Waitress turned babysitter
I'm never working another Saturday shift. Never. Not even if I can't find a good reason to say no when my boss comes up to me at the end of a Friday afternoon shift. Nope. I don't need my four hours of minimum wage and shitty tips that badly. An extra hour of sleep would have been so much better.
I had four tables in my section. Four. Because someone felt it necessary to schedule fifteen servers today. And yet it was still a clusterfuck at 11am when we opened. Guys sat down, no server was around. I was there first, at 10. I took the table. Even when the server came to reclaim her section, I told her it was too late. They were mine now. Which was great because they drank a lot and tipped well. That was the one table not in my section.
In my section I had three groups all day. One had people trickle in and order drinks and wings one order at a time. The other was three ladies and four little girls. They took up two of the tables in my section. The girls looked like they were recovering from a slumber party. Each asked for a kiddie cocktail, which meant me getting sticky grenadine all over myself. They spilled it all over the table. The women were rude--snapping fingers to signal their need for refills. The girls shouted. Not talked in loud voices, but shouted. I made an oath that I would not bring my kids to sit down restaurants. Ever. Or, at the very least, I would allow my children to scream and run around the restaurant. Crayons were on the floor, along with half the girls' meals. At my other table, a baby managed to drop half a box of Cheerios on the floor. But I'm sure they believed their 7% tip made it worth my time to crawl around the table to pick up each O. At one point I met a comrade at the soda machine, a fellow weekday gal like myself. We rolled our eyes, a silent agreement that we would stick to the men in business suits and old ladies who share meals and complain that there are no senior discounts or soup.
Last night, after a couple glasses of wine, I subjected the boy to old nonfiction pieces I wrote over the summer. So many unfinished paragraphs, stopped mid-sentence in a few. He laughed at one description, and hmmed over another. Then he declared that I was good, that I should be writing everyday, that I should be publishing. And maybe that doesn't mean a lot coming from Mr. Fantasy Novel, but he made me feel good for a little while. Maybe I'll even have something prepared for the net writer's bloc?
I had four tables in my section. Four. Because someone felt it necessary to schedule fifteen servers today. And yet it was still a clusterfuck at 11am when we opened. Guys sat down, no server was around. I was there first, at 10. I took the table. Even when the server came to reclaim her section, I told her it was too late. They were mine now. Which was great because they drank a lot and tipped well. That was the one table not in my section.
In my section I had three groups all day. One had people trickle in and order drinks and wings one order at a time. The other was three ladies and four little girls. They took up two of the tables in my section. The girls looked like they were recovering from a slumber party. Each asked for a kiddie cocktail, which meant me getting sticky grenadine all over myself. They spilled it all over the table. The women were rude--snapping fingers to signal their need for refills. The girls shouted. Not talked in loud voices, but shouted. I made an oath that I would not bring my kids to sit down restaurants. Ever. Or, at the very least, I would allow my children to scream and run around the restaurant. Crayons were on the floor, along with half the girls' meals. At my other table, a baby managed to drop half a box of Cheerios on the floor. But I'm sure they believed their 7% tip made it worth my time to crawl around the table to pick up each O. At one point I met a comrade at the soda machine, a fellow weekday gal like myself. We rolled our eyes, a silent agreement that we would stick to the men in business suits and old ladies who share meals and complain that there are no senior discounts or soup.
Last night, after a couple glasses of wine, I subjected the boy to old nonfiction pieces I wrote over the summer. So many unfinished paragraphs, stopped mid-sentence in a few. He laughed at one description, and hmmed over another. Then he declared that I was good, that I should be writing everyday, that I should be publishing. And maybe that doesn't mean a lot coming from Mr. Fantasy Novel, but he made me feel good for a little while. Maybe I'll even have something prepared for the net writer's bloc?
posted by KC in Katoland at 10:25 PM
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