meals and places to sleep when it was clear that such actions only enabled them to be homeless.
I am para-phrasing in both instances, but the insensitivity, I mean, sentiment, is there.
If we stop feeding and housing citizens who have neither home nor nourishment, they will cease to exist. In other words, if we leave them out in the cold without food, they will die off and decrease the surplus population and we will no longer have to look at their dirty, malnourished faces and assume that they only want our spare change so they can buy another bottle of Thunderbird.
*I realize that I am not much better, spending my last post ranting about what I'm being served for dinner on Thanksgiving, when hey, at least I'll be having dinner. Do not think the hypocristy is lost on me.
Don’t you think we should cut back on the number of services we offer for the homeless, you know, to cut down on the number of them coming here to get help?
I turned the channel. I couldn’t bear to hear the answer to this stupidity. And I was slightly bitter that this man had the privilege and time to attend a televised city council meeting while I only had time to sit on my ass and watch it in my pajamas.
Finding nothing else on to numb my senses, I kept flipping through the channels and again landed on the city council meeting where another citizen – this one a middle aged white woman who had not been forced by poverty to skip either a meal or an appointment with her stylist – urged that something should be done about the homeless. And, as had the previous citizen, asked if it was wise to keep offering them free meals and places to sleep when it was clear that such actions only enabled them to be homeless.
I am para-phrasing in both instances, but the insensitivity, I mean, sentiment, is there.
If we stop feeding and housing citizens who have neither home nor nourishment, they will cease to exist. In other words, if we leave them out in the cold without food, they will die off and decrease the surplus population and we will no longer have to look at their dirty, malnourished faces and assume that they only want our spare change so they can buy another bottle of Thunderbird.
*I realize that I am not much better, spending my last post ranting about what I'm being served for dinner on Thanksgiving, when hey, at least I'll be having dinner. Do not think the hypocristy is lost on me.
Friday, November 16, 2007
N-O. How do you pronounce that again?
One of the bittersweet joys of living so far away from family and being too poor to travel is that I get to spend my holidays alone. Just me and the kid doing whatever we want. No splitting time between my mother’s family and my father’s before rushing the kid over to his own father’s house. No family bickering. No going out of my way to accommodate everyone else’s timelines and putting up with their little eccentricities. Just peace. And quiet. And time for silent reverence.
Ahhh.
So I was getting pretty excited about Thanksgiving. The university gives us Friday off and we only work a half day on Wednesday, so I was looking forward to a four and a half day weekend. Of course, I can’t afford to take the time off from the restaurant, but still, only working one job is a vacation. And since my availability doesn’t include Thursdays (or Saturdays – I have to have one day to do housework and grocery shopping), I’ve been looking forward to the extra full day of rest for months now.
Since we weren’t planning to go to Iowa to see family, and our kitchen is much too small for me to be preparing a big feast, I thought I’d take the kid out to dinner, overtip the poor server who had to work the holiday, then go home and spend the rest of the day playing video games and watching holiday movies while further stuffing ourselves on a few well-chosen snacks.
Exciting? No. Just what I want and need? Completely.
But it was not to be. Several weeks ago, a friend of ours invited us over for a T-Day dinner. I thanked her and said that it sounded nice, but I did not say yes. I also didn’t say no. Then a couple weeks ago, she called to ask if my son could babysit and in the course of our conversation, brought up Thanksgiving dinner. It quickly became clear that by not declining the invitation, I had accepted.
I couldn’t back out at that point, so definite plans were made. This is the same friend who gave me a place to stay this summer while I was apartment hunting, and the same friend who took me to the beach for some much needed rest. And while I don’t feel an obligation to accept her invitation, I also don’t want them to feel that I don’t care enough about them to spend the holiday with them, especially when (as most people might see it) I have nothing better to do.
And they only live ten minutes away. I figured the kid and I could still sleep in a little, get in a movie or some festive zombie-killing on the X-Box, hang out, cook and dine with my friends, and still have a few hours of down time in the evening.
This also was not to be.
The other night at the restaurant, the assistant GM sidled up to me (yes, he really did sidle).
AGM: I’m only asking you this because I have to . . .
Me: You want me to work Thanksgiving.
AGM: (slumping down by leaning on the counter to make himself smaller than me) We could really use you.
Me: You know, I used to like you.
AGM: (batting his pretty blond eyelashes) You can handle the traffic. We need the experience on the floor.
Me: I’m liking you less and less right now.
AGM: You could work morning or evening. It would really help us out.
Me: I don’t like you at all.
AGM: (puts his head on his arm and looks up at me)
Me: (in my head) Fuuuuuuuck!
AGM: The shifts are eight to two or two to ten.
Me: Is the morning busy?
AGM: (stands up straight now that he has what he wants) We’re on a wait by eight-thirty.
Me: You suck. (calling after him as he walks away) I mean that. I really can't stand you!
I need the money. Fucking money.
And I figured it wouldn’t be so bad. I have a few extra hours on Wednesday between leaving the university early and my shift at the restaurant when the kid and I can hang out. I’ll go in to the restaurant and make (I hope) some great money on Thursday and still make it to dinner at my friend’s house, then I’ll have until Friday at five to do whatever I want. Plus my usual Saturday.
So I talked to my friend a little while ago to finalize some plans for me to pick up a bed she is giving me (see, how could I turn down her invitation?). And I told her that I would have to work until mid-afternoon on Thursday, but that the kid and I would be there for dinner. No big deal, she said. She even offered to pick the kid up early so I could come straight to her house from work if I wanted. Oh, and by the way, she had some bad news.
It seems her six year old daughter (adorable) came home from school last night and declared herself a vegetarian. Eating animals is cruel. And because eating animals is cruel, she forbade her parents from cooking up and serving an already dead turkey. And because my friends are very progressive and always support their daughters in whatever their endeavors, we will not be having turkey on Thanksgiving. We will be having no meat of any kind.
Again – Fuck!
So, to recap:
dhf’s original Turkey-Day plans:
-Go out for drinks with work friends after Wednesday night’s shift because I have the next day off.
-Sleep in because I have the day off.
-Watch parades on television with the kid.
-Go out to dinner.
-Come home and eat junk food and play video games with the kid.
-Maybe go to a movie (Beowulf in 3-D at the IMAX!)
dhf’s modified Turkey-Day plans:
-Maybe have one drink after Wednesday night’s shift, depending on how early we get out because I have to be at work by eight in the morning.
-Serve pre- and post-church guests in the a.m. and lucky non-cooking bastards in the early afternoon. Hope they compensate me well for working on a holiday so they don’t have to.
-Head to my friends’ house for a lovely holiday dinner.
-Go to a movie or go home and eat junk food and kill zombies with the kid.
dhf’s final next-Thursday plans:
-Go out for too many drinks regardless of time after Wednesday night’s shift because I have to be at work early in the morning and then have a meatless Thanksgiving dinner, so why does it matter if I’m hung over.
-Drag myself out of bed and head to work where I will run my ass off for ungrateful customers who will probably bring in their kids who have likely been gorging on sweets all morning and will be hopped up on sugar, running around our restaurant with cousins they haven’t seen all year and are sooo excited to be hanging out with. Know that I’ll probably get stiffed thirty percent of the time. Two, maybe three dollars on the rest of the tables.
-Go to my friends’ house and eat vegetables and potato dishes.
-Skip the movie because I’m too hung over from the previous night’s drinking.
-Kill a shit-load of zombies because I am full of much bitterness over not being able to say no to people and spent the day doing something other than what I wanted.
Ahhh.
So I was getting pretty excited about Thanksgiving. The university gives us Friday off and we only work a half day on Wednesday, so I was looking forward to a four and a half day weekend. Of course, I can’t afford to take the time off from the restaurant, but still, only working one job is a vacation. And since my availability doesn’t include Thursdays (or Saturdays – I have to have one day to do housework and grocery shopping), I’ve been looking forward to the extra full day of rest for months now.
Since we weren’t planning to go to Iowa to see family, and our kitchen is much too small for me to be preparing a big feast, I thought I’d take the kid out to dinner, overtip the poor server who had to work the holiday, then go home and spend the rest of the day playing video games and watching holiday movies while further stuffing ourselves on a few well-chosen snacks.
Exciting? No. Just what I want and need? Completely.
But it was not to be. Several weeks ago, a friend of ours invited us over for a T-Day dinner. I thanked her and said that it sounded nice, but I did not say yes. I also didn’t say no. Then a couple weeks ago, she called to ask if my son could babysit and in the course of our conversation, brought up Thanksgiving dinner. It quickly became clear that by not declining the invitation, I had accepted.
I couldn’t back out at that point, so definite plans were made. This is the same friend who gave me a place to stay this summer while I was apartment hunting, and the same friend who took me to the beach for some much needed rest. And while I don’t feel an obligation to accept her invitation, I also don’t want them to feel that I don’t care enough about them to spend the holiday with them, especially when (as most people might see it) I have nothing better to do.
And they only live ten minutes away. I figured the kid and I could still sleep in a little, get in a movie or some festive zombie-killing on the X-Box, hang out, cook and dine with my friends, and still have a few hours of down time in the evening.
This also was not to be.
The other night at the restaurant, the assistant GM sidled up to me (yes, he really did sidle).
AGM: I’m only asking you this because I have to . . .
Me: You want me to work Thanksgiving.
AGM: (slumping down by leaning on the counter to make himself smaller than me) We could really use you.
Me: You know, I used to like you.
AGM: (batting his pretty blond eyelashes) You can handle the traffic. We need the experience on the floor.
Me: I’m liking you less and less right now.
AGM: You could work morning or evening. It would really help us out.
Me: I don’t like you at all.
AGM: (puts his head on his arm and looks up at me)
Me: (in my head) Fuuuuuuuck!
AGM: The shifts are eight to two or two to ten.
Me: Is the morning busy?
AGM: (stands up straight now that he has what he wants) We’re on a wait by eight-thirty.
Me: You suck. (calling after him as he walks away) I mean that. I really can't stand you!
I need the money. Fucking money.
And I figured it wouldn’t be so bad. I have a few extra hours on Wednesday between leaving the university early and my shift at the restaurant when the kid and I can hang out. I’ll go in to the restaurant and make (I hope) some great money on Thursday and still make it to dinner at my friend’s house, then I’ll have until Friday at five to do whatever I want. Plus my usual Saturday.
So I talked to my friend a little while ago to finalize some plans for me to pick up a bed she is giving me (see, how could I turn down her invitation?). And I told her that I would have to work until mid-afternoon on Thursday, but that the kid and I would be there for dinner. No big deal, she said. She even offered to pick the kid up early so I could come straight to her house from work if I wanted. Oh, and by the way, she had some bad news.
It seems her six year old daughter (adorable) came home from school last night and declared herself a vegetarian. Eating animals is cruel. And because eating animals is cruel, she forbade her parents from cooking up and serving an already dead turkey. And because my friends are very progressive and always support their daughters in whatever their endeavors, we will not be having turkey on Thanksgiving. We will be having no meat of any kind.
Again – Fuck!
So, to recap:
dhf’s original Turkey-Day plans:
-Go out for drinks with work friends after Wednesday night’s shift because I have the next day off.
-Sleep in because I have the day off.
-Watch parades on television with the kid.
-Go out to dinner.
-Come home and eat junk food and play video games with the kid.
-Maybe go to a movie (Beowulf in 3-D at the IMAX!)
dhf’s modified Turkey-Day plans:
-Maybe have one drink after Wednesday night’s shift, depending on how early we get out because I have to be at work by eight in the morning.
-Serve pre- and post-church guests in the a.m. and lucky non-cooking bastards in the early afternoon. Hope they compensate me well for working on a holiday so they don’t have to.
-Head to my friends’ house for a lovely holiday dinner.
-Go to a movie or go home and eat junk food and kill zombies with the kid.
dhf’s final next-Thursday plans:
-Go out for too many drinks regardless of time after Wednesday night’s shift because I have to be at work early in the morning and then have a meatless Thanksgiving dinner, so why does it matter if I’m hung over.
-Drag myself out of bed and head to work where I will run my ass off for ungrateful customers who will probably bring in their kids who have likely been gorging on sweets all morning and will be hopped up on sugar, running around our restaurant with cousins they haven’t seen all year and are sooo excited to be hanging out with. Know that I’ll probably get stiffed thirty percent of the time. Two, maybe three dollars on the rest of the tables.
-Go to my friends’ house and eat vegetables and potato dishes.
-Skip the movie because I’m too hung over from the previous night’s drinking.
-Kill a shit-load of zombies because I am full of much bitterness over not being able to say no to people and spent the day doing something other than what I wanted.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Letters to my 'guests'
To the divorced dad who brought his children in for dinner:
I was standing at another table when the hostess sat you, and as soon as I finished taking their order, I greeted you. I could tell you did not think this was fast enough. I could tell by the way you tapped your polished leather shoes impatiently until I turned around. I also greeted your children who couldn’t be bothered to look up from their notebook drawings – your daughter’s of a home with two children and a mother in front of it, your son’s of a similar house on fire – long enough to acknowledge my presence or that they had been spoken to. I came right back with the tea you ordered for yourself, and nothing for your children because you bought them sodas which they brought into the restaurant. I smiled while I waited for you to decide what to eat, even though I had other tables to greet, even though you told me you were ready and seemed annoyed when I politely suggested I come back in a few moments. I only tell you this because you weren’t looking at me while you barked your order at me. And I wanted you to know. And when you told me to bring you a plate of biscuits, then as an afterthought said, “That comes with it” almost as a question, but not quite, I told you it didn’t, but I would hook you up. I did not do this because you are entitled to bread. I did it to be nice. And when I brought you the bread, and you said “the kids need some waters” – still not looking me in the eye – and put your arms behind your head, making sure to shake your shiny gold watch behind your head as you stretched and your son picked up the orange crayon to add accent to his flames, I did not “accidentally” drop the plate of bread in your lap. This too I did to be nice. And when I brought the children their water, and offered to top off your glass of tea, I understood that you were too busy staring off into nothingness to acknowledge that you had been asked a question, so I refilled it anyway. And when I brought your food out, including an extra plate so your children could split a meal, and they couldn’t be bothered to move their crayons and notebooks to make room for the plates of food and you said nothing, I only laughed and commented on how we needed to make bigger tables. And when you growled at me to “put that down over there!” even though I could not reach “over there” because your son had chosen that moment to lean across the table and throw the orange slice garnish on the ground at my feet, I did not knock him in the head with the plate, and teach him about being aware of his surroundings as I reached over him. Because I’m nice like that. And later, as I rushed down the aisle with another table’s tray of food and you stretched your foot into the aisle, almost tripping me, I did not scuff your expensive shoes. Even though I wanted to. And after you left, and I came back to bus your table, and I saw the untouched water glasses, the outside soda bottles, the pieces of wet pancake on the table and the floor, and the dollar fifty tip you left me on a twenty dollar tab, I wondered why it took your wife so long to leave your sorry ass.
To the older woman who needed to complain about something, to somebody:
You ordered roast beef with no gravy. Even though it is cooked in gravy. So I stood behind the cook while he put your portion of roast onto the grill and cooked the gravy away. I watched while he added the sides to your plate, and the moment he was finished, I brought it to your table. You might imagine my surprise when I stopped back to ask how your meal was, and you complained that it wasn’t very warm. I was almost as shocked as you were when my manager refused to comp your meal and most definitely more shocked than when you and your husband left without tipping me at all.
To the guests who come in with thirteen of your closest friends and complain to management about my service when your food does not arrive within fifteen minutes during a dinner rush on Friday night:
Go to McDonald's. Or a buffet. Or the real world. Your choice.
To the couple with the adorable little girl and the teenage son, both of whom said “please” and “thank you” and wished me a good evening as you left:
I think I love you. Please dine with us every night. Please.
I was standing at another table when the hostess sat you, and as soon as I finished taking their order, I greeted you. I could tell you did not think this was fast enough. I could tell by the way you tapped your polished leather shoes impatiently until I turned around. I also greeted your children who couldn’t be bothered to look up from their notebook drawings – your daughter’s of a home with two children and a mother in front of it, your son’s of a similar house on fire – long enough to acknowledge my presence or that they had been spoken to. I came right back with the tea you ordered for yourself, and nothing for your children because you bought them sodas which they brought into the restaurant. I smiled while I waited for you to decide what to eat, even though I had other tables to greet, even though you told me you were ready and seemed annoyed when I politely suggested I come back in a few moments. I only tell you this because you weren’t looking at me while you barked your order at me. And I wanted you to know. And when you told me to bring you a plate of biscuits, then as an afterthought said, “That comes with it” almost as a question, but not quite, I told you it didn’t, but I would hook you up. I did not do this because you are entitled to bread. I did it to be nice. And when I brought you the bread, and you said “the kids need some waters” – still not looking me in the eye – and put your arms behind your head, making sure to shake your shiny gold watch behind your head as you stretched and your son picked up the orange crayon to add accent to his flames, I did not “accidentally” drop the plate of bread in your lap. This too I did to be nice. And when I brought the children their water, and offered to top off your glass of tea, I understood that you were too busy staring off into nothingness to acknowledge that you had been asked a question, so I refilled it anyway. And when I brought your food out, including an extra plate so your children could split a meal, and they couldn’t be bothered to move their crayons and notebooks to make room for the plates of food and you said nothing, I only laughed and commented on how we needed to make bigger tables. And when you growled at me to “put that down over there!” even though I could not reach “over there” because your son had chosen that moment to lean across the table and throw the orange slice garnish on the ground at my feet, I did not knock him in the head with the plate, and teach him about being aware of his surroundings as I reached over him. Because I’m nice like that. And later, as I rushed down the aisle with another table’s tray of food and you stretched your foot into the aisle, almost tripping me, I did not scuff your expensive shoes. Even though I wanted to. And after you left, and I came back to bus your table, and I saw the untouched water glasses, the outside soda bottles, the pieces of wet pancake on the table and the floor, and the dollar fifty tip you left me on a twenty dollar tab, I wondered why it took your wife so long to leave your sorry ass.
To the older woman who needed to complain about something, to somebody:
You ordered roast beef with no gravy. Even though it is cooked in gravy. So I stood behind the cook while he put your portion of roast onto the grill and cooked the gravy away. I watched while he added the sides to your plate, and the moment he was finished, I brought it to your table. You might imagine my surprise when I stopped back to ask how your meal was, and you complained that it wasn’t very warm. I was almost as shocked as you were when my manager refused to comp your meal and most definitely more shocked than when you and your husband left without tipping me at all.
To the guests who come in with thirteen of your closest friends and complain to management about my service when your food does not arrive within fifteen minutes during a dinner rush on Friday night:
Go to McDonald's. Or a buffet. Or the real world. Your choice.
To the couple with the adorable little girl and the teenage son, both of whom said “please” and “thank you” and wished me a good evening as you left:
I think I love you. Please dine with us every night. Please.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Mommy, why do the Communists hate me?
As a senior in high school, I was forced to take a course in government. I already had enough credits as a junior that I could have graduated early except for two required courses – economics and government. That was the title of the semester long course. Government. In just eighteen short weeks, we would learn everything we needed to know about government.
Our instructor was a portly (yes, I said portly), old white dude who stood at the windows between classes and shouted insults at the smokers on the non-school-property sidewalk outside. This particular OWD was a Republican, which I know because he declared so in class on a daily basis. I was most definitely not a Republican, but he had a PhD and I figured I could learn something from him despite his misguided ideology.
There were also in our class, two exchange students from Germany. One from West Germany. The other from still-behind-the-iron-curtain East Germany. It made for interesting discussions in the classroom, especially with our OWD teacher mockingly accusing the East German student of being in our class so he could go back home and pass on secrets to his countrymen. What national secrets were being divulged in a twelfth grade government class in the Midwest, I’m not sure. I’m also not sure our OWD was entirely joking.
Most of the semester, we had spent talking about communism. And how it stacked up against democracy. We didn’t actually discuss the ideological bases of democracy vs. communism, or how fascist governments could be the product of any political system. Instead, we talked about the communist USSR and how it stacked up against the democratic US of A. And most of what we learned was reinforcement of what we had already learned through television and the media, the gist of which was that communism was bad, democracy good.
So the eighteen weeks of government was little more than a course in flag-waving, the capstone on eighteen years of Cold-War-Era learned paranoia. The Communists were out to get us. Because they hated freedom.
We were offered examples of how freedom-hating the communists really were.
- In Russia, the KGB suppresses political dissidence. In the US, you’re free to say whatever you want about the government and nobody cares.
- In Russia, there are all these secrert prisons and the government can hold you there for no reason whatsoever. Like if you disagree with them or something. Not like in the United States where you have right to due process.
- In Russia, the police can just barge right into your house any time. Not like in the US where they have to have a search warrant.
- In Russia, the secret police torture people to get information from them. We don’t torture in the US.
- In Russia, the government controls the media. They decide what goes in the papers and on the air, not like in the US where we have freedom of the press.
- Communist elections are fixed. Leaders aren’t chosen by the people. Cronyism is rampant in communist countries, unlike in the US where our leaders are democratically elected.
- In communist countries, the government listens to your phone calls and reads your mail. Not like in the US where we have a guaranteed right to privacy.
- In Russia, the whole country is run by the same people. The government is all-powerful. Not like in the US where we have a set of checks and balances that protect the people.
You get where I’m going. At least I hope you do.
I had the good fortune of going on to college, of actually reading Marx (and Hume and Hobbes and others on whose theories our Enlightenment following founders based our particular brand of government), and of learning the difference between a government and an ideology. And the things that had bothered me as a child and young adult (how can we say all communists are bad when their government won’t let them be any other way?) started to make more sense. And also less.
That semester I took government was in the fall of 1989. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall came down. I remember that our OWD pushed a tv set into the room and we watched coverage on CNN (it might have been a tape of the previous nights’ broadcast, I can’t remember). In the desk in front of me sat the West German student and a few chairs over, the East German. We asked them both lots of questions. What did this mean to them? What was it like to see all those people pouring into West Berlin? Are you sad you aren’t there to witness it for yourself?
I honestly don’t remember their answers. I don’t even remember if they did answer or if they just sat there, staring at the television, and the crumbling of a wall.
Our instructor was a portly (yes, I said portly), old white dude who stood at the windows between classes and shouted insults at the smokers on the non-school-property sidewalk outside. This particular OWD was a Republican, which I know because he declared so in class on a daily basis. I was most definitely not a Republican, but he had a PhD and I figured I could learn something from him despite his misguided ideology.
There were also in our class, two exchange students from Germany. One from West Germany. The other from still-behind-the-iron-curtain East Germany. It made for interesting discussions in the classroom, especially with our OWD teacher mockingly accusing the East German student of being in our class so he could go back home and pass on secrets to his countrymen. What national secrets were being divulged in a twelfth grade government class in the Midwest, I’m not sure. I’m also not sure our OWD was entirely joking.
Most of the semester, we had spent talking about communism. And how it stacked up against democracy. We didn’t actually discuss the ideological bases of democracy vs. communism, or how fascist governments could be the product of any political system. Instead, we talked about the communist USSR and how it stacked up against the democratic US of A. And most of what we learned was reinforcement of what we had already learned through television and the media, the gist of which was that communism was bad, democracy good.
So the eighteen weeks of government was little more than a course in flag-waving, the capstone on eighteen years of Cold-War-Era learned paranoia. The Communists were out to get us. Because they hated freedom.
We were offered examples of how freedom-hating the communists really were.
- In Russia, the KGB suppresses political dissidence. In the US, you’re free to say whatever you want about the government and nobody cares.
- In Russia, there are all these secrert prisons and the government can hold you there for no reason whatsoever. Like if you disagree with them or something. Not like in the United States where you have right to due process.
- In Russia, the police can just barge right into your house any time. Not like in the US where they have to have a search warrant.
- In Russia, the secret police torture people to get information from them. We don’t torture in the US.
- In Russia, the government controls the media. They decide what goes in the papers and on the air, not like in the US where we have freedom of the press.
- Communist elections are fixed. Leaders aren’t chosen by the people. Cronyism is rampant in communist countries, unlike in the US where our leaders are democratically elected.
- In communist countries, the government listens to your phone calls and reads your mail. Not like in the US where we have a guaranteed right to privacy.
- In Russia, the whole country is run by the same people. The government is all-powerful. Not like in the US where we have a set of checks and balances that protect the people.
You get where I’m going. At least I hope you do.
I had the good fortune of going on to college, of actually reading Marx (and Hume and Hobbes and others on whose theories our Enlightenment following founders based our particular brand of government), and of learning the difference between a government and an ideology. And the things that had bothered me as a child and young adult (how can we say all communists are bad when their government won’t let them be any other way?) started to make more sense. And also less.
That semester I took government was in the fall of 1989. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall came down. I remember that our OWD pushed a tv set into the room and we watched coverage on CNN (it might have been a tape of the previous nights’ broadcast, I can’t remember). In the desk in front of me sat the West German student and a few chairs over, the East German. We asked them both lots of questions. What did this mean to them? What was it like to see all those people pouring into West Berlin? Are you sad you aren’t there to witness it for yourself?
I honestly don’t remember their answers. I don’t even remember if they did answer or if they just sat there, staring at the television, and the crumbling of a wall.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Feels just like I'm walking on crumpled trash
My last three shifts at the restaurant have been with our general manager as the closer. This is never fun. Our GM is an older, grumpy white dude with no sense of humor who sucks what little joy we have at work right out of the occasion.
Our GM is obsessed with the tidiness of the restaurant. Not with the cleanliness, which would make sense because, you know, we serve food to people. No, our GM is obsessed with things being neat and orderly at all times. He walks up and down the server aisle moving trays into neat little piles and organizing stacks of napkins. I’m not kidding. But his biggest obsession seams to be the floor.
Let me just say that we sweep when there’s down time. And if one of us spills something or drops a dish, we immediately clean it up. We do this because it makes sense – no matter how busy we are, no matter how much a table is demanding bread service right that moment, we know that we cannot leave liquids or broken porcelain on the floor. It’s a safety issue. Sometimes a health code issue. But occasionally, as we are rushing through the server aisle with our trays, we drop things – straw wrappers, grill tickets, sugar packets, etc.
The GM gets irritated by this. So irritated that even during our busiest rushes, his top priority is finding someone to sweep the server aisle. Should we run some of the trays in the window before the food gets cold and we have to replate it? No, we should sweep up straw wrappers. Should we go greet the three tables the airheaded hostess just sat in our section at once? No, we should pick up those two packets of Equal that spilled out of the box.
His obsession with a tidy floor has become a joke, and no longer do any of us respond to his requests for “somebody to take a broom through here” when we have hungry, thirsty guests on the floor. It probably has something to do with the fact that just a few weeks ago, he shoved a broom in my direction despite the fact that I was already carrying a tray full of drinks and asked me to sweep the floor, and I told him, “I would, but my guests need me to do something for them. And they’re paying me more than you are.”
I don’t know why he hasn’t fired me yet.
So Friday night, realizing that none of us cared about his tidy floor, he took the broom and dustpan and swept it himself. Not without grumbling of course.
“You’re walking on trash, people!” he said, as he swept up a grill ticket. “Do you walk on trash at home? Is this how you people live?”
Most everybody ignored him or just plain didn’t hear him, as the restaurant was full of guests and we were on an hour wait, but I happened to be standing near him, making sweet tea so I could take some to my tables.
“Do you walk on trash at home?” he said to me. He even said my name. Do you walk on trash at home, dhf? As if our little question and answer would be an example for all other servers. Did you hear that? Dhf doesn't walk on trash at home. Maybe we should sweep up these crumpled napkins.
“No,” I told him. “I don't walk on trash. But I also don’t wait tables at my house, so it’s kind of a wash.”
I'm very disappointed in myself.
Our GM is obsessed with the tidiness of the restaurant. Not with the cleanliness, which would make sense because, you know, we serve food to people. No, our GM is obsessed with things being neat and orderly at all times. He walks up and down the server aisle moving trays into neat little piles and organizing stacks of napkins. I’m not kidding. But his biggest obsession seams to be the floor.
Let me just say that we sweep when there’s down time. And if one of us spills something or drops a dish, we immediately clean it up. We do this because it makes sense – no matter how busy we are, no matter how much a table is demanding bread service right that moment, we know that we cannot leave liquids or broken porcelain on the floor. It’s a safety issue. Sometimes a health code issue. But occasionally, as we are rushing through the server aisle with our trays, we drop things – straw wrappers, grill tickets, sugar packets, etc.
The GM gets irritated by this. So irritated that even during our busiest rushes, his top priority is finding someone to sweep the server aisle. Should we run some of the trays in the window before the food gets cold and we have to replate it? No, we should sweep up straw wrappers. Should we go greet the three tables the airheaded hostess just sat in our section at once? No, we should pick up those two packets of Equal that spilled out of the box.
His obsession with a tidy floor has become a joke, and no longer do any of us respond to his requests for “somebody to take a broom through here” when we have hungry, thirsty guests on the floor. It probably has something to do with the fact that just a few weeks ago, he shoved a broom in my direction despite the fact that I was already carrying a tray full of drinks and asked me to sweep the floor, and I told him, “I would, but my guests need me to do something for them. And they’re paying me more than you are.”
I don’t know why he hasn’t fired me yet.
So Friday night, realizing that none of us cared about his tidy floor, he took the broom and dustpan and swept it himself. Not without grumbling of course.
“You’re walking on trash, people!” he said, as he swept up a grill ticket. “Do you walk on trash at home? Is this how you people live?”
Most everybody ignored him or just plain didn’t hear him, as the restaurant was full of guests and we were on an hour wait, but I happened to be standing near him, making sweet tea so I could take some to my tables.
“Do you walk on trash at home?” he said to me. He even said my name. Do you walk on trash at home, dhf? As if our little question and answer would be an example for all other servers. Did you hear that? Dhf doesn't walk on trash at home. Maybe we should sweep up these crumpled napkins.
“No,” I told him. “I don't walk on trash. But I also don’t wait tables at my house, so it’s kind of a wash.”
I'm very disappointed in myself.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
The coffee's probably not a safe bet, either
I’ve only dropped one tray at the restaurant. Actually, it wasn’t even a full tray – just one plate of food that slid off the corner of the tray as I pulled it out of the window. It’s amazing that I haven’t dropped more. I mean, I’m clumsy. I once fell and knocked over an end table and broke a lamp by doing nothing more than turning to face a friend who was speaking to me. Another time I tripped over the sidewalk and slammed my face into the concrete outside the library. In front of a lot of people. Who all rushed to my aid, embarrassing me even further. The worst part was I had a twenty-eight hour bus ride home ahead of me and a bad case of facial road-rash, though I'm not sure I stood out that much with the other Greyhound passengers.
Regardless, it amazes me that I am able to carry a tray full of water glasses and coffee pots and plates and soup bowls and chinchillas. Okay, scratch that last one. Just making sure you’re keeping up.
Making it through the diningroom with a fully loaded tray is pretty tough. Especially when it’s busy. Sometimes, you have ten or twelve glasses of liquid on a ten inch round tray balanced on your fingertips, and you have to make it from the kitchen to the table without spilling.
This wouldn’t be so bad if it were a straight shot, but there are always obstacles – other servers, children running around unattended, high chairs sticking out in the aisle because guests don’t listen when the hostesses tell them it isn’t safe, little old people who walk damn slow or just plain stop for no reason. Our restaurant even has these infernal rocking chairs. Which rock. And rock even harder when kids jump out of them. I can’t tell you how many servers have been taken down by the backs of these quickly abandoned rockers.
As hazardous as the diningroom is, it is nothing compared to the server aisle. Ours runs the length of the restaurant, spanning everything from the dishroom and bussing station at one end, to prep and the breakroom at the other. The grill hood (where the cooks tray up the food to be served) is in the middle of the server aisle. Opposite the grill hood is the salad cooler, salad dressing station and juice machines. Beside the grill hood are the bread stations and soup stations. And at each end of the aisle are the long counters that hold the tea and soda and coffee and hot chocolate stations.
And the aisle itself is four feet wide. If that.
On a busy day, there are ten or more servers, two managers, a couple of bussers, a server assistant, and a few more random employees all fighting for space in this aisle. Imagine carrying a tray loaded with food or beverages through there while moving as fast as you can without running because you have four tables on the floor and everybody needs a refill. Now. Right now (Damnit, where is this waitress with my sweet tea!). Sometimes I think of it in terms of football, like being a linebacker and having to pivot and turn and swivel in order to avoid the other players while trying not to drop the ball.
Last night, for example, was insanely busy, and there we were short-staffed. The dish room was backed up, the server aisle was a mess, even the grill was a little backed up, and we all had more tables than we could comfortably handle. It was three hours of chaos. Still I managed to make it through the night without dropping a thing. I was the only one.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad for a shift to be over, and I was ready to just hop in the car and get home. When I started the car though, I realized I needed to get gas, so I stopped at the BP across the street and while the car was filling I went inside to grab some caffeine. Another woman reached the door just a moment before I did and she held it open for me and we exchanged smiles and I thanked her as I walked inside. I was thinking about how nice that was, such a small thing really, but such a change after a night of angry customers and the resulting short fuses of my co-workers. I was thinking this as I opened the cooler and picked out a bottle of cola.
And as I closed the cooler door, the soda bottle slipped from my hand. And it burst. Sugary, sticky liquid exploded and fizzed out all over the floor and my pants and the pants of the woman who had just been considerate enough to hold the door for me.
The woman was very sweet about the whole thing, as was the store clerk who had to clean up the soda spilled all over the floor and splashed up the cooler doors. He even refused to let me pay for the bottle I dropped.
I was mortified.
I apologized like crazy and even joked that I had made it all night at work without dropping a tray, but couldn’t seem to handle a sealed plastic bottle.
The clerk laughed and asked me where did I work. I told him and he said maybe he’d request me next time he came in. Then he said, “I just won’t order the soup.” And he and the woman laughed.
Not funny. Not funny at all.
Regardless, it amazes me that I am able to carry a tray full of water glasses and coffee pots and plates and soup bowls and chinchillas. Okay, scratch that last one. Just making sure you’re keeping up.
Making it through the diningroom with a fully loaded tray is pretty tough. Especially when it’s busy. Sometimes, you have ten or twelve glasses of liquid on a ten inch round tray balanced on your fingertips, and you have to make it from the kitchen to the table without spilling.
This wouldn’t be so bad if it were a straight shot, but there are always obstacles – other servers, children running around unattended, high chairs sticking out in the aisle because guests don’t listen when the hostesses tell them it isn’t safe, little old people who walk damn slow or just plain stop for no reason. Our restaurant even has these infernal rocking chairs. Which rock. And rock even harder when kids jump out of them. I can’t tell you how many servers have been taken down by the backs of these quickly abandoned rockers.
As hazardous as the diningroom is, it is nothing compared to the server aisle. Ours runs the length of the restaurant, spanning everything from the dishroom and bussing station at one end, to prep and the breakroom at the other. The grill hood (where the cooks tray up the food to be served) is in the middle of the server aisle. Opposite the grill hood is the salad cooler, salad dressing station and juice machines. Beside the grill hood are the bread stations and soup stations. And at each end of the aisle are the long counters that hold the tea and soda and coffee and hot chocolate stations.
And the aisle itself is four feet wide. If that.
On a busy day, there are ten or more servers, two managers, a couple of bussers, a server assistant, and a few more random employees all fighting for space in this aisle. Imagine carrying a tray loaded with food or beverages through there while moving as fast as you can without running because you have four tables on the floor and everybody needs a refill. Now. Right now (Damnit, where is this waitress with my sweet tea!). Sometimes I think of it in terms of football, like being a linebacker and having to pivot and turn and swivel in order to avoid the other players while trying not to drop the ball.
Last night, for example, was insanely busy, and there we were short-staffed. The dish room was backed up, the server aisle was a mess, even the grill was a little backed up, and we all had more tables than we could comfortably handle. It was three hours of chaos. Still I managed to make it through the night without dropping a thing. I was the only one.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad for a shift to be over, and I was ready to just hop in the car and get home. When I started the car though, I realized I needed to get gas, so I stopped at the BP across the street and while the car was filling I went inside to grab some caffeine. Another woman reached the door just a moment before I did and she held it open for me and we exchanged smiles and I thanked her as I walked inside. I was thinking about how nice that was, such a small thing really, but such a change after a night of angry customers and the resulting short fuses of my co-workers. I was thinking this as I opened the cooler and picked out a bottle of cola.
And as I closed the cooler door, the soda bottle slipped from my hand. And it burst. Sugary, sticky liquid exploded and fizzed out all over the floor and my pants and the pants of the woman who had just been considerate enough to hold the door for me.
The woman was very sweet about the whole thing, as was the store clerk who had to clean up the soda spilled all over the floor and splashed up the cooler doors. He even refused to let me pay for the bottle I dropped.
I was mortified.
I apologized like crazy and even joked that I had made it all night at work without dropping a tray, but couldn’t seem to handle a sealed plastic bottle.
The clerk laughed and asked me where did I work. I told him and he said maybe he’d request me next time he came in. Then he said, “I just won’t order the soup.” And he and the woman laughed.
Not funny. Not funny at all.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Doormats and feminists
One of the requirements for my undergraduate degree was a course in literary theory. It was upper division, but still a survey course in which we read and discussed a variety of theories ranging from Aristotle’s Poetics to Derrida’s deconstruction and the post-structuralists. Somewhere in the middle we touched upon feminist literary theory, beginning with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
The day the professor introduced the lesson to us, many of the other students in the class (all women) scoffed. How was this relevant, they wanted to know. Feminism is about trying to get votes and better pay. Didn’t we get those things? Aren’t feminists just whiners? What does this have to do with literature? Isn’t feminism dead?
Paul, our professor, responded by telling us that every person in that room was a feminist.
I smiled because I knew he meant to include himself. And I thought that was fabulous. The woman sitting beside me – a buttoned to the throat, evangelical, suburban mother of five – objected. She was most certainly not a feminist and how could he stand up there and say that she was. He didn’t know anything about her outside of the classroom and how could he accuse her of such a thing.
Paul spoke slowly as he responded, “You are in this classroom, on a college campus, getting an education, and learning about something other than domestic arts. You are wearing blue jeans and not a skirt. You are making eye contact with me, a man, and not looking at the ground when you speak to me. You are not at home, with a child at your breast, checking on the roast in the oven and making sure your husband has clean shirts for tomorrow. That,” he said, “makes you a feminist.”
She wasn’t convinced. Even after we read Woolf and Rich and Gilbert and Gubar. The fact that they were able to write anything at all proves that feminism is an outdated notion, she argued. Even after we discussed the canon and how it was almost entirely made up of works authored by men. That's because women didn't write until recently, she argued (missing the entire point made by Woolf and everyone else we read). For every discussion, she was the counterpoint to the feminist view. And she believed feminism to be useless, even harmful.
I’m sure to this day she probably would protest. I imagine her at dinner parties, her arms folded in front of her as she absent-mindedly caresses her string of pearls with one hand and tells the other soccer-moms and wives of her husband’s business associates about that crazy radical professor who accused her of being one of those filthy man-haters.
And it pisses me off.
Big time.
Because she is part of the problem.
The day the professor introduced the lesson to us, many of the other students in the class (all women) scoffed. How was this relevant, they wanted to know. Feminism is about trying to get votes and better pay. Didn’t we get those things? Aren’t feminists just whiners? What does this have to do with literature? Isn’t feminism dead?
Paul, our professor, responded by telling us that every person in that room was a feminist.
I smiled because I knew he meant to include himself. And I thought that was fabulous. The woman sitting beside me – a buttoned to the throat, evangelical, suburban mother of five – objected. She was most certainly not a feminist and how could he stand up there and say that she was. He didn’t know anything about her outside of the classroom and how could he accuse her of such a thing.
Paul spoke slowly as he responded, “You are in this classroom, on a college campus, getting an education, and learning about something other than domestic arts. You are wearing blue jeans and not a skirt. You are making eye contact with me, a man, and not looking at the ground when you speak to me. You are not at home, with a child at your breast, checking on the roast in the oven and making sure your husband has clean shirts for tomorrow. That,” he said, “makes you a feminist.”
She wasn’t convinced. Even after we read Woolf and Rich and Gilbert and Gubar. The fact that they were able to write anything at all proves that feminism is an outdated notion, she argued. Even after we discussed the canon and how it was almost entirely made up of works authored by men. That's because women didn't write until recently, she argued (missing the entire point made by Woolf and everyone else we read). For every discussion, she was the counterpoint to the feminist view. And she believed feminism to be useless, even harmful.
I’m sure to this day she probably would protest. I imagine her at dinner parties, her arms folded in front of her as she absent-mindedly caresses her string of pearls with one hand and tells the other soccer-moms and wives of her husband’s business associates about that crazy radical professor who accused her of being one of those filthy man-haters.
And it pisses me off.
Big time.
Because she is part of the problem.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Cruising the loop
Today another blogger (on whose site I frequently lurk) talked about dragging main. If you aren’t familiar with this term, lucky you, let’s just say it involves teenagers driving the same stretch of road over and over while trying to pick up, drag race, or otherwise engage other teenage drivers traveling the same stretch of road. Like in American Graffitti.
In Des Moines, where I went to high school (and, okay, lived for a very large portion of my life), this stretch of road(s) was referred to as “The Loop” (this is not to be confused with the much more famous, much cooler area in Chicago) and extends over several streets downtown.
This was the thing to on a Friday night after the football game or a Saturday night after scoring some weed or stealing your older sister’s id and buying beer. Not that I ever did that.
I don’t have an older sister.
Anyway, cruising the Loop was the shit.
Cruising the Loop in your mother’s old two-tone brown Ford Taurus that frequently overheated for no reason whatsoever was not.
My friends and I much preferred going to the Lost Planet, which was a drainage dump used by the city’s water works system and mostly consisted of lime deposits. This gave it a really eerie glow under the moonlight – thus the name.
Getting there meant parking your car on an unlit street and walking through a quarter mile of even darker woods and across a set of railroad tracks and up a hill to a small opening in the trees where you would be greeted by a glowing lake of lime.
The best part about the Lost Planet was the trip there. First was the fear that the police would see your car parked on the side of the road and, knowing what you were up to, would follow you to the pit and arrest you for trespassing. Or tow your car. And even though it was located in a nicer part of town, near the governor’s mansion in fact, there were often homeless men sleeping near the train tracks. And then of course, there were the requisite legends of disappearing teenagers, alien abductions, and psycho killers. And did I mention it was dark? Like hold-on-to-the-shirt-of-the-teenage-boy-in-front-of-you dark?
Okay, so that was the best part.
I don’t really have a point to this post (why start having one now?). Just reminiscing. And thinking about how really stupid it was to be wandering around out in the woods after midnight.
In Des Moines, where I went to high school (and, okay, lived for a very large portion of my life), this stretch of road(s) was referred to as “The Loop” (this is not to be confused with the much more famous, much cooler area in Chicago) and extends over several streets downtown.
This was the thing to on a Friday night after the football game or a Saturday night after scoring some weed or stealing your older sister’s id and buying beer. Not that I ever did that.
I don’t have an older sister.
Anyway, cruising the Loop was the shit.
Cruising the Loop in your mother’s old two-tone brown Ford Taurus that frequently overheated for no reason whatsoever was not.
My friends and I much preferred going to the Lost Planet, which was a drainage dump used by the city’s water works system and mostly consisted of lime deposits. This gave it a really eerie glow under the moonlight – thus the name.
Getting there meant parking your car on an unlit street and walking through a quarter mile of even darker woods and across a set of railroad tracks and up a hill to a small opening in the trees where you would be greeted by a glowing lake of lime.
The best part about the Lost Planet was the trip there. First was the fear that the police would see your car parked on the side of the road and, knowing what you were up to, would follow you to the pit and arrest you for trespassing. Or tow your car. And even though it was located in a nicer part of town, near the governor’s mansion in fact, there were often homeless men sleeping near the train tracks. And then of course, there were the requisite legends of disappearing teenagers, alien abductions, and psycho killers. And did I mention it was dark? Like hold-on-to-the-shirt-of-the-teenage-boy-in-front-of-you dark?
Okay, so that was the best part.
I don’t really have a point to this post (why start having one now?). Just reminiscing. And thinking about how really stupid it was to be wandering around out in the woods after midnight.
Monday, November 05, 2007
My opening act
My mother called this weekend and for once, I actually answered the phone. It’s not that I don’t like speaking to my mother, I just don’t like speaking on the phone in general. And she usually calls at the most inopportune times – like when I’m in line at the grocery store or when I’m sitting in my comfy chair and flipping through the television stations because there’s nothing good on and I’m bored. So by the time I actually feel I can stand holding the phone up to my ear for an hour, three weeks have gone by and I have twelve missed phone calls from my mother.
Yes, I’m a terrible person.
Anyway, she called and I actually answered. Okay, she called and my son answered and told her I was out picking up dinner and he talked to her for about an hour, so by the time I “returned” from my errands, she was pretty much over holding the phone up to her ear and our conversation was relatively brief. I only had time to smoke two cigarettes. Don’t start.
I’ve decided this is a good strategy from now on. My son can be my opening act. Except that while most opening acts are meant to get the audience pumped and excited, mine will just wear them down, so by the time I take the stage, they won’t really care about my performance. I’ll still be the headliner, and they can tell people they got to see (speak to) me, but I don’t really have to do much and they’ll still feel like they got their money’s worth.
And before you accuse me of using the kid, let me say that he loves to talk on the phone. And by “talk on the phone,” I mean that he likes to be on the phone, to be a presence on an open line between two people, but he doesn’t really have much to say. A typical conversation with my son consists of asking him one hundred and ninety-two questions, most of which are answered with monosyllabic grunts and sighs. The one hundred and ninety-third question, about what video game he is currently playing, is met with a forty-five minute response in which he explains what level mage he is (I still don’t even know what that means). But mostly he just sits there, breathing into the mouthpiece and refusing to take the hint when you ask him things like, “Well . . . is there anything else you’d like to talk about?” The fact that there never is anything else does not mean he’s ready to hang up. He isn’t. Unless, of course, food has arrived.
Or, you know, fake food.
Yes, I’m a terrible person.
Anyway, she called and I actually answered. Okay, she called and my son answered and told her I was out picking up dinner and he talked to her for about an hour, so by the time I “returned” from my errands, she was pretty much over holding the phone up to her ear and our conversation was relatively brief. I only had time to smoke two cigarettes. Don’t start.
I’ve decided this is a good strategy from now on. My son can be my opening act. Except that while most opening acts are meant to get the audience pumped and excited, mine will just wear them down, so by the time I take the stage, they won’t really care about my performance. I’ll still be the headliner, and they can tell people they got to see (speak to) me, but I don’t really have to do much and they’ll still feel like they got their money’s worth.
And before you accuse me of using the kid, let me say that he loves to talk on the phone. And by “talk on the phone,” I mean that he likes to be on the phone, to be a presence on an open line between two people, but he doesn’t really have much to say. A typical conversation with my son consists of asking him one hundred and ninety-two questions, most of which are answered with monosyllabic grunts and sighs. The one hundred and ninety-third question, about what video game he is currently playing, is met with a forty-five minute response in which he explains what level mage he is (I still don’t even know what that means). But mostly he just sits there, breathing into the mouthpiece and refusing to take the hint when you ask him things like, “Well . . . is there anything else you’d like to talk about?” The fact that there never is anything else does not mean he’s ready to hang up. He isn’t. Unless, of course, food has arrived.
Or, you know, fake food.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Nothing really
One would think that with so much going on in the world, what with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the upcoming presidential race primaries, racist celebrities, and Britney Spears’ lack of savings, I’d have something to blog about each and every day. I mean, I’m fairly intelligent. I spend a good deal of my day thinking. And I can write. Not particularly well, but I get by. But I’ve found in this very short time I’ve been blogging, that regularity is not one of my attributes. Wait, that came out wrong. So did that.
See, I’ve been trying to decide what to write all day now, and all I can come up with is some inadvertent toilet humor.
And even that is a poorly worded statement. It isn't that I can't come up with anything else as much as it is that I want to write about everything and I have so much trouble choosing just one idea from the thousands of mediocre ones I have each day. The pressure usually is too much and as a result, I choose nothing. Those days you access this page and are (un)lucky enough to find something new, well I can't tell you what happens those days to get me to finally write something down. If I knew, I would make it happen more often.
So in lieu of an actual singularly-themed post (as if I have those on other days), I offer another set of outtakes:
- Halloween at the restaurant was a pain in the ass. All the young kids I work with (and by that I mean to say that I work while they wander around looking busy) were desperate to leave and get to whatever parties they had planned. Each and every one of them conned the manager into cutting the floor before eight o'clock and most of them skipped out on their sidework and doing their tables. The result was that our usual dinner rush started as they were all leaving because everyone was coming in after trick or treating ended. The three of us left on the floor ended up doing all of their sidework and cleaning their tables and leaving well after close.
- I could have left a little earlier had it not been for the woman and her mother who came in ten minutes before close and ordered milkshakes (which I had to make since the prep person was long gone) and then did not even order until after ten. And then they stayed another hour. Forcing me to hang around an extra hour. On Halloween.
- One of the guests came in dressed as Abraham Lincoln. Pretty random. And slightly dangerous, I'd think, here in the capital of the Confederacy. When the manager came back to tell us that Abe was in the diningroom, he also announced that he was going to go to the table and thank the man for freeing him from slavery. The manager didn't actually do it (that would have been great), but he did spend the rest of the night doing his best Butterfly McQueen impersonation and pretending to talk to Abe by saying things like, "Thank you, Mr. Lincoln. Without you, my ass would still be living on the plantation!"
- My son and some of his classmates have sent a complaint to the principal about one of their teachers. They told me all of the teachers swear in class (WTF?) and that several of them make threats of violence to students. The one in particular they're complaing about just today told a student to "shut up or I'll punch you in the throat."
This deserves a looong entry but I want to confirm it and get the details straight (and call the school myself) before I rant too much.
Well, that's it. Nothing exciting. Have a great weekend!
See, I’ve been trying to decide what to write all day now, and all I can come up with is some inadvertent toilet humor.
And even that is a poorly worded statement. It isn't that I can't come up with anything else as much as it is that I want to write about everything and I have so much trouble choosing just one idea from the thousands of mediocre ones I have each day. The pressure usually is too much and as a result, I choose nothing. Those days you access this page and are (un)lucky enough to find something new, well I can't tell you what happens those days to get me to finally write something down. If I knew, I would make it happen more often.
So in lieu of an actual singularly-themed post (as if I have those on other days), I offer another set of outtakes:
- Halloween at the restaurant was a pain in the ass. All the young kids I work with (and by that I mean to say that I work while they wander around looking busy) were desperate to leave and get to whatever parties they had planned. Each and every one of them conned the manager into cutting the floor before eight o'clock and most of them skipped out on their sidework and doing their tables. The result was that our usual dinner rush started as they were all leaving because everyone was coming in after trick or treating ended. The three of us left on the floor ended up doing all of their sidework and cleaning their tables and leaving well after close.
- I could have left a little earlier had it not been for the woman and her mother who came in ten minutes before close and ordered milkshakes (which I had to make since the prep person was long gone) and then did not even order until after ten. And then they stayed another hour. Forcing me to hang around an extra hour. On Halloween.
- One of the guests came in dressed as Abraham Lincoln. Pretty random. And slightly dangerous, I'd think, here in the capital of the Confederacy. When the manager came back to tell us that Abe was in the diningroom, he also announced that he was going to go to the table and thank the man for freeing him from slavery. The manager didn't actually do it (that would have been great), but he did spend the rest of the night doing his best Butterfly McQueen impersonation and pretending to talk to Abe by saying things like, "Thank you, Mr. Lincoln. Without you, my ass would still be living on the plantation!"
- My son and some of his classmates have sent a complaint to the principal about one of their teachers. They told me all of the teachers swear in class (WTF?) and that several of them make threats of violence to students. The one in particular they're complaing about just today told a student to "shut up or I'll punch you in the throat."
This deserves a looong entry but I want to confirm it and get the details straight (and call the school myself) before I rant too much.
Well, that's it. Nothing exciting. Have a great weekend!
Thursday, November 01, 2007
The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme
One of my so-called friends tagged me for this meme. The rules are slightly complex - a little too much work for my feeble mind, but here are my answers:
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Primate Diaries.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Thus Spake Zuska.
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is a k8, a cat, a mission.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Monkeygirl.
My great-great-great-grandparent is DancingFish.
My great-grandparent is Dr. Brazen Hussy.
My great-grandparent is Addy
My grandparent is Mommy/Prof
My parent is Cheese & Responsibility
The best television series on cable is: Mad Men
The best cult tv show in comedy is: Arrested Development
The best feminist novel in classic fiction is: The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The best classic movie in comedy is: The Apartment
The best fairy-tale film in fantasy is: The Princess Bride
The best humor book in non-fiction is: Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
I think I was supposed to post the rules myself, but it seemed like an awful lot of work and I've had enough of that. Plus, I don't really like rules. I won't tag anyone, but if you choose to participate, please be a better person than I am and follow the rules (which state to post the rules). Otherwise, I think if you do it wrong or don't pass it along your great aunt on your father's half-sister's side will fall and break her hip. Or something like that.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Primate Diaries.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Thus Spake Zuska.
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is a k8, a cat, a mission.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Monkeygirl.
My great-great-great-grandparent is DancingFish.
My great-grandparent is Dr. Brazen Hussy.
My great-grandparent is Addy
My grandparent is Mommy/Prof
My parent is Cheese & Responsibility
The best television series on cable is: Mad Men
The best cult tv show in comedy is: Arrested Development
The best feminist novel in classic fiction is: The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The best classic movie in comedy is: The Apartment
The best fairy-tale film in fantasy is: The Princess Bride
The best humor book in non-fiction is: Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
I think I was supposed to post the rules myself, but it seemed like an awful lot of work and I've had enough of that. Plus, I don't really like rules. I won't tag anyone, but if you choose to participate, please be a better person than I am and follow the rules (which state to post the rules). Otherwise, I think if you do it wrong or don't pass it along your great aunt on your father's half-sister's side will fall and break her hip. Or something like that.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Happy Halloween!
So yeah, it’s Halloween and I’ve been trying to decide which story I should tell today. I thought about this time I was babysitting, and some guy kept prank calling, and the police told me he was calling from inside the house. Or maybe that other time I was babysitting, and this dude in a white mask showed up. Or that other time, at camp, when I was making out with some guy while there was a slasher on the loose.
But those stories aren’t so exciting, so I’ll just tell you about last year’s Halloween. Actually, it’s about the week after Halloween, but whatever.
When the kid moved out to Virginia to live with me last year, the first thing he did was test his boundaries. How far was Mom going to allow him to go? He started with his hair. The kid’s a blonde, but he decided he wanted to change that. He wanted to dye his hair blue-black, he said. I think he assumed I would say no because he seemed a bit shocked when I showed up with a box of hair coloring. A week later, he decided he wanted pink highlights. Again, I picked up the stuff. Again, he seemed shocked. Next, it was a Mohawk. He backed out when I took him to get it done.
Score one for mom.
Shortly before Halloween, he asked for black fingernail polish. And black lipstick. But instead of wearing them to school on Halloween, when all the amateurs were dressing up, my son decided to do it a week later. I helped him paint his nails (so he wouldn’t get black nail polish all over the carpet) and showed him how to put on the lipstick and I even helped him with some black eyeliner. It was one of those milestone moments that makes a mother proud, I tell you. The day you show your teenaged son the proper use of cosmetics.
Anyway, I sent the pink-haired, black-lipped, eyeliner-ed kid off to school and drove myself to work. I was pretty sure there would be a message waiting for me when I got there – an angry principal telling me I needed to come get my demon child and never send him to school looking like that again. We lived in the country then, and the school the kid attended . . . well, it was filled with country folk. The children of church-going, gun-toting, flag-waiving, we-don’t-take-to-your-kind-around-here country folk. And my child was doing everything he could not to fit in. So I was certain there would be a phone call. And I was prepared.
I spent my entire forty-five minute commute composing my response. My son is just trying to express himself, I would say. Nothing in the dress code prohibits black nail polish or lipstick, I would tell them. And if you’re going to let the girls wear make up, then you have to let my son. To tell him he can’t just because he’s a boy is sexist.
I was ready for the fight.
And, as expected, there was a message waiting for me when I got to my office.
But . . .
It wasn’t the conversation I expected to be having. Yes, my son was in trouble. Yes, he had been to the counselor’s office. Yes, he was being suspended. But not for looking like the spawn of Marilyn Manson and Pink.
There had apparently been a drill the previous day. They were practicing what to do in the case of a gunman in the building. This included closing the blinds of the classroom and hiding under their desks.
My stupid son, being one to find and acknowledge humor in the most inappropriate times and places, joked that closing the blinds didn’t seem all that smart. After all, if someone with a gun was outside, he could very easily deduce which rooms were in fact occupied.
Then, to make matters worse, after about fifteen minutes hunched under the desk, the oxygen apparently stopped flowing freely to his brain and he started to giggle. Before I tell you what happened next, I have to preface it by saying that my son is a fan of irony. And dark humor. And again, he finds humor in the most inappropriate of circumstances.
So when he said to the kid next to him, “Wouldn’t it be funny if a gunman came in while we were having this drill?” He did not mean, “I would like for someone to come into this room with a gun and start shooting.” He meant something more along the lines of, “That would make a great Quentin Tarentino/Wes Anderson flick.”
(I did punish him. There was grounding. There were lost tv privileges. There was even a researched report on Columbine, where I made him read the memorial sites of each victim. And there was a lot of talking about this. Just so you know.)
So the guidance counselor who called me didn’t seem too upset. She said she had talked to him, and he seemed to understand how what he’d said was worrisome to others and that he seemed like a good kid with an unfortunate sense of humor, but that they took these things seriously and he would have to be suspended. I assured her that we had no weapons in the house and he absolutely had no access to any weapons and that he really was, as she said, a good kid.
Then I had to talk to the principal. And to try to convince her that my son was not a menace and not depressed and not violent or anything other than a normal teenage boy.
Despite the fact that one day after making a “threat” to his classmates, the kid showed up wearing black nail polish and black lipstick and a black t-shirt with a bleeding skull on it.
Irony.
But those stories aren’t so exciting, so I’ll just tell you about last year’s Halloween. Actually, it’s about the week after Halloween, but whatever.
When the kid moved out to Virginia to live with me last year, the first thing he did was test his boundaries. How far was Mom going to allow him to go? He started with his hair. The kid’s a blonde, but he decided he wanted to change that. He wanted to dye his hair blue-black, he said. I think he assumed I would say no because he seemed a bit shocked when I showed up with a box of hair coloring. A week later, he decided he wanted pink highlights. Again, I picked up the stuff. Again, he seemed shocked. Next, it was a Mohawk. He backed out when I took him to get it done.
Score one for mom.
Shortly before Halloween, he asked for black fingernail polish. And black lipstick. But instead of wearing them to school on Halloween, when all the amateurs were dressing up, my son decided to do it a week later. I helped him paint his nails (so he wouldn’t get black nail polish all over the carpet) and showed him how to put on the lipstick and I even helped him with some black eyeliner. It was one of those milestone moments that makes a mother proud, I tell you. The day you show your teenaged son the proper use of cosmetics.
Anyway, I sent the pink-haired, black-lipped, eyeliner-ed kid off to school and drove myself to work. I was pretty sure there would be a message waiting for me when I got there – an angry principal telling me I needed to come get my demon child and never send him to school looking like that again. We lived in the country then, and the school the kid attended . . . well, it was filled with country folk. The children of church-going, gun-toting, flag-waiving, we-don’t-take-to-your-kind-around-here country folk. And my child was doing everything he could not to fit in. So I was certain there would be a phone call. And I was prepared.
I spent my entire forty-five minute commute composing my response. My son is just trying to express himself, I would say. Nothing in the dress code prohibits black nail polish or lipstick, I would tell them. And if you’re going to let the girls wear make up, then you have to let my son. To tell him he can’t just because he’s a boy is sexist.
I was ready for the fight.
And, as expected, there was a message waiting for me when I got to my office.
But . . .
It wasn’t the conversation I expected to be having. Yes, my son was in trouble. Yes, he had been to the counselor’s office. Yes, he was being suspended. But not for looking like the spawn of Marilyn Manson and Pink.
There had apparently been a drill the previous day. They were practicing what to do in the case of a gunman in the building. This included closing the blinds of the classroom and hiding under their desks.
My stupid son, being one to find and acknowledge humor in the most inappropriate times and places, joked that closing the blinds didn’t seem all that smart. After all, if someone with a gun was outside, he could very easily deduce which rooms were in fact occupied.
Then, to make matters worse, after about fifteen minutes hunched under the desk, the oxygen apparently stopped flowing freely to his brain and he started to giggle. Before I tell you what happened next, I have to preface it by saying that my son is a fan of irony. And dark humor. And again, he finds humor in the most inappropriate of circumstances.
So when he said to the kid next to him, “Wouldn’t it be funny if a gunman came in while we were having this drill?” He did not mean, “I would like for someone to come into this room with a gun and start shooting.” He meant something more along the lines of, “That would make a great Quentin Tarentino/Wes Anderson flick.”
(I did punish him. There was grounding. There were lost tv privileges. There was even a researched report on Columbine, where I made him read the memorial sites of each victim. And there was a lot of talking about this. Just so you know.)
So the guidance counselor who called me didn’t seem too upset. She said she had talked to him, and he seemed to understand how what he’d said was worrisome to others and that he seemed like a good kid with an unfortunate sense of humor, but that they took these things seriously and he would have to be suspended. I assured her that we had no weapons in the house and he absolutely had no access to any weapons and that he really was, as she said, a good kid.
Then I had to talk to the principal. And to try to convince her that my son was not a menace and not depressed and not violent or anything other than a normal teenage boy.
Despite the fact that one day after making a “threat” to his classmates, the kid showed up wearing black nail polish and black lipstick and a black t-shirt with a bleeding skull on it.
Irony.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
I'm apparently addicted to HGTV
Over the weekend, my son and I were watching some show on HGTV where they come in and organize a messy room in some family’s house and turn it into a functional living/sleeping/dining place that will no doubt be trashed again in a few short months. This particular family had three kids between the ages of six and ten, and the kids had toys and games all over the house. So the parents wanted to reclaim their house by renovating a room in their basement – an unused, cluttered family room with fake wood paneling and poor lighting.
Then they showed the designers’ plans for the space – paint the walls white, add some primary color accents to brighten it up, etc. Then for organization, they added some shelves with brightly colored bins and a coffee table contraption to which they added plexiglass sides for the display of artwork they commissioned from the kids.
While they were working on the room, the people from the show interviewed the little tykes on why they didn’t use the basement, despite the fact that it (like the rest of the house) was full of toys. The girls said it was dark and spooky. The oldest kid, a little boy around ten years old, said, “It creeps me out.”
At this point, my son looked at me and said, “Fast forward to five years from now, they’ll just have to come back and do it again. This kid will be sitting in the basement, wearing eyeliner and black nail polish, looking around at the pictures of Barney on the wall and saying, ‘It creeps me out.’”
You may not find him charming, but my kid cracks me up. Sometimes enough that I choke on my apple juice and cough it all over the new slipcover on our chair.
Then they showed the designers’ plans for the space – paint the walls white, add some primary color accents to brighten it up, etc. Then for organization, they added some shelves with brightly colored bins and a coffee table contraption to which they added plexiglass sides for the display of artwork they commissioned from the kids.
While they were working on the room, the people from the show interviewed the little tykes on why they didn’t use the basement, despite the fact that it (like the rest of the house) was full of toys. The girls said it was dark and spooky. The oldest kid, a little boy around ten years old, said, “It creeps me out.”
At this point, my son looked at me and said, “Fast forward to five years from now, they’ll just have to come back and do it again. This kid will be sitting in the basement, wearing eyeliner and black nail polish, looking around at the pictures of Barney on the wall and saying, ‘It creeps me out.’”
You may not find him charming, but my kid cracks me up. Sometimes enough that I choke on my apple juice and cough it all over the new slipcover on our chair.
Friday, October 26, 2007
How Sub-Zero changed my life
As I polished off the last bits of my lunch – a bag of Chex Mix and a non sugar-free soda – I thought about how I perhaps should have had something a tad more nutritious. However, as this would have required either going outside of the building and purchasing something or bringing a meal from home, I decided not to be too hard on myself about it.
The first option isn’t really an option because, well, for one thing, it is raining outside. But more than that I am limited by both time and money and food on or near campus can be found but it is either cheap or nutritious. Or smokable.
The second option – bringing something from home – sounds plausible. I could get up early and make something to bring with me each day. But then I remembered that in order to get up earlier I would have to stop sleeping sooner, and this option no longer appealed to me.
All of this pondering made me tired, so I put my head down on my desk for a few moments, and when I woke up I was hungry again.
Last night I was watching HGTV and for some reason they were touring Kelly Osbourne’s house, and she was very proudly showing off her $12,000 Sub-Zero refrigerator. While I was watching, I thought about how much different my life would be if I had such a refrigerator. And by different, I mean better. And by better, I mean more like that of a celebutante and less like that of a single mom.
Of course, the appliance itself was larger than my current kitchen, but I figure if I could afford a twelve-thousand dollar refrigerator, I could probably afford a larger kitchen as well. And if I could afford a kitchen big enough to house a twelve-thousand dollar refrigerator, I could probably afford some sort of help, you know, to take care of the kitchen and the refrigerator.
I’m pretty sure this is what I was dreaming about when I lay my head down on my desk.
The reality is that I have an apartment-sized galley kitchen with an apartment-sized stove and an apartment-sized refrigerator. My freezer will hold one quart of ice cream, two bags of frozen vegetables (pizza rolls), and three frozen Healthy Choice (Hungry Man) dinners. The refrigerator itself has two shelves and one drawer.
If I had a Sub-Zero instead of the Westinghouse compact, I just know my entire life would be healthier and happier. Whenever I wanted a snack, I could just reach into one of the many refrigerated drawers and grab an apple or a handful of grapes. Admittedly, I could do this now, but with only one drawer, all my grapes end up smashed under the thirty pounds of deli meat required to keep my son in sandwiches throughout the week.
Plus, if I had a twelve-thousand dollar refrigerator, I could find things when I look for them. So instead of grabbing a pudding cup because pudding cups are at the front of the shelf and I’m too busy and important (lazy) to move things, I could have yogurt or one of the fruit cups obscured by the pudding and leftover chocolate cake and day old donuts in the way*. And because I would have someone to clean my Sub-Zero refrigerator (remember paragraph three?), I would never reach for an orange only to discover fuzz had already grown on them in the three short months since I decided to turn my life around and eat only fruit (but had quickly given up on because, hey wait! There are pudding cups!).
And, you know, since I had someone to clean my refrigerator, I could probably afford a few more people as well – one to cook healthy, nutritious meals for me and for my son (who would probably refuse to eat them, and would eat out every night because I’d probably spoil him with a new sports car and an allowance larger than my current annual salary plus whatever money he stole from my purse because, yes, with that much money, I’d also have a wine cellar and a bar and would likely be intoxicated most of the time), and a couple more to clean the rest of my house and keep things organized. Because I really crave organization, but I also really crave sleep and time in front of the television, so . . .
Anyway, with all the time this would free up for me, I would probably be okay with getting up a little earlier to make a lunch for work (of course I would still have to work. Where do you think I would get all this money?). Then again, I would probably just have one of the servants take care of that for me and with the extra time I could probably engage in some other healthy activity, like joining a gym (pub crawl) or hiring a personal trainer (at-home bartender).
I would be so fit.
___
*Of course I’m kidding. I don’t have yogurt or fruit cups in my kitchen
The first option isn’t really an option because, well, for one thing, it is raining outside. But more than that I am limited by both time and money and food on or near campus can be found but it is either cheap or nutritious. Or smokable.
The second option – bringing something from home – sounds plausible. I could get up early and make something to bring with me each day. But then I remembered that in order to get up earlier I would have to stop sleeping sooner, and this option no longer appealed to me.
All of this pondering made me tired, so I put my head down on my desk for a few moments, and when I woke up I was hungry again.
Last night I was watching HGTV and for some reason they were touring Kelly Osbourne’s house, and she was very proudly showing off her $12,000 Sub-Zero refrigerator. While I was watching, I thought about how much different my life would be if I had such a refrigerator. And by different, I mean better. And by better, I mean more like that of a celebutante and less like that of a single mom.
Of course, the appliance itself was larger than my current kitchen, but I figure if I could afford a twelve-thousand dollar refrigerator, I could probably afford a larger kitchen as well. And if I could afford a kitchen big enough to house a twelve-thousand dollar refrigerator, I could probably afford some sort of help, you know, to take care of the kitchen and the refrigerator.
I’m pretty sure this is what I was dreaming about when I lay my head down on my desk.
The reality is that I have an apartment-sized galley kitchen with an apartment-sized stove and an apartment-sized refrigerator. My freezer will hold one quart of ice cream, two bags of frozen vegetables (pizza rolls), and three frozen Healthy Choice (Hungry Man) dinners. The refrigerator itself has two shelves and one drawer.
If I had a Sub-Zero instead of the Westinghouse compact, I just know my entire life would be healthier and happier. Whenever I wanted a snack, I could just reach into one of the many refrigerated drawers and grab an apple or a handful of grapes. Admittedly, I could do this now, but with only one drawer, all my grapes end up smashed under the thirty pounds of deli meat required to keep my son in sandwiches throughout the week.
Plus, if I had a twelve-thousand dollar refrigerator, I could find things when I look for them. So instead of grabbing a pudding cup because pudding cups are at the front of the shelf and I’m too busy and important (lazy) to move things, I could have yogurt or one of the fruit cups obscured by the pudding and leftover chocolate cake and day old donuts in the way*. And because I would have someone to clean my Sub-Zero refrigerator (remember paragraph three?), I would never reach for an orange only to discover fuzz had already grown on them in the three short months since I decided to turn my life around and eat only fruit (but had quickly given up on because, hey wait! There are pudding cups!).
And, you know, since I had someone to clean my refrigerator, I could probably afford a few more people as well – one to cook healthy, nutritious meals for me and for my son (who would probably refuse to eat them, and would eat out every night because I’d probably spoil him with a new sports car and an allowance larger than my current annual salary plus whatever money he stole from my purse because, yes, with that much money, I’d also have a wine cellar and a bar and would likely be intoxicated most of the time), and a couple more to clean the rest of my house and keep things organized. Because I really crave organization, but I also really crave sleep and time in front of the television, so . . .
Anyway, with all the time this would free up for me, I would probably be okay with getting up a little earlier to make a lunch for work (of course I would still have to work. Where do you think I would get all this money?). Then again, I would probably just have one of the servants take care of that for me and with the extra time I could probably engage in some other healthy activity, like joining a gym (pub crawl) or hiring a personal trainer (at-home bartender).
I would be so fit.
___
*Of course I’m kidding. I don’t have yogurt or fruit cups in my kitchen
Thursday, October 25, 2007
New at eleven: Signs that your parents may not love you after all
Newscasters convinced my son that he was suffering from a staph infection. Oh, and that he was going to die. Immediately. Unless he was seen and treated by a qualified physician. Perhaps even an unqualified one. And the fact that I would not take him to see any physician whatsoever for said staph infection was evidence that I did not love him.
So really, newscasters had convinced my son that I am a horrible excuse for a parent.
This part is nothing new.
The kid complained Monday night that he had a mildly sore throat and he had a bit of a sniffle. I suspected this was a ruse to get out of going to school, but I told him he probably had a cold and that he should drink plenty of water and go to bed early, probably take a nap when he got home from school the next day. Tuesday night when I got home from work, he had discovered (invented) a new set of symptoms to support his theory that he would need to be hospitalized at any moment. These symptoms included but were not limited to the following:
-A tender spot on his head, suspiciously near the base of the hairs he twists into knots when nervous and/or bored.
-A protrusion beneath the backside of one of his toes. He claims to have stepped on a piece of glass when he was nine and is certain the glass is still in his toe. I felt the toe and informed him that said “protrusion” was in fact a bone. He was unconvinced.
-A burning fever. This proved to be just plain false. When confronted with his actual body temperature, he rebutted that a lack of fever did not mean he wasn’t sick.
-A red spot behind his ear. I asked what had prompted him to look there, since in the nearly fifteen years he has been a conscious being, he has failed to notice this birthmark previously.
But yesterday, knowing that I should never take my child's health too lightly, I took him to Patient’s First (love these guys, by the way) where, for a measly twenty-five dollar co-pay, my son was diagnosed with an upper respiratory virus. In other words, he basically has a cold. He was sent home to drink plenty of fluids and get some rest. And to stop rubbing that bone in his toe.
So really, newscasters had convinced my son that I am a horrible excuse for a parent.
This part is nothing new.
The kid complained Monday night that he had a mildly sore throat and he had a bit of a sniffle. I suspected this was a ruse to get out of going to school, but I told him he probably had a cold and that he should drink plenty of water and go to bed early, probably take a nap when he got home from school the next day. Tuesday night when I got home from work, he had discovered (invented) a new set of symptoms to support his theory that he would need to be hospitalized at any moment. These symptoms included but were not limited to the following:
-A tender spot on his head, suspiciously near the base of the hairs he twists into knots when nervous and/or bored.
-A protrusion beneath the backside of one of his toes. He claims to have stepped on a piece of glass when he was nine and is certain the glass is still in his toe. I felt the toe and informed him that said “protrusion” was in fact a bone. He was unconvinced.
-A burning fever. This proved to be just plain false. When confronted with his actual body temperature, he rebutted that a lack of fever did not mean he wasn’t sick.
-A red spot behind his ear. I asked what had prompted him to look there, since in the nearly fifteen years he has been a conscious being, he has failed to notice this birthmark previously.
But yesterday, knowing that I should never take my child's health too lightly, I took him to Patient’s First (love these guys, by the way) where, for a measly twenty-five dollar co-pay, my son was diagnosed with an upper respiratory virus. In other words, he basically has a cold. He was sent home to drink plenty of fluids and get some rest. And to stop rubbing that bone in his toe.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
I won't post about serving tomorrow, I promise
Uhhm, so, I almost got myself fired last night.
Okay, so the story’s not all that exciting, but here it is anyway.
I had a four table section in the second dining room and, because we were short staffed, an eight table section in smoking. Being Monday night, it wasn’t exceptionally busy, but we got a decent crowd in for dinner. I already had a couple tables down when the hostess seated a seven top in the smoking section. Mostly kids.
Yes, some people think it’s cool to sit with their kids in the smoking section. But that's not today’s rant.
Since there were five small children at the table, I asked the hostess not to seat me again for a few minutes because the presence of small children at the table generally adds two minutes per child to the ordering time:
Mom: (to kid) What would you like to drink?
Kid: I want Coke.
Mom: No Coke. How about chocolate milk?
Kid: I hate chocolate milk.
Mom: Please sit back down in your chair.
Kid: I want Coke!
Mom: I’m not ordering you soda. It’s almost bed time.
Kid: Coke!
Mom: You can have chocolate milk.
Kid: Co. Ca. Cola!
Mom: Let go of your sister’s hair. Chocolate milk or nothing.
Kid: Fine!
Mom: (to me, standing patiently beside the table) He’ll have chocolate milk.
Repeat scenario once per child.
(Here's where it gets boring. But it's called a set-up. Like the long, boring parts in sci-fi shows, where you're just picking up clues and backstory and waiting for the action.)
After I finally got the drink order for the seven top, I swung back by my other section to check on my guests and discovered that the hostess had sat me anyway. And not once, but twice. I picked up the drink orders for the new tables, being informed by one that someone else would be joining them, and headed into the kitchen for the drinks. I asked another server to drop off coffees and sweet teas in the second dining room while I went back to the seven top with bread and their drinks and got their order.
Before I put the order in, I stopped back in the second dining room, dropped off a couple checks, and checked on the two tables just sat. One wasn’t ready to order. The other was still waiting for their guest.
I put the seven top's order in and came back to the dining room where the third guest had finally joined her party. I greeted her, got her drink order, and since they weren’t ready to order food yet, I told them I’d be back. I took the order from my other table (who was ready) and put it in before coming back with the drink and finally getting the order from the three top. I came back out to the dining room with pitchers and coffee pots, refilled all my guests (including the three top) in the second, brought boxes for people who were getting ready to leave, and then went to my tables in smoking, where I had been sat again.
They gave me a drink order, asked about the soup and specials and for bread, but weren’t ready to order. They were ready when I came back, so I took their order and left to put it in. As soon as I was finished, the seven top’s food was ready in the window. I gathered all their requested condiments, asked for a couple followers, and took the food to their table. They needed more napkins and some extra dressings, which I brought right away.
When I came back into the kitchen, someone else was walking out the door with one of my trays – for the two top – but the three top wasn’t up yet, and since this was the first moment since refilling drinks I’d had, I started setting up a plate of bread to take to the three top. Just then my manager came back and said that the three top “requested your presence.”
(So here's the "action." No flying or bolts of lightning flying out of anyone's hand. No bending time - though that would have been helpful)
At this point, it had been at most, at the very, very most, fifteen minutes since I had taken that table’s order (and I refilled their drinks once after the order went in). Here is the conversation:
Woman who came in last: Where have you been?
Me: (setting down bread and plates on the table) Uhm, I’m sorry, ma’am, I have a large part-
Woman: (interrupting) You’ve left us sitting here for thirty minutes.
Me: I’m sorry, ma’am. But it hasn’t been thirty-
Woman: We had to get someone else to refill our drinks.
Me: I do apologize, ma’am. I have several other tables and a large par-
Woman: (interrupting, again, and gesturing toward the manager who is standing at the next table over) He told us you were at a large party.
Me: Yes, ma’am. Their food came up and I was-
Woman: Well, you just walked away and left us.
Me: Ma’am, I had food to bring out and another –
Woman: You didn’t even come back to refill our drinks for over thirty minutes.
Me: I do apologize, but I just took your order fifteen –
Woman: Are you telling me it hasn’t been over thirty minutes?
Woman’s father: I think she is.
Me: (trying to change the subject) Ma’am your food should be up any –
Woman: Are you going to tell me it hasn’t been thirty minutes?
Woman's father: Of course she is.
Me: Ma'am, I have five other tables, including a party of sev-
Woman: I don't know what you were doing, but it shouldn't take you thirty minutes.
Me: Ma’am, I apologize if it seemed like I was gone -
Woman: It was thirty minutes.
Me: I apologize. Can I bring you -
Woman: Are you going to continue telling me it hasn’t been thirty minutes?
Me: Are you going to continue to be rude to me?
Yep.
There it was.
She said, “Excuse me?!” And I walked away before I said something really stupid. Or threw lightning at her. She turned around and grabbed the manager who was still at the table beside them.
In the kitchen, I checked their ticket time. It had been seventeen minutes since I put it in.
When the manager came back, I apologized to him and asked told him I understood he was probably going to send me home.
“Hell no,” he said. “I heard everything. She was being a bitch.”
I calmed myself down, checked on my smoking tables, and came back to the window, where the three top’s food had just come up. I got it ready and ran it out to them.
And I apologized. I didn’t say I was sorry (because I wasn’t), but that I apologized. I asked them if they needed anything else. Perhaps some refills (because for the third time in twenty minutes they had sucked down twenty ounces of liquid). Then I dropped off their check. Showing the time they ordered.
I brought back refills, asked them how everything was, and apologized again. The woman said thank you and for the rest of their meal, they were all extremely polite.
At the end of their meal, I brought them to go boxes and welcomed them to join us again.
The manager said he would back me up if they decided to complain, but they tipped me eighteen percent. So I don't think they will.
Still, I felt bad about it all night. I mean, she was wrong, but I never lose my cool with a guest. And I have had some awful guests. I didn’t understand why I reacted that way. The rest of my tables were doing fine. I wasn’t in the weeds. I was having a pretty good night. I wasn’t anywhere near the end of my rope or the last straw or whatever.
I just suddenly couldn’t take this woman being so incredibly demeaning.
Okay, so the story’s not all that exciting, but here it is anyway.
I had a four table section in the second dining room and, because we were short staffed, an eight table section in smoking. Being Monday night, it wasn’t exceptionally busy, but we got a decent crowd in for dinner. I already had a couple tables down when the hostess seated a seven top in the smoking section. Mostly kids.
Yes, some people think it’s cool to sit with their kids in the smoking section. But that's not today’s rant.
Since there were five small children at the table, I asked the hostess not to seat me again for a few minutes because the presence of small children at the table generally adds two minutes per child to the ordering time:
Mom: (to kid) What would you like to drink?
Kid: I want Coke.
Mom: No Coke. How about chocolate milk?
Kid: I hate chocolate milk.
Mom: Please sit back down in your chair.
Kid: I want Coke!
Mom: I’m not ordering you soda. It’s almost bed time.
Kid: Coke!
Mom: You can have chocolate milk.
Kid: Co. Ca. Cola!
Mom: Let go of your sister’s hair. Chocolate milk or nothing.
Kid: Fine!
Mom: (to me, standing patiently beside the table) He’ll have chocolate milk.
Repeat scenario once per child.
(Here's where it gets boring. But it's called a set-up. Like the long, boring parts in sci-fi shows, where you're just picking up clues and backstory and waiting for the action.)
After I finally got the drink order for the seven top, I swung back by my other section to check on my guests and discovered that the hostess had sat me anyway. And not once, but twice. I picked up the drink orders for the new tables, being informed by one that someone else would be joining them, and headed into the kitchen for the drinks. I asked another server to drop off coffees and sweet teas in the second dining room while I went back to the seven top with bread and their drinks and got their order.
Before I put the order in, I stopped back in the second dining room, dropped off a couple checks, and checked on the two tables just sat. One wasn’t ready to order. The other was still waiting for their guest.
I put the seven top's order in and came back to the dining room where the third guest had finally joined her party. I greeted her, got her drink order, and since they weren’t ready to order food yet, I told them I’d be back. I took the order from my other table (who was ready) and put it in before coming back with the drink and finally getting the order from the three top. I came back out to the dining room with pitchers and coffee pots, refilled all my guests (including the three top) in the second, brought boxes for people who were getting ready to leave, and then went to my tables in smoking, where I had been sat again.
They gave me a drink order, asked about the soup and specials and for bread, but weren’t ready to order. They were ready when I came back, so I took their order and left to put it in. As soon as I was finished, the seven top’s food was ready in the window. I gathered all their requested condiments, asked for a couple followers, and took the food to their table. They needed more napkins and some extra dressings, which I brought right away.
When I came back into the kitchen, someone else was walking out the door with one of my trays – for the two top – but the three top wasn’t up yet, and since this was the first moment since refilling drinks I’d had, I started setting up a plate of bread to take to the three top. Just then my manager came back and said that the three top “requested your presence.”
(So here's the "action." No flying or bolts of lightning flying out of anyone's hand. No bending time - though that would have been helpful)
At this point, it had been at most, at the very, very most, fifteen minutes since I had taken that table’s order (and I refilled their drinks once after the order went in). Here is the conversation:
Woman who came in last: Where have you been?
Me: (setting down bread and plates on the table) Uhm, I’m sorry, ma’am, I have a large part-
Woman: (interrupting) You’ve left us sitting here for thirty minutes.
Me: I’m sorry, ma’am. But it hasn’t been thirty-
Woman: We had to get someone else to refill our drinks.
Me: I do apologize, ma’am. I have several other tables and a large par-
Woman: (interrupting, again, and gesturing toward the manager who is standing at the next table over) He told us you were at a large party.
Me: Yes, ma’am. Their food came up and I was-
Woman: Well, you just walked away and left us.
Me: Ma’am, I had food to bring out and another –
Woman: You didn’t even come back to refill our drinks for over thirty minutes.
Me: I do apologize, but I just took your order fifteen –
Woman: Are you telling me it hasn’t been over thirty minutes?
Woman’s father: I think she is.
Me: (trying to change the subject) Ma’am your food should be up any –
Woman: Are you going to tell me it hasn’t been thirty minutes?
Woman's father: Of course she is.
Me: Ma'am, I have five other tables, including a party of sev-
Woman: I don't know what you were doing, but it shouldn't take you thirty minutes.
Me: Ma’am, I apologize if it seemed like I was gone -
Woman: It was thirty minutes.
Me: I apologize. Can I bring you -
Woman: Are you going to continue telling me it hasn’t been thirty minutes?
Me: Are you going to continue to be rude to me?
Yep.
There it was.
She said, “Excuse me?!” And I walked away before I said something really stupid. Or threw lightning at her. She turned around and grabbed the manager who was still at the table beside them.
In the kitchen, I checked their ticket time. It had been seventeen minutes since I put it in.
When the manager came back, I apologized to him and asked told him I understood he was probably going to send me home.
“Hell no,” he said. “I heard everything. She was being a bitch.”
I calmed myself down, checked on my smoking tables, and came back to the window, where the three top’s food had just come up. I got it ready and ran it out to them.
And I apologized. I didn’t say I was sorry (because I wasn’t), but that I apologized. I asked them if they needed anything else. Perhaps some refills (because for the third time in twenty minutes they had sucked down twenty ounces of liquid). Then I dropped off their check. Showing the time they ordered.
I brought back refills, asked them how everything was, and apologized again. The woman said thank you and for the rest of their meal, they were all extremely polite.
At the end of their meal, I brought them to go boxes and welcomed them to join us again.
The manager said he would back me up if they decided to complain, but they tipped me eighteen percent. So I don't think they will.
Still, I felt bad about it all night. I mean, she was wrong, but I never lose my cool with a guest. And I have had some awful guests. I didn’t understand why I reacted that way. The rest of my tables were doing fine. I wasn’t in the weeds. I was having a pretty good night. I wasn’t anywhere near the end of my rope or the last straw or whatever.
I just suddenly couldn’t take this woman being so incredibly demeaning.
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