The Joys of the Workforce

Last night at my place of employment--let's call it "Pino's"--I was reminded that I needed to make a post about the joys of waiting tables.

Pino's is a little European restaurant by the garden district of Baton Rouge. Established in 1963, this place is one of the older dining institutions still in business; others were run off by chains like Chili's and DeAngelo's. The majority of our customers are people who have been eating at Pino's since the sixties.

Last night, a lady came in with her boyfriend. I immediately recognized her as the woman who came in by herself two years ago to booze up and have an eggplant parmigiana. On that occasion, she got so drunk that she proceeded to talk to me for an hour about how wonderful the South Beach Diet was. I even tried to sit at the table next to her to fold napkins with my co-worker--she kept talking, leaning over so she could see me around the corner. By the time she left, she had been keeping us there past closing time for two hours, because of the goddamn South Beach Diet.

The serious issue here is that I do not understand how anyone could think--drunk or not--that their server, at most a brief acquaintance, would be interested in the intricacies of the South Beach Diet for over an hour. When that starts happening, I start wishing I were a therapist so I could charge $50 an hour. Pay me $50 and I will listen with the greatest of attention.

But she didn't tip me $50. She tipped $7. SEVEN.

Another hilarity struck me last night as well. I had a four-top of sophisticated-looking adults, who were rather wonderful people. It was probably the best table I had all night. Teh Funny happened when I handed them the check. The two CEO-looking husbands each grabbed a side of the payment book and started pulling.
"No, it's MY treat!"
"I assure you, it's mine."
Their wives looked on in amusement. I ran away so I could giggle. The guy I thought would tip the best ended up winning the battle, and he did tip well.

We servers always have a designated person to whom we give the bill to, because we've already judged each and every one of you and decided who is most likely to tip 20%. I guess you could call it being judgmental or greedy, but the gratuity industry is, indeed, a business. It's how we pay rent. You get up at 6AM to crunch numbers or file papers; I get up at noon and lay around until 4 and make money from your excess income. Sometimes this makes me feel like a big cheat, every shift for a year after I first started waiting.

Four years later, I rarely feel like I'm cheating people. I think we get defensive sometimes when people treat us like shit--we run our asses off with no health insurance or 401K, and if we happen to break our leg, we're fucked out of a job and stuck with an insane hospital bill. So I've come to believe that my time is worth just as much as the CEOs I wait on, and I have absolutely no trouble living with myself when I auto-gratuity a big table and they tip on top. Their mistake, right? Technically that's wrong to try for, and I'm glad to say I never take steps to hide the gratuity (I've seen people do it before), but a server's situation is precarious. We're employed in a risky, Stazi-like business.

We get defensive about our worth because deep, deep down, we know we have a long way to go before we're CEOs. We might never ascend to some of our customers' financial levels. Having to wonder whether you'll make rent every month solely on other peoples' generosity gives one a complex. It makes us more ambitious, and at the same time a little defeated every time we only make 20% of your enormous pleasure expense, because we know we couldn't drop that much money in one night at a restaurant.

So we think, "I can make more, more more here," we get greedy, judgmental. Restaurant Samsara develops in the best of us. Caught in that cycle of cash every night, bar tabs, huge tips and living beyond our means because we want to be able to drop $200 in one place. But we can't. And every time the white-collars and soccer moms come in, no matter how much we despise them and their lifestyles, we're faced with the reality that their lives are so much more comfortable than ours.

And we're busting our asses to make it that way.