Reunited and it feels so...awkward?

It's been a couple years since I've made a cappuccino or served a meal to anyone, but I still run into old customers occasionally. Quite often at parties, a friend (mostly the ones who live in St. Paul, which is where I last worked in food service) will introduce me to their friend and the conversation will go like this:

Friend of friend: "You look so familiar. Did you go to [name of college - they usually guess art school if I'm wearing my glasses]?"
Me: "Nope."
FoF: "Hmm. Did you used to be friends/roommates with/date [name of another friend]?"
Me: "No, I don't think I know that person."
FoF: "Weird, I swear I know you from somewhere."
(awkward silence)
Me: "*Sigh*...Well, did you used to go to [place I used to work], by chance?"
FoF: "Oh, yeah, I live right by there! That's where I know you from. You used to make my coffee!"
Me: "Yep, that's it. I worked there for eight years."

It's at this point that the conversation goes one of two ways. Choose your own adventure!

1. The person is cool and has other things to talk about besides where I used to work, or will actually be interested in my non-food service life in addition to talking about what kind of smoothie they used to like. I like when this happens, as sometimes I make a new friend.

2. The person is kind of clueless and will then try to have a conversation with me about nothing but my former workplace. I've had people grill me about whether they are hiring, why the price of something has gone up, bitching about how the menu has changed. I usually try to take it with a grain of salt, but some people revert to customer mode when they find out I used to serve them, and it's kind of irritating.

Although it should be noted that I absolutely love it when people tell me how much worse the food/service has gotten since I left. Because it's TOTALLY TRUE ;)

Servitude abroad

I just spent a week on the lovely little island of Anguilla (and if you're wondering how I can afford such a vacation, it's because my boss at my office job owns a home there and is very generous with his Christmas gifts).

As much fun as the vacation was and as relaxed as I felt, I still got a little uptight over the whole "rich (um, relatively) white person travelling to mostly black country to stay in huge house and lay on the beach while being served by the locals who live in shacks and work for peanuts" thing. I believe this is generally described as White Guilt, however I attribute my feelings more to class issues than to race. But I digress...

Just about everyone we encountered on the island was remarkably friendly, especially the servers. As this is kind of a spendy island to visit, these folks are used to dealing with celebrities (OMG Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt totally broke up there!) and other wealthy people. There are no cruise ships or flocks of fanny pack-wearing tourists coming in, and no "Give Up the Booty!" shot glasses with drawings of a pirate's hook dangling a thong - you have to go to St. Martin for that. So since I wasn't really there on my own dime, it was kind of hard for me to reconcile my own serving experiences with the experience of being waited on hand and foot.

When we thought the rental car's tire might have a leak, the chef from the restaurant we were visiting came out of the kitchen and promised to change the tire or take care of whatever we needed. The chef! When have you known an American chef to a) not be a sociopath and/or drunk and b) ever in a million years take it upon him or herself to actually provide customer service?! "You go to the beach and have all the fun you need," is what he said to me when I started to freak a little. "We'll take care of whatever you need." Go, James! Our server at another place, Jerell, remembered us and the plans we had told him about four days prior.

I kept trying to figure out if people were being nice to us because we were white, and therefore presumably rich tourists in need of coddling, or if it was because we were nice, and therefore presumably not assholes. It's kind of an uncomfortable thought, but maybe there are people who can just truly be happy serving other people, race and class aside. Maybe the servers of Anguilla are proud of their country and of the fact that people come there to experience paradise. Maybe they don't get any bitchy customers because it is paradise. Hell, if I lived there I wouldn't mind slinging rum punch on the beach, even if the customers were dicks. And if Minnesota somehow became a sought-after vacation spot and Anguillans like James and Jerell were my customers, I would go back to serving in a heartbeat.

Bein thankful...ur doin it rite!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

As you prepare and serve your holiday feast (personally, I just finished making the cranberries) I hope you will not only take the time to realize how thankful you are for your friends and family, your health and the awesome food you're about to devour, I hope you'll *perhaps* remember all the service employees (retail, food and otherwise) who work on holidays. I can't even count the number of busy Wednesday night close/Thanksgiving morning opens I've had to pull in my life. It's really stressful!

Also, be thankful for all the wonderful servers and cooks who make and serve you delicious food (and clean up after you) every time you go out to eat. Think of how tired you are after cooking for and serving 12 people...see why there is such thing as a tip?

But seriously, Happy Thanksgiving and be well!

Waitress Hell

I had forgotten all about this old Heavens to Betsy song, Waitress Hell (you may know Corin Tucker from H2B from her later band, Sleater-Kinney). Their only album, Calculated came out in 1994 and I think I first heard it around 1995 or so, after I'd gotten obsessively into Bikini Kill and was a full-fledged Riot Grrrl (or at least the tamer, teenage, polite midwestern English-class revolutionary version of a Riot Grrrl). Listening to it now, it's just as good. Maybe even better now that I've lived it.

miss, i need another glass, this one is smudged and my
lips are too precious for this
we want the window table clear and set it for us
it's not too busy for us
bring a million different things to my table on a silver
platter you've got nothing better to do
if you smile really big and kiss my whitey ass
maybe you'll get a dollar today

you're going to waitress hell
you're gonna burn in my hell

yeah i just do this job for a hobby so
don't worry about a tip
4.25/hr suits me fine yeah i just love to serve
sure i'll take your plate your glass your bowl and then
i'll wipe your chin
and in the end i'm covered in your shit-
you look at me like i'm the dirty one

you're going to waitress hell
you're gonna burn in my hell

To inconvenience, or not to inconvenience

I waffle on this subject a lot: are you really "inconveniencing" someone whose job it is to serve you? And if you are, does it matter?

When this question inevitably comes up in a restaurant or bar, your friends probably all have differing theories. What's surprising is those who have worked in food service aren't always the ones wanting to give the waitress a break or tip the bartender extra just because. Out of habit, I usually leave generous tips but sometimes I catch myself - I'm just about as broke as a server and if the service was bad (truly bad, not just that I went somewhere insanely busy on a Friday night and had to wait five minutes longer than normal) I will tip exactly 15 percent, possibly less. I will sometimes not ask for something because it seems like it will inconvenience somebody, but then I remember - that's their job. When I was serving, I would much rather have someone assertively ask for (or remind me of) what they need rather than pull that passive-aggressive bullshit of "Oh, I don't want to bother her. Now I'll just be quietly upset all night that I didn't get extra salad dressing, and tell everyone later that the service was bad."

I was visiting friends in Brooklyn this weekend and while we were walking back to the train a little before 2 AM, we (unbelievably) couldn't find any late-night food options in the neighborhood we were in (I know, not even pizza! In Brooklyn!). Drunk and hungry, we finally stumbled upon a hot dog place. They closed at 2, and one of my companions and I declared we didn't want to be "assholes" and go into an establishment a few minutes before closing. They were probably cleaning up and wanting to go home. Our other friend, annoyed with our passivity, reminded us that the restaurant was open until 2, and made a living off of providing food for people. It's their JOB. Distracted and drunk, we wandered away from the hot dog place but I thought about it later - she's right. It's their job. In fact, I just got pissed off at a bakery in a small town a couple weeks ago where I went in a half-hour before closing and basically could not get them to sell me anything because it was all "put away." How annoying.

On a side note, the friend who reminded us that the hot dog people make a living off of selling hot dogs, and would probably be glad to do so even right before closing, is a former server and even worked at the same restaurant as me in high school. She also once left a condescending biyatch waitress at some crappy tapas bar in Uptown a bunch of scattered change on the table as a tip after she was excruciatingly rude to us.

Proof that fairness doesn't always mean accommodation, even if you're trained to think that way.

Crying at work

Once I was a customer when a barista started crying. She burned herself on the steam wand (which you get used to pretty quickly working in a job like that). She tried to hide it at first and when I asked if she was OK, she just muttered "yeah." But it quickly became apparent that either due to the burn or (more likely) due to other things, she was not. I tried to send her telepathic messages. "It's OK. I'm one of the good ones. You can let it out." And as if she heard me, she started crying. I told her I knew what she felt like since I'd burned myself about a million times on steam wands all over the Minneapolis metro area, but what I was really saying is that I know what she felt like because I know what it's like to be treated like shit all day. To know that despite that, if you want to make any money, you have to be nice to everyone no matter what's going on at home or at work or in your head.

One time...

I cut myself pitting an avocado and bled all over someone's sandwich. I told him I was going to get somebody else to take care of his order and he simply asked, "How long will that take?" Meanwhile I cradled my hand as blood pooled on the floor.