I’m a good tipper. Not because I’m a particularly good person. I’m not. But, because I spent a season as a waiter at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Southern Indiana. Before getting into advertising, I worked a handful of odd jobs. I can say, with complete certainty, I would rather tear out piss-soaked, shit-caked, moth-eaten carpet than serve canned refried beans, microwaved rice and soggy enchiladas to the American public any day of the week. There are great servers, good servers and bad servers. Then, there is this separate category of servers—on the far end of the spectrum—that one might label: criminal. These are individuals so outrageously incompetent at the craft of waiting tables that they should do time in a state penitentiary simply for entering within a one-mile radius of a serving tray. I fell into this latter category.
By the way, if you’ve ever hated a job, you’re in good company. I wrote a thread about extraordinary writers, artists and entrepreneurs who once worked very ordinary gigs to make ends meet.
Like writing advertising, fixing busted pipes, laying concrete and hanging drywall, waiting tables is a craft. It requires a unique set of skills. At any given moment, you’re responsible for tending to as many as six tables. Seated at each of these tables is a unique set of individuals with colorful personalities, bizarre dietary restrictions, lofty expectations and challenging temperaments. Ask anyone involved in a serious romantic relationship. It’s hard enough to keep just one person happy. Attempting to keep two dozen people happy—who are all hungry, tipsy and soon to be unreasonably angry if they aren’t fed in an appropriate amount of time—deserves the culinary equivalent of the Medal of Honor. You have to be a better small talker than a Walmart greeter. You have to develop the short-term memory of a telephone operator. You have to be as nimble on your feet as a Russian ballerina. And you have to possess the wrist strength of an amateur powerlifter.
I recall watching in awe as a veteran waitress, weighing no more than 95 pounds soaking wet, would tango through the trenches of the restaurant’s closely packed tables with a 50-pound tray of piping-hot cast-iron skillets held above her head, a folding tray stand sandwiched underneath her armpit and an enormous pitcher of frozen margaritas clutched in her left hand. Once she arrived at her destination, she would somehow manage to drop the tray stand, kick out one of its legs like a TSA agent conducting a cavity search, set the tray down atop it and then distribute the fajitas to drunk, beet-red patrons while topping off their glasses and asking them about their children, by name.
I was nineteen years old. I was sheltered. I was a virgin. Although, I’d spend my twenties making up for lost time. I had never seen nor touched a drug. I had tasted alcohol on a handful of occasions. I was as innocent as a sloth standing trial for homicide. It would be another four or five years before I would read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Having seen the inner workings of the restaurant business, I can assure you he wasn’t spinning fables. Cooks would spill frozen fries on the ground, shrug, scoop them up in their ungloved hands and toss them into bubbling grease. Servers would take bumps of cocaine while shivering in the walk-in freezer. Dishwashers would finish “untouched” quesadillas while hosing down leaning towers of plates in the sinks. Servers would fuck other servers in the back of beat-to-hell Honda Civics and lifted Chevrolet Silverados on lunch breaks. I recall one of the line cooks getting so atrociously drunk after a particularly busy shift, that he ran his Ford Explorer into a train. When the officer showed up to the scene and stuck him in the back of the patrol car, it’s rumored he said something to the tune of, “Son, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve never taken someone in for running into a parked locomotive.” His SUV was totaled, the train was unscathed and he was left with a broken wrist, which didn’t prevent him from being back on the line the following week making chimichangas.
For a kid that would one day become a writer, the vulgarities I would hear in the kitchen were like an MFA in grease poetry. The head chef was a man in his sixties who had a mouth so vulgar it’d make the cast of The Sopranos squirm. He would sexually harass the male servers under his breath as he plated the hundreds of dishes the restaurant would serve each day. He would say things like, “After you run this order, why don’t you come back and jerk me off into the queso?” It would be such an astonishing remark that you wouldn’t believe your ears. You would say ‘Huh?’, certain you’d heard him wrong. Then, the entire kitchen would cackle like a pack of jackals and you’d walk out of the kitchen with an overloaded tray hoisted over your shoulder and your tail tucked between your legs.
I made it just under a year. My manager was a wonderful woman with rosy cheeks who—with her wife—had adopted three children from East Asia. Within a week of me tying on my apron, she knew I wasn’t cut out for this kind of work. But, she didn’t have the heart to tell me. She would assign me to the least busy sections of the restaurant and cheer me on like a supportive mother, giving me pointers when she saw that I was struggling to keep my head above water.
Which, speaking of water, on my last day I was serving a booth of four well-dressed women who had just left church. They were wearing high heels and knee-high skirts that—when seated—exposed the entirety of their legs. They each ordered ice water. Because it’s America and there is no such thing as big enough, the plastic cups were 24 ounces. I rounded the corner with my tray of 96 ounces of water, caught a glimpse of their eight bare legs underneath the table, tripped over my own feet and dropped the tray. I watched the tragedy happen in slow motion. Somehow, all four cups fell from my tray at such a precise angle, that they managed to ricochet off the tile floor and rifle into the belly of the booth. As the oversized cups unleashed their contents, it looked like a mini tidal wave. In seconds, their exposed legs were covered in ice-cold water as they screamed in impressive synchronicity. Their screaming caused me to scream and, before I knew it, everybody in my section was screaming as if someone had pulled out a gun. My manager came running over to our section, certain a customer was choking on a tortilla chip. I was so overwhelmed, I ran to the back of the restaurant, tore off my apron and held my face in my hands. She hunted me down not longer after, handed me a dozen or so towels and told me to go back out there and offer to pat down those poor women’s legs. After my shift, we both agreed I was in the wrong business.
Waiting tables was a tremendous education, though. It not only blessed me with a vernacular that would later inform my writing—although I try not to make sexual passes at my clients, as it’s considered bad practice—but it also taught me how to context switch. It’s a skill I use every day running Honey. At 9 a.m., I might be writing an essay about working as a server in a Tex-Mex restaurant in Southern Indiana. At 10 a.m., I might be reviewing a series of ads for an organic hydration brand. At 11 a.m., I might be selling a prospect on why she should work with my agency rather than the other 114,000 agencies in the United States. At 11:30 a.m., I might be offering a previously contracted designer a full-time job (hoping he will be better equipped for agency life than I was for waiting tables). People think context switching is about jumping in and out of a hundred open tabs on your laptop without missing a beat—and I suppose, to a degree, it is—but context switching is really about keeping your cool as a chef is demanding you jerk him off into a bubbling cauldron of queso, while scraping off the melted cheese atop a taco salad for a woman at Table 7 who had mentioned—on three separate occasions—that she was lactose intolerant.