Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress

by Ginsberg, Debra

  The disaster that followed was almost sublime in its totality.

  For starters, Tiffany was completely unable to hold a thought in her head, let alone an order. She became the only waitress at Molto’s to use an order pad, and even then she wrote down the wrong items. She took orders for entrees not listed on the menu and drove the cooks nearly insane when she demanded they prepare these dishes. Because she added every bill incorrectly, the bartender on duty was forced to total Tiffany’s checks to avoid costly mistakes. But even with all this help, Tiffany had absolutely no sense of timing—a fatal flaw. Every day she came to work (and she often didn’t make it in for her shifts), she acted as if she was serving a leisurely meal in her own home, to one table at a time. The word multitasking was not in Tiffany’s vocabulary.

  Perhaps all of this could have been forgiven, or at least managed, if Tiffany had been possessed of some of the personal qualities that make a good, or even competent, waitress. But although she was an attractive young woman, Tiffany selected variations on the standard black-and-white uniform that could only be described as garish and strange. Seeking to disguise an imaginary heaviness, Tiffany shopped at a clothing store named Renoir’s Lady and came to work in a floor-length tent of a skirt that would have been better suited for a Wiccan festival. Her jumbo skirt caught on the edges of tables, collected spills of every kind, and tripped her quite often. In contrast, she bought white shirts that were way too small for her ample bosom and popped several buttons under the strain. As for hair and makeup, Tiffany was clueless. Suffice it to say that several strands of her dark tresses frequently wound up in the dishes she served. When I attempted to offer some advice on her attire, however, Tiffany accused me of being jealous of her sense of style. I countered by telling her that our manager, Barry, had noted that her clothing was inappropriate (what he’d actually said was “Where the hell does she think she is, a cabaret?”). Tiffany really took umbrage at this, telling me that she was quite sure Barry was “very attracted to me, if you know what I mean.”

  Barry did have a certain attraction for Tiffany, but it was the sort of fascination that makes people slow down when they pass a fatal accident on the freeway. For in addition to being a train wreck in terms of ability and attire, Tiffany was also unable to get through a single shift without dropping, breaking, or spilling something. Her penultimate feat at Molto’s came during a busy lunch shift. The dining room was divided into a main floor and a balcony linked by a carpeted stairway. I was taking an order in the upstairs smoking section when I heard a tremendous crash. The wind whispered “Tiffany” in the silence that followed.

  Sure enough, Tiffany had managed to wipe out on the stairs with two dishes of linguini and shrimp in cream sauce, which made the seating of any more upstairs tables a viscous impossibility. Tiffany was laughing. Horrified, I rushed over to the host’s podium where Barry was watching silently, his jaw muscles working overtime in an extended clench.

  “Barry, I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Barry, a chiseled New Yorker with a wit drier than the Sahara, looked at me and said, “I can’t stand the way she moves. I can’t stand the way she moves through my restaurant.”

  Wringing my hands, I told him, “Please fire her. I don’t mind. Really.”

  Barry was no fool. He was also the first and last restaurant manager I have ever respected. “Oh no,” he said, “I’m not going to fire her. You can do that. Go ahead, I dare you.”

  Neither one of us fired Tiffany. Miraculously, she found another job (serving cocktails, no less) after complaining that nobody was nice to her at Molto’s. Before she left, however, she managed to create a final nightmare of epic proportions. In preparation for her new job, Tiffany got two-inch acrylic nails applied to her fingers. She then came to work at Molto’s with

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  said nails and proceeded to puncture several holes in the boxes that held the restaurant’s house wines. Naturally, Tiffany never noticed the leaks. Since the wines were stored in the upstairs cooler, chablis soon began flooding out of the containers, down the stairs, and along the walls, dripping in a fruity waterfall onto the tables below.

  Tiffany and Belinda represent opposite ends of the waiting spectrum as it pertains to those elusive personal qualities, but I’ve also seen everything in between. Unfortunately, many restaurant managers hire their waitstaff according to their own specifications regarding certain qualities. Breast size, for example. One owner I worked for hired a stunning Brazilian girl to wait tables even though she spoke absolutely no English and had never lifted a plate in her life. When it proved impossible to keep her on the floor, he paid her just to stand in front of the restaurant in a short skirt, holding menus.

  As for state laws requiring that servers prove they are free of communicable diseases, I’ve never encountered such a request. Perhaps this is because most restaurant managers figure that communicable diseases on both sides of the table cancel each other out. A waiter may come to work with a cold, for example, but he would never approach a table with a visible open sore (what customer would tip him?). However, a customer thinks nothing of sharing his maladies with his server. The woman I waited on who handed me the napkins full of vomit is but one example. I’ve also had to clean up used dental floss, emptied syringes, and bloodied linens. Other servers I have known have not been as lucky, having been licked, kissed, and thrown up on.

  Job Outlook

  Finally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides a telling paragraph in its description of the job outlook for waiters and waitresses:

  “While employment growth will produce many new jobs, the overwhelming majority of openings will arise from the need to replace the high proportion of workers who leave this very large occupation each year. There is substantial movement into and out of the occupation because education and training requirements are minimal.”

  A recent survey projects that Americans spend almost a billion dollars a day on dining outside the home. Surely, this is a clear indication of the nation’s increasing appetite for personal, gratifying service. Yet, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics rightly claims, the training and education requirements for the providers of this service are minimal. It’s somewhat of a paradox that as a society we demand so much from those for whom we have such little regard.

  Perhaps this is all a bit too profound. I don’t claim that waiters and waitresses need advanced degrees in psychology or human relations to be successful at their work. Nor do I believe that waiting should be elevated to the status of health care, teaching, or any other occupation vital to the forward movement of the human race. However, I do believe that there is more to waiting than immediately meets the eye. Even servers themselves are often unaware of the subtle complexities of their job. My feeling is that for all the reasons above, waiting tests a server’s ability to cope with much more than remembering an order and delivering it in a timely fashion. In addition to providing excellent training in personal organizational abilities, patience, and stamina, waiting also provides a test of a server’s human relations skills. There are few jobs that offer such direct contact with such a wide variety of people. Those who are able to hone these skills, I feel, will be successful in whatever field they choose, whether they stay in the restaurant business or not.

  Restaurants provide one of the last customer service industries to flourish. These days everything can be done via fax,

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  modem, or phone. I can order my clothes from a catalog, furnish my house through home shopping channels, listen to music samples on my computer, and submit my written work via e-mail. The only thing I really can’t do without a human being present is be served dinner in a restaurant. Somehow, there really is no substitute for the person-to-person contact involved in the simple act of sitting down in a restaurant and being waited on. Perhaps this is part of the reason why the interchanges between customer and server are often so highly charged and have emotional content far beyond what seems reasonable given the situatio
n. The expectations for an “experience,” be it pleasant or not, are great. On both sides of the table.

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  six

  molotov cocktail waitr ess

  After working for a while at Molto’s, surrounded by so many people on a daily basis, I found myself in one of the loneliest periods of my life. On the day I turned twenty-four, I railed against fate in my journal. What kind of ridiculous age was this to be, I wondered. I’d accomplished nothing and was on a fast track to nowhere. Although I’d continued to write between shifts, on my days off, and late at night when I couldn’t sleep, I was a far cry from the successful writer I’d planned to become when I first started working in the Dining Room. In no particular order, I listed all that I had not accomplished: no great works, no mate, no children, no meaningful contributions to mankind. I couldn’t even get a decent relationship together (and by this, I meant any kind of relationship, even the ashtray-hurling passion that flares and then dies). The few friends I had left from my college days were embarking on serious love affairs, which would later turn into marriages for all of them. They wanted very little to do with me and my connection to their recent pasts.

  I worked at Molto’s as often as I could without burning myself out on it altogether. After all, there was only so often I could rub up against the same five people in that tiny kitchen. Besides this, the configuration of Molto’s was changing, slowly but perceptibly.

  Following her usual MO, Belinda had quit and moved on to another restaurant. She’d been replaced by Sue, whose super-model looks and sunny disposition seemed too good to be true. We all wondered when she would crack and reveal a fatal flaw. Then the usually unflappable Barry set the events of his own undoing in motion by hiring Pamela, whom he was personally very attracted to, a married mother with a notoriously jealous husband. The developing tension between Pamela and Barry soon began affecting the moods of everybody on the staff. Charlotte reacted by taking a second job in another restaurant and worked fewer shifts at Molto’s. Wes managed to win the heart of the beautiful Sue, and the two of them embarked on the most publicly physical relationship I’d ever seen. They kissed in the kitchen. They felt each other up at the dishwasher. They made eyes at each other over the line. They came into the restaurant after hours (they told us) and had sex on the floor of the smoking section. The fact that they were both incredibly good-looking only made things worse. Watching them was a little like watching a trailer for a home porno movie.

  For a while, I managed to make my own life a little more difficult by dating Sonny. It was spring, after all, and I wasn’t immune to the undercurrents flowing through the kitchen. Unfortunately, Sonny neglected to tell me that he was also dating Barbara, who bussed tables at Molto’s. Barbara, who had an abusive speed-freak ex-husband stalking her, was a real hard-luck story. She was also very tough and very strong and she frightened me. I was extremely unhappy about being dragged into the middle of this drama when all I’d really been looking for

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  was a little diversion. Of course, I still had to work with both Sonny and Barbara after it all hit the fan, which was interesting since on any given night one of them was preparing my food and the other was bussing my tables. Food was thrown, epithets were hurled, and feelings were hurt.

  Finally, Barbara cornered me between Table Twenty and Table Twenty-One one night and said, “You can have him. I’m not good enough for him anyway and I’d only bring him trouble.” She was weeping.

  “Please,” I told her, “I have no claims on Sonny at all. He’s all yours and I’m sure he loves you very much.”

  I stormed into the kitchen and threw a handful of tickets over the line at Sonny.

  “What’s the order?” he asked, baffled.

  “You are such an asshole,” I spat at him.

  “So, would that be rare or medium rare?” he asked.

  It was getting—in more ways than one—too hot in the kitchen.

  I decided that adding more work to my schedule was the only viable escape. Again, Belinda was the catalyst. She was working as a cocktail waitress at Le Jardin, an upscale bistro a few blocks from my apartment in downtown Portland, and offered, again, to get me an interview. In short order I was hired to work a cocktail shift on the two nights I was free from Molto’s.

  It soon became evident, however, that Le Jardin was not going to provide me with the type of distraction I was looking for. Nor was it particularly profitable. I barely made enough money on the two nights I worked to justify being there at all. With this in mind, I answered an ad in the local paper for a job as a writer. The ad didn’t specify what kind of writing, for whom, or what salary, but none of that bothered me. My thought was that I had to try to get it.

  I showed up to interview for the job in a small office piled high with papers, ashtrays, and half-filled coffee cups. It turned out that the job specifications didn’t exactly match those in the newspaper. The two men who interviewed me were going into a joint venture developing a discount card for use in restaurants, movies, and amusement parks. Hank, the older of the two men, had been selling insurance for most of his life. Tim, the younger man, published a small newspaper that consisted mostly of advertising copy for the businesses that paid for space in the paper. What they really wanted was somebody to sell their discount cards over the phone. I was disappointed. I told both of them that I was hopeless at selling and what I really wanted to do was write. Tim hastened to tell me that I’d be doing a lot of writing for his paper (if that’s what I wanted) and that my hours selling would be minimal. They offered me the job on the spot. I felt compelled to take it, even though the pay was pretty low and I’d be adding a long daily commute to my already crowded schedule.

  The job was not without its generous dose of irony. Every morning I’d arrive in the office, take a seat in the glassed-off triangle of space that had been provided for me, and look at my assignment for the day. The writing assignments bordered on the bizarre. For example, Tim would leave a note on my desk saying something like “Write a story on San Francisco. About two pages should do it.” Sometimes he’d want restaurant reviews. Of course, they couldn’t be real reviews since the restaurants were paying to be mentioned. Instead, I’d get a faxed menu and have to create a fantasy tale about what went into the making of dishes I had never seen, much less tasted. I felt I’d really reached the apex of this type of writing when I was instructed to write about a motel in Capistrano, California. “Like the swallows,” I wrote, “visitors will always want to return to Motel X in Capistrano. . . .” Hank and Tim loved my writing so

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  much that my services soon became completely funneled into the paper. I was even listed on the masthead. The discount card never got off the ground. Despite the fact that I felt what I was writing was the height of silliness, I was actually getting paid to write for the first time. That in itself was no small thing for me. This, I reckoned, was a job worth keeping.

  But by the fall of 1986, I’d had just about enough of everything. My plan to disappear into as many jobs as possible had resulted only in greater personal dissatisfaction. I had been writing short stories frantically in my spare time and had sent a few of them out to small literary magazines. I’d received a few nibbles, and this was enough to make me think that I should be devoting all, not part, of my time to writing. I was never going to get anywhere slinging plates, I reckoned (of course, all the stories I was writing were about people and events I’d come to know of through the restaurants I worked in, but I wasn’t farsighted enough to realize this), and I was just wasting my time. Some of Portland’s notorious dampness had settled into my soul. I was tired of watching it rain week after week. I felt as if my entire personality was becoming pale and washed out.

  My writing job at the paper had convinced me that I would probably be able to scratch out a living writing something somewhere, and I decided I’d have to make a definitive move. San Francisco sounded like as good a place as any to try. A few college frien
ds were living there and actually having some success in their chosen fields. However, I knew I’d never leave as long as I had my job at Molto’s. Despite the fact that it had become a bit oppressive, the money I made there was still good, and I’d worked there longer than I’d worked anywhere up to that point. It was familiar. So I gave notice, telling Barry and my coworkers that I intended to move south and try to make it as a writer.

  Because I’d given a month’s notice instead of the usual two weeks, my leaving turned into an extended going-away party.

  Every weekend night, I’d join Wes, Charlotte, Anne, and whoever else wanted to come along for drinks and pool. Wes was in a state of desolation due to the fact that Sue had herself recently moved to California in search of a better life. I started spending more time with him on our weekly forays and listening to his tales. Although he preferred to limit his banter to incisive barbs in the kitchen, I learned that he had a razor-sharp mind as well as an ability to quietly assess the personalities of his coworkers with amazing accuracy. Wes told me that he was getting terribly tired of Barry’s disastrous flirtation with Pamela and was sure that no good would come of it. Barry, he claimed, was getting into some “bad shit” over the whole thing and it was affecting his managerial skills. Wes also told me that he was sick of working himself to the bone for what he was paid. He was looking into opening his own restaurant, he said. All very hush-hush, of course. “Too bad you’re moving,” he added, “you could come work for me.”

  But I didn’t actually feel like I was going anywhere. I’d made no plans and was, effectively, just waiting for the end of my time at Molto’s to force me into movement of any kind.

  My last night at Molto’s came on a Sunday. Pamela, who had recently been promoted to nights, dominated the floor, scooping up as many tables as Barry would give her. Barry himself looked as if he hadn’t slept for weeks and was irritable beyond what I’d seen before. The whole shift was very anticlimactic. Charlotte was off and everybody else went home early. I went about cleaning as Wes packed up the kitchen.