Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
dirt.fyi
dirt.fyi
I worked for years in retail, in camera shops, and I understand the episodic hilarity and mundane heartbreak of a career in service. But it was washing dishes in a restaurant, my first ever job, that made me aware of the time-pressure intensity of food service, and that it's a lower-risk version of the old space/air travel aphorism: 'Flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror'.
You work a whole shift, but only a slim segment of it matters, when work and concentration become hyper-compressed. Dishes break, people break, and there are no breaks - it continues relentlessly like a forced march, without reflection, until the blessed first minutes where you sense that it's beginning to abate.
If you're of a reflective mood, you think to yourself not only that the frantic and merciless nature of the job will never change (even if the restaurant closes, the same experience is happening in an endless continuum all over the city), but that it has probably been like this for as long as there has been civilization - a millennial succession of workers (slaves, the earlier back you go), chopping vegetables and scraping plates (copper plates, if you go back far enough), back to dining establishments and the kitchens of the influential in Roman times, Egyptian times.
It's a strange thing, but participating in these activities that are most visceral and least threatened by automation, they feel like a kind of time travel, or like being in one of the less objectionable circles in hell.
We've always been at lunch with Oceania!
Capability: Industrial machinery struggles to meet many of the requirements of a professional kitchen. Plating alone requires the ability to handle and place aesthetically, both solids of different consistencies and liquids. Avoiding cross-contamination is another concern. Setting aside a set of pans and chopping boards is very different to installing another assembly line.
Flexibility: Typically, automation pays off when you're making lots of the same thing. Most restaurants will change dishes out relatively frequently and don't have anywhere near the volume of an assembly line. Most kitchens will also try to accommodate requests for the modification of dishes and in some cases for things that aren't on the menu at all.
Resiliency: An automated assembly line is much more complicated than an oven or fryer and much more prone to failure. If a frozen burger can jam up the machine you end up paying someone to watch for that happening, plus a much more expensive maintenance worker when you could've just paid the first guy to chuck the burgers on a grill.
Fast food places are likely to get further than most with automation. Although, I'm sceptical of how the economics work out.
The answer is likely to be a combination of the financials not making sense, along with a reduction in quality, and the type of service that people go to Starbucks for.
Starbucks workers are human and very rarely are consistent with making drinks/proportions. I would almost consider paying their outrageous $6-$10 per drink prices if I knew there wasn't a 60% chance a new, untrained employee is just "winging it" on making a 3-4 ingredient drink (my girlfriend likes a frozen (blended) frappuccino with caramel drizzle lining the cup, no whipped cream topping, and almond milk)
They get this "wrong" consistency wise/modification wise 70% of the time, multiple stores.
Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." One of my other low-paying jobs was as a copy editor, and I have seen how commonly schools have failed to teach PhDs to be good writers--I don't see why the randomly selected waitress should be better. I should say that the demands of the two jobs are quite different, anyway: the waitress has to be able constantly switch attention to multiple people and multiple tasks, the writer (or programmer) has to be able to focus on one thing for relatively long times.
Turns out, neither great writing nor mathematics work that way. Both are very hard and require non intuitive leaps of inspiration.
Unfortunately it isn’t generally the case that people have something interesting to write at length about, and even more rarely do they have something interesting to say about the specific topic assigned.
Even though I struggled to get a "D" in her class I am certainly not a bad writer, I've made a living at times writing, I've written book chapters, blog posts, contracts, standards documents and all sorts of things. I struggled to master the language used in academic writing though.
Occasionally, I would be plagued by a bit of writer's block, and I couldn't think up enough to write, but eventually I could gin up enough logorrhea that I would have a nice tapestry to begin snipping out the wordy and irrelevant bits.
And that was my favorite part about the classes, being able to write a really tight research/opinion paper every few weeks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
Essentially, students are, from the time they start school until they graduate, taught to write to an audience – teachers – who are both:
1. Paid to read it, and have no real possibility to stop reading because they get bored (teachers will read anything from beginning to end).
2. Looking for, in the writing, evidence that the student has learned the information.
Neither of those two things are true of the rest of the world, when they are reading a book or an article by an aspiring professional writer. Therefore, writing to such an audience will require new skills which most people have never practiced.
Yeah, I don't buy that either.
I know that the best software engineering work I've done in my entire life happened when I was working as a hotel housekeeper, before I was programming professionally.
It was because cleaning hotel rooms is a purely physical, and highly repetitive job. Every day at work, I was mentally "checked out", working on difficult programming problems in my head while my body just robotically did the work.
Once I was programming professionally, I no longer had the luxury of spending so much time deeply thinking about programming problems.
A) being a waitress learning to be a writer?
B) an intellectual learning to be a waiter?
I would have thought A, but you imply it's B.
That's interesting to me, because when I was a waiter, I certainly didn't feel B. My high school classmate who went to Cornell and I spent an hour or two a day with senior year pretended they didn't remember me. Customers constantly talked down to me.
I built an app to replace the restaurant computer, occasionally people would ask why I was taking orders on an iPod and when I'd explain, it made things _worse_: there was more than a handful of times they'd argue about rounding and the local tax rate.
I think the author meant its _much_ harder to take the abusive management, extremely physical work, and occassional abusive customer when you think of yourself as an intellectual working a sidejob, as opposed to it being your job where the programming is a side passion.
I suppose that my real, underlying point is that you can't reliably tell what a person's skillset is by what they do for a living.
No, you can't tell about a person's skillset. I teach ESL, and have taught
a. An employee of the the Brazilian national health department now cleaning houses in Montgomery County, Maryland.
b. A Nicaraguan attorney now cleaning rooms for a Washington, DC, hotel.
c. A Salvadoran archivist doing construction work here.
And there are plenty of native-born Americans who are holding down jobs that are not commensurate with their skills or anyway potentials.
I worked hard physically as a dishwasher or warehouse worker, but had little mental stress.
I only lasted a few weeks as a waiter. Despite the much higher tips, dealing with bad customers was so stressful I couldn't handle it and it significantly affected my studying.
Whereas I never felt that tired when doing physical labor.
In Europe there is much less of a tipping culture, but at the end of the night all tips go in one big pot and then get divided amongst the staff.
It’s probably due to a difference in culture. The US was still very anti-socialism at the time. But the culture was definitely that you should keep the rewards of your own labor.
At smaller restaurants there was never any pooling at all.
Most servers I know prefer to keep their own.
I was a fine dining server for a couple years while in college before finding my first programming job. It taught me how to deal with pretty much any kind of person.
> That is one of the great mistakes people make: assuming that someone who does menial work does not like thinking. Physical labor is great for the mind, as it leaves all kinds of time to consider the world. Other work, like accounting or scribing, demands little of the body—but siphons energy from the mind. If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.
I firmly believe that in our dna we were wired to be outside most of the time.
https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-...
Really depends on what kind of labor is it, not all of it is equal. I've had a new doors installed in my apartment yesterday, and the amount of troubleshooting and stress that the installers went through is not smaller than what I've faced in my programming job. But, I didn't have to do it while sweating from lifting 100 kg doors onto fourth floor, and later repeatedly trying to wrangle them into place.
I’m not a door pro, but my experience with diying doors puts it definitely NOT in the category of mindless!
Other developers keep trying to persuade me to use multiple monitors (I have a laptop - I can't be bothered plugging it in every day, and I'm used to switching between windows with the keyboard). I struggle to explain to them that, even if I was less 'efficient', that time I 'lose' is not wasted - It's thinking time.
Sure, set up and clear down have plenty of routine zone out time - but service is maintaining multiple concurrent to do lists in your head whilst keeping an eye out on the environment for additional tasks.
I was terrible at the job because I have poor short term memory (my lists dropped items all the damned time). But I sure as hell was too busy to contemplate some higher order problem
One could almost say that not being smart requires you to be harder working. (At least that's what I'm telling myself to keep working hard.)
Not true unfortunately. You would t believe how many illiterate or near illiterate kids are in high school.
Good writer is a qualification that could mean millions or the top 5.
This is like saying everyone learns math in school. It's technically correct, but only if you ignore the vast difference in skill between the average person and (e.g.) an accomplished novelist.
Check out studies of adult functional literacy. It's, uh, not great.
I think of the modern or contemporary "intellectuals" I have read and many are mediocre writers. For every William James there's a Pearse or a Lewis who is hard to read.
But I think that the author has a different idea in mind, that of the novelist, story writer or journalist. A lack of life experience and appreciation for dialog can lead to poor writing in these domains, and perhaps a waiter would have a leg up.
In my experience many PhD candidates are required to write in turgid and stilted prose b/c it sounds more professional.
Being excellent at balancing a stressful, fast paced, work environment applies to many jobs. But being excellent at being an “intellectual” whatever the hell that even means (writers? Programmers?), does not really apply to very many jobs.
I suspect you cannot teach that. I mean, you can whip the cur into following basic rules and avoiding egregious mistakes, but you cannot teach taste.
More than a few of them may already posses an English degree (:
> The work was the only thing that kept me out of my anxiety.
I know it's a trope for knowledge workers to romanticize physical work, but I find the opposite when programming. The work increases the mental anxiety.
> The life of the American worker is inherently undignified
This is true, and even goes for highly-paid, high-status gigs. In fact, I think that sometimes, companies consider high pay, a license to humiliate.
However, since being forced into retirement (a highly undignified and humiliating process), I have found that I never want to go back to that again. I work at my own pace (about triple what I did, when getting paid), and don't take one ounce of crap, from anyone.
When I was a manager, I always strove to treat my team with extreme dignity. My managers were not as willing to do that, for me, however.
You see, I'm a criminal. I've committed the felony of getting old, so I am not supposed to work in tech, anymore (at least, not as an IC).
I probably could have gotten a job as a manager. I was a very good manager.
But I hated it. I just wanted to be a coder (and architect -I'm pretty good at that, as well).
I wasn't given the opportunity. In fact, it seemed as if some folks used the interview process to scratch itches they had, with their own parents.
After a few of these "interviews," I realized that this industry no longer had any room for me, and came to understand that, although I was not rich, I did have the means to walk away.
I spent my life, living humbly, frugally, and modestly. Many folks on this forum would sneer at me, for living the way that I do (but they can no longer sneer from a position of power). I have to be a caregiver to a couple of family members, and being forced to retire, actually coincided with them needing more care, so it has worked out.
This is easier to think if you haven't had or don't remember low-wage work.
People who are self-employed and wealthy are just exploited much less
Approximately everyone is aware that low-paid service and agricultural workers get -figuratively- shit on.
As someone who was not in the industry, I expected workers who were paid $120k, $250k, $500k, and more, per year to be treated as people who are highly knowledgeable in their field - to have their opinions carefully considered, and to be treated with respect. In short, to be treated as the Key Employees that their employment contracts often asserted (and their paychecks certainly suggested) that they are.
I was very surprised (and very disappointed) when I discovered that there are managers and businessmen who have opinions that can be roughly summed up as "I'm paying you a lot of money, so you work on whatever I say, do the work however I say to do it, and you take whatever shit I dish out without complaining. You are -after all- taking a _ton_ of my (or our company's) money, so you have no room to complain."
Anecdotally, I have a couple of friends that basically have to be "professional shoppers," once or twice a year. It seems like a dream job, going to Europe, and buying the top-of-the-line clothes, from shops in every country, but it seems to actually be quite difficult for them.
In any case, they have been doing this for decades, and I have been told that they regularly see the same sales associates, cashiers, and managers, at these stores, year after year. They have actually made some long-term friendships, and look forward to meeting these people, who have families, kids in college, etc.
I assume that this means that many folks can actually make lifetime careers from work that, in the US, is often considered "transitional."
That leverage can come from many sources. Maybe you have enough money that you don't actually need to be there. Maybe you're unionized and if they screw with you the union can screw them back. It doesn't matter what it is, you need some power to be able to get them to treat you with respect. Corporations are constantly trying to minimize our power, we should maximize it at all costs.
Amassing enough money to become financially independent is the only surefire way to obtain that power. Everything else depends on others. Unions are rife with politicking and corruption, for example. They can also be busted down or coopted.
As the adage goes, "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans".
If there's one thing this piece made me think of, is that you should either be happy doing what you're doing or be on the path to do that.
I have friends in their 40s who have worked in the service industry for decades while planning to do "something else later", and they're not the happiest of my acquaintances.
You might jot down your aimless years after college, for your own future reminiscences if nothing else.
But everyone, I believe, has a story to tell, something of value. We tend not to tell our stories anymore, because we’re too busy and overstimulated and no longer need to fill up the hours around the cooking fire.
I have to disagree. Social media is, essentially, people telling their stories 24/7.
> Basically a journey to maturity and self-discovery.
This is my gripe with this piece. There's no buildup at any point, nothing to keep the reader interested, to make the reader care about this person sharing her memories.
For comparison, I used to date a person who worked as a waitress and she had scores of interesting stories to tell.
Once she showed me her former workplace, which had a lot of souvenirs and odd furniture - this was no accident because the manager(owner?) attributed meaning to every piece, like the kayak hanging from the ceiling represented teamwork, because you can't swim in it alone, and you certainly wouldn' be able to put it up there single-handedly. 20+ pieces in total and everyone from the wait staff was quizzed regularly on them.
Or her first, very much illegal, summer work experience at age 13, where her first task as a waitress was to trim the lawn using pruning shears. She got an allergic reaction to whatever was in that grass and management had to backpedal on this child labour thing really quick.
All the crazy stuff that goes on in such places is only mentioned in passing and I think it doesn't do this line of work justice.
The writing is good though at a micro level. I think it needs more structure and hooks. Chapters with interesting titles “The positive consequences of lying in my first interview” for example (I am not a writer so sure HN could do better)
> In Bigfootland you showed up for work fifteen minutes before your shift. Period. Two minutes late? You lose the shift and are sent home. If you're on the train and it looks like it's running late? You get off the train at the next stop, inform Bigfoot of your pending lateness, and then get back on the next train. It's okay to call Bigfoot and say, 'Bigfoot, I was up all night smoking crack, sticking up liquor stores, drinking blood and worshipping Satan... I'm going to be a little late.' That's acceptable-once in a very great while. But after showing up late, try saying (even if true), 'Uh... Bigfoot, I was on the way to work and the President's limo crashed right next to me... and I had to pull him out of the car, give him mouth-to-mouth... and like I saved the leader of the free world, man!' You, my friend, are fired. I fondly recall how once, after a long-time waitress arrived back late from vacation, claiming her flight arrived fifteen minutes after scheduled time, Bigfoot called the airport to check her story and then fired her for lying. Treating Bigfoot like an idiot was always a big mistake. He lived for that. In the man's three or so decades in the life, he'd seen and heard every scam, every bullshit story, every trick, deception, ploy and gag that ever existed or that a human mind could conceive-and was always happy to prove that to anyone foolish enough to try. If Bigfoot asked you a question, and you didn't know the answer, he always preferred an 'I dunno' to a long- winded series of qualified statements, speculation and half-truths. You kept Bigfoot informed of your movements. He would never allow himself to fall victim to 'manager's syndrome'-constantly watching the clock, wondering if and when his employees were going to show up. Where Bigfoot ruled, he knew when they were showing up: fifteen minutes before start of shift. That's when. Bigfoot understood--as I came to understand--that character is far more important than skills or employment history.
This is of course a very blue way to tell a story, but it also sets a very clear model for what a demanding and competent boss wants out of his competent employees. Anyone in the corporate world who is always 15 minutes early and says "I don't know" instead of BSing is going to be a rare asset to any company, and that's just one dimension of what Anthony Bourdain outlines as a competent chef in his book.
It's ok to like or dislike a piece, but common courtesy if you don't care for something but it does not offend, is to simply offer no comment.
it outright contradicts itself at points.
On an unrelated note, that final restaurant job was as a bartender at a cocktail bar frequented by white-collar workers. On a slow day I was asked to wait on a table which I'd never done before. They ordered a red Bordeaux blend; I messed up the bottle service by failing to pour a sample to which the eldest gentlemen in the party retorted "Well I hope I like it!" (despite the initial pour being to check for quality, not preference, but I digress). I made it up to him by providing a few minutes of free IT consulting to the chagrin of the rest of the table and ended up with a beefy tip :o). All's well that ends well, I suppose...
I think this is one of the most toxic things in todays society, work becomes your identity and therefore you relate to it and it becomes you, or you settle to what that identity is. You are also surrounded by people in the same role, and depending on that you change to fit in with your new peers. The social media groups also re-enforce the same idea of that's all that it is.
As the author wrote in the beginning:
" I always said, soon, soon, things like this cannot last forever. I thought I’d get too tired to keep waiting tables, I thought if I waited much longer I’d lose the chance to get a ‘real’ job, in publishing or media or who knows what industry."
Many people don't get "out."
The same can be described of other groups too, can be hobby groups like cars, or other activities and such - we choose to involve ourselves with other people.
Personally, I've known many people at a distance join such groups/roles/jobs/interests and change to something worse/negative and then cut off - because it became their prime identity.
Just an interesting observation, but many times I feel people go with the easiest/path of lease resistance. Change is hard. Persistance is harder.
The need can be healthy (or at least it is common in healthy people). The satisfaction of it can be toxic, and it takes a strong(?)/determined, or at least self-aware, person to escape the local maxima and reach for something approaching real fulfillment.
But I may be projecting. I would be dissatisfied if I still lived in the town/state/region I grew up in, for example. Some people are perfectly happy there and never even question their (lack of) path. And I'm not talking about people born in destination locations!
I acknowledge my own display of ignorance and privilege in the preceding!
The freedom to consider those kinds of options -- or even the ability to conceive of them -- is absolutely not available equally to all people or at all times.
Tech isn't the only thing I follow, and I have a few other hobbies, but it definitely is a big part of my identity now, to the point that even when I next take a break from working in software I'm still going to be following open source, tinkering with software, and probably still obsessively keeping up with HN
Reading this article made me wonder if I could hack it as a waiter. I’ve never really done any manual labor in my life - just a few part time jobs as a student that made me realize I am bad at it compared to some of my friends for whom it came so naturally. Driving a truck, building things, interacting with customers, etc. Programming, on the other hand, has always just come so naturally to me that it’s hard to imagine myself doing anything else.
I agree with the author that with most careers there is a system, and once you learn the ropes it makes things dramatically easier. And sometimes the only thing holding someone back is that first opportunity to get in the door and start learning the system. I think writers especially must struggle with this as the career path is not as well-defined as other trades.
> Why don’t websites hire service people to write about food? How do ‘restaurant journalists’ exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.
But I don’t really agree with this premise that anyone can be a writer. I struggle to write - every paragraph is agonizing for me. I think I could definitely get better with practice, but if it were my career it would fill me with so much anxiety and self doubt that I wouldn’t be able to function. Same as if I were to be a waiter (assuming I didn’t just get fired in my first week).
I think that the author is underestimating the value of her journalism degree, and her natural inclination that made her want to study journalism in the first place, to her eventual success in that career once given an opportunity.
Remember when a job such as being a waiter still meant you could in fact survive and have money left over for the occasional niceties in life like a bit of relaxation, or a frivolous purchase like (gasp) some clothing that isn't needed for a particular purpose?
All gone...because billionaires drowning in yachts, jets, vacation homes, and ultra-luxury, hyper-sports cars...aren't satisfied, and also want tax writeoffs they get because politicians tell us that if they don't give them a tax break, someone else will get the trickle-down economic benefits.
The greed is so extensive, they've gotten the USSC to rule that workers are now liable for damages to their employers, from striking...in what is almost certainly a response to the railroad strikes that scared the shit out of the 0.01%.
The author's experience was three years ago. Yes, I think we all remember, no, not that much has changed in three years. Many people still make a comfortable living in a big city waiting on tables; many struggled to make ends meet even way back then.
"What app could help waitstaff move onto better paying positions?"
- They are very tired after the day so can't really learn after work.
- They usually don't have the resources to do a dev-bootcamp and dev-bootcamps don't seem to be well done.
- Copywriting is dead.
Solving for time is hard.
https://www.facebook.com/HashHouseAGoGoSanDiego/photos/a.120...
Ha ha. Somehow reminded me of Charles Bukowski. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ilmOZvpOa8