How To Get Fired In 14 Easy Steps (A Recipe for Disaster)
Posted by Heather on 9/10 at 10:44 pm
Step 1: Find a boyfriend whose mother owns a seasonal restaurant and live with him for seven years.
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Step 2: Agree to wait tables at the family restaurant for the summer while boyfriend steps in as sous chef.
Step 3: When meeting other employees at a staff meeting, notice handsome, ridiculously young waiter with blue eyes and a love of reading.
Step 4: Get screamed at by boyfriend in front of kitchen staff about a special order. Twice. Wonder (not for the first time) if you belong together.
Step 5: Discover that you and young waiter both love Hermann Hesse. Realize you share a day off.
Step 6: Start preening excessively before your shift. Tell yourself you just want to look pretty for customers.
Step 7: Agree to "take a walk" with young waiter. On the beach. At night. With wine.
Step 8: Make out for hours and stumble home at 3 a.m. with sand in your hair.
Step 9: Find out that young waiter told someone he's having an affair with you, and watch rumors spread like SARS through the restaurant.
Step 10: Lie to boyfriend when confronted. Continue to meet young waiter for steamy trysts in graveyards and fields.
Step 11: Go to young waiter's crappy summer rental, the location of which is common knowledge, and stay too long.
Step 12: Stand by, frozen with shock, as boyfriend shows up and fistfight commences. Take note of the fact that young waiter isn't wearing pants.
Step 13: Tentatively break up with boyfriend.
Step 14: The next day, when boyfriend's mother says "we don't need you tonight," suspect that you've been canned. Confirm it later with now former boyfriend.
Optional: Continue to secretly meet young waiter. Pack suitcase and leave island together. Drive across country while blowing through saved tips like sailors on shore leave and having sex at every rest stop. Get bored of young waiter and separate in New Mexico. Never wait tables again.
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Crying on the Job
Posted by Rose on 9/8 at 4:35 pm
When a maitre d' mutters the words "restaurant people in your section," a waiter normally expects to find friendly, compassionate souls who will order the most interesting dishes on the menu, appreciate and discuss every morsel, and leave an embarrassingly large tip. They're usually friends of someone who works in the restaurant (God help the waiter if they know the chef, who will show off by sending out twenty variations on caviar and truffles, all comped), or they themselves work in the restaurant and can't resist the strange compulsion to be served by their own kind and eat the same food they have to look at every night. Under most circumstances, a waiter has nothing to fear from other restaurant people, who understand what it's like to be sweaty, frazzled, underfed, and later, drunk. Unless, of course, they work at a competing restaurant.
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It was nine thirty on a Sunday night, and I was working upstairs in a place that had once been an exceptional private house, but was now a mediocre and overpriced fallback for people who couldn't get a reservation anywhere else. The lobster tails were frozen, the color scheme pink and black, and the owner and his wife regularly battled in front of the wait staff, but the money was well worth lowering myself for. I wasn't happy to have a table of ten sit down so late, but I assumed they'd be gone in time for me to help with closing sidework between gulps of lousy house merlot.
"They're from The Boathouse," the manager told me. "First round of drinks on me."
"On me" meant that I got to do a lot of extra stair-climbing for no extra money, but I hoped I would make it up later through a hefty sympathy tip. I began to suspect that sympathy was in short supply, however, when The Boathouse's owner, a wiry, bald man in his late sixties, pulled the flaps of his ears forward and yelped, "Louder! We can't hear you!" only five words into the specials. His crew of waiters, bartenders, and managers stared at me like a parole board listening to an unconvincing expression of remorse. I knew then that they weren't there to have a nice dinner, but to prove that my restaurant was inferior to theirs. And so began some of the worst hours of my waitressing career.
The first plate I put on the table was greeted with a grimace. "These are scallops?" said one of the women. I started to answer, only to realize that she was already talking to the person next to her. I had never been ignored and put on the spot at the same time, but this group managed to do it every time I walked into the dining room. When I had something to say (shout, actually), they talked over me, when I dared to leave for a few minutes, I returned to annoyed arm waving and expressions that said, "Where the hell do they get these amateurs?" Every request began "Get me," "I want," or "Bring me," and every request fulfilled was greeted with either silence or a quiet snort of laughter. I began to take it personally.
"I'm a terrible waiter," I said to the bartender. "They hate me."
"No, they don't," he said, patting my shoulder. "They hate the food."
If they hated the food, why did they keep ordering so much of it? The rest of the restaurant was empty and most of the staff long gone by the time I delivered what I hoped was the last dessert. Like the others, it was held up, inspected, and passed around for everyone to taste and ridicule. And just when I thought they were about to make me the happiest waiter on earth by getting up and leaving, they pulled out cigarettes and ordered a bottle of Sauternes. It was after one in the morning when my table of restaurant people left a twelve percent tip in change and dollar bills, and walked out without acknowledging me. I cried for two hours – first in the bathroom at work, and afterward, at home, as I related every detail of my humiliating night to my boyfriend, who told me I should try to see the humor in it all. I guess it should have been funny by then, but it wasn't. Unlike most of my restaurant memories, it isn't even funny now.
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Champagne, Anyone?
Posted by Heather on 9/4 at 10:44 pm
Nothing scares a waitress on a Saturday night like the words "the kitchen is in the weeds." Suddenly, the product you've been hawking ("Our vodka-spiked oysters are a last-supper experience") is nowhere to be seen, and the cooks, safely hidden behind the swinging doors, are blaming the delay on the hostess for slamming them, and on the waiters for not perfectly staggering their orders.
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"Twenty minutes!" the chef at F Street shouted when I asked him about the ETA of a six-top's main courses.
"Seriously?" I bleated.
"Now that you questioned me, make it thirty!"
I walked gravely back to the table, like a doctor about to deliver a terminal diagnosis. All six middle-aged patrons looked up from their conversation with expectant, hungry faces, reminding me that while their experience at the restaurant was not entirely in my control, it was still my responsibility. "Your main courses will be right out," I lied, unable to dash their fragile hopes.
"We'll believe it when we see it," one of them replied.
Forty-five minutes later, they were half-drunk and threatening to leave, and they weren't the only ones. F Street's owner had already bought "sorry you're starving" drinks for three other tables, and he suggested that I pacify my six-top with a bottle of our least expensive champagne. I was still a fledgling waitress, and had only recently begun uncorking wine. Opening champagne, with its precise technique and potentially maiming finale, was a challenge to my limited skills.
But I wasn't going to tell
him that.
I pulled a bottle of non-vintage brut from the fridge in the kitchen and presented it at the table as if it were Krug Rosé. "Complements of C.," I announced, trembling as I unwrapped the foil from the bottle while the busboy set down champagne glasses. Visions of a stubborn cork or cheap bubbly foaming over onto the woman at my elbow raced through my head as I unwound the tab of the wire cage. But those fears were miniscule compared to what happened next: The second I removed the wire cage, the cork exploded into the air with such force that the bottle flew straight out of my hands. I watched helplessly as it dropped to the hardwood floor without breaking and spun across the crowded dining room, spraying champagne on shoes, legs, and tablecloths. The entire restaurant went silent.
I stood with my hands outstretched, unable to speak, as the owner rushed in with a "Who's got a gun?" expression on his face. The busboy, a veteran of workplace disasters, ripped off his apron and began mopping the floor and walls as I mumbled a horrified apology, grabbed the now-empty bottle, and slunk back to the kitchen for more champagne.
This time, I picked a more expensive brand, and, fueled by humiliation and a nothing-left-to-lose attitude, opened it with flawless style. By the time my now-sated patrons left at midnight, I'd learned two very important lessons: Never take your finger off the cork, and always drink the good stuff.
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Post-Traumatic Service Disorder
Posted by Heather on 8/24 at 9:56 am
At least twice a month, I have the same nightmare: I'm waiting tables and I'm behind. My tables are filling up, guests are trying to flag me down, but I can't move fast enough to help them. I'm forgetting a table that's just out of sight, and speaking a language nobody understands (true in reality when talking to cooks). I've spilled drinks, brought plates to the wrong people, and spent an hour making a credit card go through. By the time I get back to the dining room, all hell has broken loose. The guests that haven't left in disgust are screaming at me or complaining to the manager. And for some reason, I still have to tell everyone the specials. Which I can't remember.
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It's been years since I waited tables, so why do I still have this dream?
Once you've worn an apron, you don't just take it off and forget it. It's a little like being an reformed alcoholic – you may not go to bars anymore, but you're still trying to figure out how you made it home on Halloween night, 2003. How, I wonder, did I work five doubles a week for an entire summer on Nantucket without stopping in the middle of the dinner shift and shouting, "ALL OF YOU, GET OUT!" How did I wait on a very smug Neve Campbell at the height of her
Scream fame (while the cooks gawked, lovesick, from the kitchen door) without saying, "Hey, why don't I be you, and you be me, just for five minutes?" How did I sleep so little, drink so many vodka tonics, and have so many conversations that started "Good evening, everyone" and end "Thank you so much!" and walk away sane?
And speaking of walking away, why didn't I?
Why did I keep going back, night after night, knowing that a bruised ego, sore feet, and a cook shouting, "That's not your bluefin, sister" were waiting for me? Why did I endure a schedule normally kept by strippers rather than get a "real" job, one that utilized my quickly dwindling (monotony-induced cell death) intelligence? For the two most American of principles: freedom and easy money. As a waiter, I was exempt from taxes, early mornings, and corporate politics. I shoved a roll of cash into my pocket at the end of each shift, and if I got tired of one job, another was literally around the corner. I joined a new clique of fellow waiters, trained for a few days, and
voila, I was twenty-four. Then twenty-eight.
Uh oh.
Maybe my dreams are a way of processing what I couldn't possibly sort through at the time. Like the second stomach of the psyche, dreams digest what overwhelms the conscious mind. Now that I'm safe (away from the flirtatious-yet-gay salad guy and the crazy manager with the festering leg sore), I can wait tables all over again, in private, and not collect a single tip for my trouble. Every time I feel anxious or under pressure, my brain looks for the one experience that defines "anxious, under pressure." It drifts back over college exams, medical procedures, turbulent flights, job interviews, and all of the nights I navigated a kitchen swarming with surly cooks and a dining room packed with hungry rich people. And it always serves up the same dream.
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Sex and Condiments
Posted by Rose on 8/22 at 4:17 pm
It's a universal law of waiting tables (along with "The chef thinks you're an idiot"): if you're ducking into the storage room mid-shift to go to third base with a cook, your time at work is going to fly. I learned this early in my waitressing career, and took advantage of it whenever anyone sexy and single (okay, not always single) was on the staff. It was simple – I could suffer through ten hours of being bitched at, starved, and looked down upon, or I could develop a convenient crush that would actually make me look forward to showing up at whatever hellhole was my current source of income.
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My first restaurant infatuation was C., a tall South American guy who answered phones and packed up takeout at a little lunch spot across the street from Radio City Music Hall. I sold tuna melts and dealt with a chronic shortage of flatware, he bagged mac and cheese for the delivery boys, and our attraction blossomed in spite of (because of?) the constant presence of ranch dressing and our inability to understand each other's language. We kissed whenever we could find a spare moment. For lack of a more private option, this moment usually took place at the pick-up window in full view of the leering cooks. "I want you so bad," C. would whisper into my hamburger-scented hair, before telling the cooks to fuck off in Spanish. This might have progressed to a location outside the restaurant if it weren't for the little matter of my boyfriend.
Crush Two was G., a dark-haired line cook at a Nantucket restaurant so close to the water that I once accidentally knocked an ashtray off a table and into the harbor. While he sent hundreds of lobsters to their graves in the steamer and I served them to tourists who said things like "I didn't know the head would be attached," we plotted secret trysts that the rest of the staff wouldn't discover. This usually meant meeting after midnight at G's room, where we would drink Bass Ale, listen to the Cowboy Junkies, and maul each other until the birds started singing. Yes, my uniform consisted of ugly red shorts and white sneakers, and no, I never had time to go to the beach. Business was often slow, and the chef was a psychotic former fisherman who liked to fire waiters on the spot. But I loved the way a little adrenaline and some pheromones could turn a miserable dinner shift into a dimly-lit romantic getaway. It was a shame that G. and I were doomed to part at the end of the summer.
J. was a busboy, eight years my junior, a college student from the Midwest, and fond of pulling me into the condiment closet in the middle of service so we could make out surrounded by fingerprint-marked bottles of ketchup. Was this manager-sanctioned behavior? Nope. Did I neglect tables so I could throw myself at a handsome kid who still binge drank and wore baseball caps and shaved his head when somebody dared him to? Absolutely. I had no choice. This was a restaurant that forced its waiters to pull a certain number of "running shifts," humiliating, unpaid marathons that involved ferrying heavy trays of food from the second-floor kitchen down to our unappreciative customers. Without the promise of J. waiting for me by the shelves of malt vinegar, I might literally have collapsed. But there was no point in quitting. Things wouldn't be much better anywhere else, and I'd run the risk of having to work in a sex-free environment. Heaven forbid.
These days, I rarely think about my former crushes, though I owe them a huge debt of gratitude for making some lousy jobs easier to bear. Now that I'm in a committed relationship, I use a different kind of reward to get me through the tough times, one that doesn't require me to look hot in an apron or rub shoulders with containers of bulk mayonnaise. When my mind is blowing fuses and I can't write another word, I go the kitchen, open the best cabernet I can find, and pour myself a generous glass. It's almost as good as sex in a closet, and I don't have to worry about getting caught.
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An Order of Tuna
Posted by Heather on 8/21 at 5:04 pm
I used to think that the nicer the restaurant, the more talented and respectable the kitchen staff. Then I took a job waiting tables at F Street (let's call it), an upscale eatery with old wooden floors, a charming bar, and a loyal clientele. The food was good, if not especially imaginative, and the tips were by far the best I'd ever received. But as one of the youngest and least experienced waiters, I was at the bottom of the pecking order, a rank that resulted in less desirable sections, smaller parties, and a free flow of remarks from the red-haired, freckled, and very married chef. Some were insulting ("You don't know the difference between basil and rosemary"), some were suggestive ("Want to get together later?"), but I absorbed them all without complaint. I was the new girl, and I didn't want to seem overly sensitive or incompetent.
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The cooks considered themselves underpaid artists, and they entertained themselves by swearing, drinking on the job, and making shifts as stressful as possible for a few unfortunate waiters. The lawless atmosphere in the kitchen was silently sanctioned by F Street's owner, a mild-mannered man who expressed concern over my voice projection and ability to handle a six-top. While I struggled to learn, perform, and prove myself, the chef stepped up his sexually-charged comments, prompting me to complain to the owner, who said, "I'm sure you've dealt with this kind of thing before. You'll get used to it."
As it became clear to the chef that I wasn't going to play his abuse-me-flirt-with-me game, a seismic shift took place among the kitchen staff. Suddenly, I was despised by everyone, and I became cold and closed as a result. The simple act of taking my plates from under the heat lamps caused the chef to roll his eyes in contempt. Another waitress told me that as soon as I left the kitchen, the sous chef called me a "stupid fucking bitch." I hated going to work, felt constantly whispered about and on the defensive, but it was winter in a summer resort town and few restaurants were open. I took to hiding a glass of chardonnay above the computer in the hallway.
As the weather turned warmer, I started riding my bike to work, locking it to the rack in the alley near the kitchen door. One afternoon, as I got ready to leave the house for my dinner shift, I noticed a cloud of flies buzzing around my bicycle, and discovered an ahi tuna filet tied tightly under the seat with twine. Stunned, frightened, disgusted by the obvious sexual implications, I watched from the back steps as my then-boyfriend cut out the rotting fish and washed my bike with boiling water. Having failed to get to me any other way, the cooks had finally resorted to something so violating that I couldn't ignore it.
I walked to work that night, unable to touch my bicycle. Though I was beyond livid, I didn't go to F Street's owner, as I knew his loyalty lay with his cooks. But the head waiter wasn't interested either – he made a half-hearted attempt to interrogate the kitchen staff, who claimed to have no idea what he was talking about. I grimly made it through another few months at F Street, and I never got back on my bike without first checking under the seat. By the time I quit and moved to San Francisco, I thought I'd seen the worst restaurants had to offer. My next waiting job, no matter how demanding, couldn't possibly be as bad. I was right.
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It's Not Nice to Hate the Dead
Posted by Rose on 8/19 at 11:43 pm
Once upon a waiting job, I served a legendary professional athlete and his family. I approached him as I would any famous or semi-famous person: as if he weren't well-known. Why make him feel uncomfortable or self-conscious by being anything other than pleasant and professional, as I was (or tried to be, with varying degrees of success) with everyone else? In my mind, fawning or putting him on the spot would be not only inappropriate, but demeaning for me. I was a waitress, yes, but I wasn't a brown-noser.
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Considering how the night turned out, treating him like an ordinary person might not have been such a hot idea. He was curt, dismissive, and barely made eye contact with me (this is a clever device guests use when they want to make the waiter feel as insignificant as possible). His wife seemed to be struggling to keep up both ends of the conversation by herself, while their young daughter and her little friend systematically dismantled whatever was on the table and put it, along with large amounts of salt and pepper, into their water glasses.
F.A. (Famous Athlete) didn't seem to notice the destruction taking place only inches from his plate. I could understand ignoring his wife, but an encroaching flood of ketchup-stained ice water? Bits of paper napkin landing in his main course? While he stared into the distance and chewed, his wife droned on endlessly and the children made an everything salad on the tablecloth, causing me to feel both infuriated (who's in charge here?) and better about myself (hey, I'm not the only one he's ignoring). Why, I wondered, are some people as comfortable being dysfunctional in public as they are at home? Or did F.A. believe that, in order to get his money's worth, he had to make me work harder? My answer came at tip time, always the moment of truth for any waiter/customer transaction.
Eight percent.
Several months later, I read about F.A.'s early death in
The New York Times. How sad, I thought, remembering the night when I struggled to meet his monotone demands and make his dinner a memorable one – which it certainly had been for me. Not only had he given me less than I was worth, but I and one very pissed off busboy had been forced to clean up the carnage afterwards. And now here I was, alive and happy on a beautiful winter morning, and F.A. was gone.
I could have been philosophical about it. But the way I saw it, he'd skipped town. And he still owed me money.
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A Thief in Monk's Clothing
Posted by Heather on 8/19 at 6:23 pm
George (not his real name) was the owner of a popular restaurant in the San Francisco financial district. Fresh from a stint at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, he told his waiters that during his years of meditation and gardening, he never thought about money, but now, he "couldn't get enough of it." A middle-aged husband and father, George encouraged me to add four top-shelf vodkas to the tab of an alcoholic businessman every time he came in for lunch.
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"Won't he notice?" I asked, my moral principles not yet eroded from years of waitressing.
"The shape he's in?" George scoffed. "He can barely sit up straight."
Whenever large parties arrived, George's cheeks flushed with excitement. "Throw in two more cases of Silver Oak," he muttered as I tallied the check for a wedding reception. "I gave them a deal on the food."
George was the first person I worked for who was obsessed with check averages, tensely calculating each waiter's average at the end of every shift. "You only did eighty bucks per person!" he'd cry, as if I were personally taking cash from his pocket.
"I had a lot of women on diets," I'd argue. "They
wanted iced tea and chicken salads."
"Cristo averaged over one twenty," he'd say, beaming at an Eastern European super-waiter who worked nights at the Carnelian Room and owned an apartment building. That Cristo's tables were always seated with regulars who ordered wine and multiple courses was an injustice I overlooked. That diners felt an obligation to spend more when faced with a foreign-born, professional waiter as opposed to a twenty-something girl biding her time didn't occur to me until later.
Several of my fellow waiters had caught George's virus-like greed, and it wasn't long before I came down with it. Whenever he wasn't in the restaurant (he was too cheap to hire a manager), we swiped cash transactions and removed the dupes from the kitchen so they couldn't be traced. If a corporate function called for a no-host bar, we pilfered a healthy portion of the evening's drink total and split it among the four of us. We routinely took home expensive bottles of wine and felt no guilt whatsoever. Hell, the boss was doing it!
Occasionally, George would express confusion over the disappointing profits from a large party the evening before. "I don't understand," he'd say, squinting at the numbers. "There were so many of them and they drank so little."
No matter how brazen we were, or how obvious the evidence ("only sixteen people came in for dinner last night?"), George never suspected that his waiters were doing to him what he did to his own diners. Maybe it was a leftover Zen habit of only seeing the good in people. Or maybe we were just good at it.
After all, we'd learned from the master himself.
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