Passing The Torch

Last week my older niece got a job as a waiter.* Her younger sister starts the same job in a month or so.
   I am now officially NOT the only person in my family to have been a waiter.
   It's been my contention since I brought my first plate of lasagna to my first ungrateful and undeserving customer that everyone should have to work a food service job early on in life. Much like the Swiss have mandatory military service for all their citizens, we should have mandatory restaurant duty. You don't necessarily have to be a waiter, you could be a busser, a bartender, even a hostess, any job where you have to deal with the Great Unwashed on a daily basis.
   See, having to deal with people on a decidedly unequal footing - your job is to bring them their food, presumably spit-free** - makes you realize how poorly you've been treating others. Slinging hash, or spaghetti, or burgers, or in my niece's case tortillas, brings you into contact with some genuine people. And by that I mean not only genuinely nice people, I mean genuine assholes. There are customers who come in the door looking to take their bad day out one someone, and since the waiter has the apron he's elected.
   It's a learning experience for sure, not only in reading people and their intentions but also in controlling yourself. And in controlling your finances, and in managing not only your work but others' work as well. When you're first on the Tuesday evening shift and the cook is coming down off some righteous bud you need to plan for his inevitable screwing-up of the order and general lack of urgency to repair his own mistake. And at the same time your customers don't want to hear any excuses, especially lame ones about the cook being stoned off his ass. It's a PR job and the first acting gig I ever had.
   It builds character. When you dance like a trained monkey for 15% or less, you learn to find inner validation. And then, when the night is done and the restaurant is closed and you're so tired you can't hardly stand up, you discover that everything - EVERYTHING - is the funniest thing you've ever heard. My best friends are people I worked with when I was a waiter. Good times, good times.
   So congratulations to my nieces on their new adult jobs. Welcome to the working world, it sucks worse than you can possibly imagine. But if anybody gives you a hard time let me know, me and my boys will take care of it.


* waitress, server, waitron, wage slave, food getter... it's all good and all means the same thing

** no guarantees