Waiter Dreams

I used to be a waiter, a long, long, long time ago. They wanted us to say 'server' but I never could get behind that, it sounded like what it was, a term made up by corporate weasels. It was fun gig right out of college, a cash business where you got your meals for free, especially if you worked as cook too, which I did. While it is not a fast-track job for the career-minded, it does take a certain kind of person to be able to handle the stresses inherent in waiting tables.
   Not only do you have crazy-ass people who come into the restaurant believing they're entitled to something by virtue of having their butt in one of your seats, you have to deal with incompetent restaurant managers, dim-witted hostesses, and cooks who are either coming down from their latest high or thinking about the next time they can get high. It's a delicate dance between all sorts of volatile personalities to get what you need to get your job done. Roll all of that together put it under the pressure of having to make rent money on the last day of the month and you can see why there aren't many really old waiters.
   Everyone who's been a waiter has had the waiter dream - you're the only one in the restaurant when a bus full of senior citizens pulls up, or you're in the kitchen trying to get back out to your customers but something always keeps you from getting through that door, or you're working at full capacity already and the hostess seats you a party of twenty. You're panicked and sweaty and rushed and nothing ever goes your way; usually a waiter dream is never resolved, you just wake up, shake it off, and try to go back to sleep. They're stress dreams, and I used to have them all the time when I was actually working as a waiter. And in the years since, from time to time, I'll have another waiter dream and I'll know that my sub-conscious mind is trying to tell me something.
   I've been having waiter dreams recently. Maybe this unemployment thing is getting to me more than I realized.