bitterwaitress

 

 

The plight of the waiter has been getting a lot of press lately. From Frank Bruni’s insightful and slighlty delusional piece in the New York Times to CNN’s survery of server-run websites, the general public is getting more of an insight into the life of a waiter than they probably ever imagined. Or wanted. I mean, if you have to think of us as people, it’s hard to stiff us, right? Here’s a trick - ask a diner for their business card before you end the meal. Watch your tip go up.

 

So the public knows we work long hours, they know we depend on tips and they know that most of us are trying to do something else. Although I believe that last part is a crock of shit. Maybe we want to do something else, but trying it is entirely different. Many of us are complicit in the stagnation of our dreams. Or we re-write the scripts of our lives to accomodate the circumstances in which we have placed ourselves. That’s a topic for another day.

 

There’s a great deal of which I am sure the public has gotten little notice though. CNN reported on what a pain it is to make hot tea. True. But do they say anything about what happens when you burn yourself making that hot tea and your manager tells you that you have to keep working? No. Where are the stories of sexual harrassment, of immigration fiascos, cooked books and the pathetic trough that passes for “family meal?” Or that coke is not something that comes out of a soda gun (but you can usually still get from the bartender). Nope. Depressing and abusive topics don’t make soundbites as good as my Shitty Tipper Database.

 

But what’s been plaguing me again of late is something so common to us that it flies beneath our own radar sometimes. Our hours. No, no the total (I skate with 38 but I have it like that). No, I mean the fact that many of us live inverted lives - starting work at four, ending at 11 - 3 and then maybe going out. It’s a rhythm that becomes a rut, and incredibly rare is the server that ends up at the 24-hour gym and not the bar. And it’s always the bar - not just any one in particular, but a haven at which we have generated such good will over the years that we usually drink for free (and everyone hates us for it).

 

Okay so there are a lot of second-shift workers in America. But our situation is a little different than nurses, doctors, construction and repair workers, 911 operators, etc. They get lunch breaks. They get benefits. They get paid vacations. They get to take a day off if they are sick.

 

 

 

Then there’s the loneliness factor. I’d hazard to say that most people entering the biz are single. Who is you dating pool? Other people in the biz. How does that go? Never well, never well at all. If you want to take a city as big as New York and shrink it just work in a restaurant for a year. Yeah, we hook up a lot and get laid more than most (it’s comically easy to have a random tumble at 4 a.m.) Ah, but we usually wake up in the wet spot of regret. Even if you end up with someone outside the biz, can it really make it when they want to go out to Sunday Brunch and you’re serving it? You think that post-work shower at 3 a.m. doesn’t wake your beloved up, especially in a miniscule city apartment?

 

People often tell me I should come home after work and go to bed. Really? Work one fucking shift - half of one shift - and try that. Oh, your body will be plenty tired, but your mind? Still cursing out the bitch on 22. Sometimes I have gone to the gym. Sometimes I even go to a midnight or 2 a.m. AA meeting (at that hour, anything goes). But more often than not it’s the Internet or TV.

 

So yea, I’ve been thru enough wikipedia and youtube to last a life time. And I’ve watched so many re-runs of Alias that I think I myself am having Ben Affleck’s baby. i just felt it kick now. Don’t know what it is, I just hate to go to sleep.

 

Ah the things I hate. That brings me to the cruelest part of working the dinner shift. Getting home. Well, trying to get home. For those of you who drive to work it’s probably not so bad - a little more dangerous with drunks, maybe deer, maybe bad talk radio. But you’re in control. In NYC, the subway system has no desire to accomodate night workers in the city that never sleeps. I’ve spent ten years dealing with this on levels from annoyance to destructive rage (sorry about that Metrocard machine outside the Natural History Musuem…). And more often than not it’s the F-train.

 

The F-train is great because it goes to places you want to be (Rock Center, Chelsea, Heath Ledger’s street…), when it goes. Which, at night, isn’t very often. Maybe once every 20 minutes. Maybe. Think they would, oh, say, use half as many cars and run it twice as often? Naaahhh.The F-train is also a main artery into Brooklyn, a place into which the subway system has no interest of getting you at night or on the weekends. On any given weekend at least 3 subway lines into or out of Brooklyn are shut down or rerouted in the most bizarre ways. Sometimes to get to your stop in Brooklyn, you have to go four extra stops then take a train (when it eventually arrives) back to your stop. It takes me 20 - 25 minutes to get to work in the afternoon. At night, it’s never less than an hour, and that’s IF I catch a train right away and they don’t suddenly decide to go local, or go express and skip my stop.

 

So you can imagine what it’s like to work nights and to live in Brooklyn. And where is the only place most servers and their ilk can afford to live? Yup, Brooklyn. (Or Queens, but, ewww, Queens).

 

Thus, I end up feeling punished. Punished by the guests. Punished by my past that has me still doing this. Punished by the subway. Of course I could just take a cab. But a cab back to Brooklyn can easily run me $25 and I am only off the first exit of the Manhattan Bridge. Hell, for 4 subway rides I could get on a plane to Los Angeles, where I’d never have to worry about the subways.

 

And where I’d be really punished.

 

Then again that could be fun.