Waitress anxiety dream #10049

And again, a waitress dream... 

These nightmares visit me when I'm feeling unappreciated, frantically-worried-but-can't-show-it, etc. . . . all the emotions that were with me during every shift when I was waiting tables.  

These dreams are always like this: I'm new, nobody shows me the menu so I don't know what goes with what or what the presentation should look like, I don't know the tables that are in each station, I don't know where anything is. I walk in the door, whip out my order pad and head for a table whose menus are closed: they look ready to order.

This perfectly applicable photo from "Do You Do That at Home?"

This dream was a little different.

Most of the workers are nice to me, if a little condescending . . . until the end when one of them openly sneers at me and her companion laughs. 

The beef stew, or stroganoff, or whatever it was, is served in an aluminum wash kettle deal, about 9" long and about 5" deep. One of the assistant managers passing by smiles at me and puts a piece of bubblewrap on the charger plate that's waiting for the washtub. I whisk away the bubble wrap, replace it with a napkin, smile happily at him.

Place is a restaurant but with shelves and aisles like a supermarket.

Fat middle aged women sitting all over the place at desks, smoking cigarettes.

One woman worriedly asks me a question about a paycheck with the payee's name spelled incorrectly. I reassure her, cite the law that applies, and rush away to get a piece of flatware, thinking, "Wait until I tell Jane that there's one of those nervous, picky women in every office!"

I woke myself up as I spoke out loud, asking a table of four Australian sailors, who were complaining about something going on outside the front door of the place, if they'd like to speak to the manager after I took their order.

I woke up and sat on the edge of the bed, sweating, remembering (this is true, not part of the dream) Priscilla raging at me on a Saturday night about 8:30 in 1989 because I kept taking C5 and it wasn't in my station anymore since she and another waitress had rearranged the stations. 

Ugh. 

Happy Monday.

Waitress anxiety dream #4031

It's full moon time again, kiddies, and we all know what that means: June has her epic nightmares and shares them with you. You might want to keep a half a Xanax handy.
Last time I saw the podiatrist, back when my toe was still broken, he said he'd always wanted to wait tables. 
"It's hard work," I said.
"Well, that's what everybody says, but I don't see what's so hard about it," he answered, the innocent. I wonder if I should share the following with him. It's a dream . . . a nightmare, but its parts are certainly real enough. I worked through many . . . many shifts like this.


Out of clean dishes, although there are plenty of dirty ones in the stacks. The heavy coffee mugs have pieces of food stuck and dried inside them. The dishwasher water heater gave up the ghost last night and nobody on the closing crew left a note so we could call the repair person before the store opened. It'll be washing dishes by hand in the bar sink all shift.
On the floor a pile of potato peels. One of the managers sees it, says, "What the hell?" and goes off, I think, to arrange for removal. But it's busy, he never comes back, so we all just step around it over it on top of it to get done what we need to get done. 


No more pre-measured coffee packets for the Bunn coffeemaker . . . partly used bags of No-Name ground coffee here and there in the waitstation. 
"How much to put into the filter?"
"Just so it looks about right." 
And where is the coffeemaker? Oh. Up there on the shelf an arm's length above my head. A maker but no warmer, so that once the pot is made (brewing while customers grit their teeth and tap their fingertips on the tables waiting for their cups) it sits and loses heat, which it does very quickly, necessitating brewing a new pot. ...if you can find enough raw materials and the few seconds and the room, among the coworkers darting here, reaching there . . . five of us with our trays in a twenty square foot floor space. 


No conversation in the waitstation except 


"Is this still hot?"
"Barely."



"This empty?" 
"More coming."


"What the hell is THIS???" from a waitress staring into a coffee cup with a dried bread ball stick inside it. 
"Mm. They're all like that."

I find one of the white crockery cups with the smallest flake of dried red sauce halfway down the inside, wonder for half a second if, untouched, it might just float off in the hot coffee and go down the customer's gullet unremarked. I chip it off with my thumbnail, and pour a cup of coffee from the half-filled brewing pot. Whoever comes after me will have watery coffee, but I have MY customer's, and I'm off out of the madhouse of the back of the house into the diningroom. White cloths, barely enough space to get between tables without my butt knocking over water glasses. 
The guests have no idea what the back of the house looks like, sounds like, smells like. 
Happy guests.


And now here come some disgruntled customers into the waitstation, coming after their coffee. Young men, soft and spoiled looking. 
"What's the problem here? Why have I been waiting for ten minutes for a simple cup of coffee? I'll get my own!" 
I am furious, stern-voiced: "Get out. Get out of here."
They were going, but my hand on one's polo shirted shoulder hurried him along. Part of me wished that his heel would find a drop of water on top of the greasy quarry tile and he'd go down, the pushy arrogant prick.


People at tables outside my station start to wave at me. "Can we get our bill?"  One of my fellow waitresses has left. Her shift is over: she's gone. Never mind her coworkers or her customers. I'm in the diningroom . . . on the stage, as it were, so like a mother bird, I lift my wing and make comforting welcoming noises, gather them underneath. Finding their checks, getting them more . . . what? 
"More coffee? Sure! I'll just whip up a fresh pot for you. It'll take just a few minutes." 
Turning, scanning tables, scanning heads, to see what else I can do on this trip. Anyone close to me would have heard, despite my lips moving not at all, "Oh God. Another flocking pot of flocking coffee."


Somebody orders two entrees and there is only enough left of one of them so that I have to take it out as a side, and lie to make it sound as if the cooks chose to present it that way because of the flavors or aesthetics or something. 
You don't want to admit that you've run out of food, clean dishes, coffee. 
You don't want to say, "We can't find our coffeemaker." 
You want to preserve, for the customers, the image of peace and competence.


And at the end of the shift, you'll go out and have pitchers of beer with your coworkers and laugh and laugh about sliding on a potato peel and nearly cracking your head on the counter edge. Somebody will say, "Why didn't he just go get me a broom so I could stick it up my ass and clean 'em up while I'm pouring drinks!" Laugh so hard you can't breathe . . . about the handle of the full-of-precious-hot-coffee pot coming loose as you reached way up there for it. Laugh about June pushing the customer out of the kitchen: [PUSH]"You can't be back here. [PUSH] We don't want you to [PUSH] get hurt!"

Unrelated thoughts and stories

I shouldn't have made that promise in the last post. Ever since, I've been feeling unpleasantly pressured to present something worthy of the buildup. 

I have grown worn out with typing thoughts not my own, what with the tape recordings to catch up on.  There were two meetings at work during the two weeks I was out of the office. I prepared for my absence by buying (from my own pocket, mind you, a recent local political debacle involving tape recordings making it inadvisable to submit a purchase order for such a thing) a Dictaphone. The nights that I was at home while the meetings were being held, I sighed with contentment: "There's a board meeting going on right now. And I am not there taking notes."  Yes, but then I had to live through those meetings in real time to get the meeting minutes finished. 

The notes and inspirations mentioned in that most recent post were random impressions that floated into my mind as I sat on the porch admiring a sunny afternoon. They appeared as twinkling sparks worthy of enlargement. Upon these several days' reflection I see that they, perhaps, are neither twinkling and sparky nor worthy of enlargement. But now I need to get something out there, so I can get beyond this and back into the routine of noticing what's going on in my own head.




MiMau and the Lazarus chipmunk
One late outdoors afternoon, MiMau came toward me from the tall grass. Her mouth looked funny. I squinted. She was carrying a chipmunk the size of her head. Having regained her good health she is now working at obtaining another parasite with which to endanger it. But that's what cats do: so be it.  She sat in the driveway facing me, put the chipmunk down. I warmly thanked her for her good hunting skills. I thought the 'munk was dead until she patted at it with one paw, then the other. One hind leg made a feeble up-and-down motion. Ah: not dead yet then. Husband emerged from the barn and MiMau proudly stalked toward him, accepted her praise and lay down fifteen feet from her prize to bask in sunshine and her family's admiration. I went back to my book. A few minutes later, a sudden turn of MiMau's head caught the corner of my eye. Astonishment in every hair of her face, she saw the dead chipmunk roll over, get up, and run for the stone wall. She pursued, but the 'munk reached the rocks first. MiMau sat for half an hour on top of the stone wall, hyperattentively listening, but the 'munk had gone deep.  I feel as if everybody won that one.



I recently read Jean Harris' Five Quarters of the Orange.  
It's set on the Loire in the late 1930s and there are frequent mentions of eels. It reminded me of my father-in-law's story about watching a farm wife he had known beheading eels: "Hold still! I'm only gonna kill ya!" He would laugh as he told the story, laugh so hard he could barely speak.


I have heard that beheaded eels writhe and flop and bang inside freezers for hours and hours when any other creature would have accepted its demise. 
All of it horrifies me. 


The story reminded me of many things, not many of them pleasant. I thought it was a darkish, but intensely absorbing, book. 


I am, at last, past the stage of having to wear the chest girdle, for which I thank the stars above, my Higher Power, all things great and small, Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all saints 'round.  A fact of which many of you will be blissfully unaware: Wearing a girdle on one's chest is even less comfortable than wearing a girdle on one's abdomen. 
Nothing, however is bad or good, but thinking makes it so.  The fine thing about the chest girdle was that, using my mirror that showed me only my upper body, I appeared thin as an eight-year-old. 
I always thought that a woman never looked fat unless her stomach stuck out past her chest. I'm in trouble there now. But if I never again look in a full-length mirror, I'll be a happy woman.


Language: Some people can't say "sausage." 
This is one of those memories from my waitress days. 
Canadians always asked for pizza "all dress," ate heartily (and tipped penuriously). I always loved it when Canadians asked for olives noir, because I was the only waitress who knew what that was.  Some Canadians asked for sah'-oo-saj'.
"Sausage" was problematic for several ethnic groups; more often than not some people-from-down-in-the-heart-of-the-city asked for shaw'sheej. So much work of jaws and lips for two seemingly simple syllables.
I understand that Asian-speaking people have no "l" (or is it "r" sound?) and therefore cannot hear the difference. That's why there are jokes about the interchanging of those sounds when they learn English, for which they have my utmost admiration, as a second language. 
It has to do with synapses. 


I have mentioned previously that I like sparkly things, things that dazzle me with color. If I can get both characteristics in one item, I am (see above) A Happy Woman. Imagine my delight, then, at having won this shiny colorful item on eBay:

Look. I know it's crap, but it didn't cost four dollars. And it's pretty. Goes with everything. Reminds me of sunrises and sunsets and the iridescent insides of shells, and just thinking about it lifts my spirits. I figure this giving in to low-class highly-colored jewelry is one of the rights I have gained by having reached . . . let's call it Late Middle Age. It's my right and I'm going to enjoy it. And enjoy it I do. 

Here's a question, a poll, if you like: 

Dare I wear that bracelet with this blouse? 

I vote yes!

Restaurant stories

I loved working with Sue. We were gaited the same way and we operated as one waitress.  The value of a team player is physically measurable in restaurant work.  Sue was funny, too.
A horrendously busy weekday lunch: some local event that no one had foreseen had people lined up at the door, and only the two of us on.
The cooks were prepping as they cooked. Sue and I were both flat out. A madhouse.
She and I muttering to each other:
"Is that your order up or mine?" 
"Oh, who the hell knows. You take it. I need to clear C7."
The very same day that the owner came in to observe.
Sue and I, sweating and cursing without moving our lips, couldn't help erupting into giggles every time we passed each other.
After a half hour of the owner watching us from the back diningroom, he called us both back to speak with him. We were hoping he'd fire us and let us go the hell home. Instead he told us how great a job we were doing, "...and you're still smiling!"
He dismissed us and we ran back to our tables to catch up the five lost minutes, laughing even harder that he had mistaken our near-hysteria for professional cordiality.


One dinner hour Sue, then five months pregnant, joined me in the waitstation, laughing breathlessly, her entire face bright rose pink.  She'd seen a stray napkin on the floor of the diningroom and had squatted down to pick it up. I gather it is the nature of pregnancy that a mother-to-be can do a thing one day and the next day have gained the ounce that makes that thing impossible: she couldn't get up. Squatting with the retrieved napkin in her hand, she slowly, gently tipped against a diner's knee. And stayed there, leaning against his leg, unable to right herself. Without a word passing, the knee chivalrously tipped her away, and she pushed herself upright.


Debbie was so pretty. And such a good worker. Reliably professional, kind, smiley.
Another crazy lunch hour. Filling ice, clearing tables, running dishes to the back, greeting people, waiting with bated breath, feeling the eyes of the waiting line while Loving Mom elicits from her four-year-old darling his preference today of the five different soft drinks available. Finally, finally, Debbie was able to get to a table that had been waiting a little longer than they might have been under other conditions.
"You're slow!" the woman customer exclaimed to Debbie.
"You're fat!" retorted Debbie, aghast at herself even as the words left her lips.
She got the order and hustled back into the waitstation before she started to laugh so hard she could hardly tell me the story.


Friday night busy.  Four or five of us on. An off-duty waitress, Donna, came in with her family, and sat at Chastain's table.  Chastain came to me after a while with a carryout container in her hands. "Here. Take a bite out of this. It's Donna's."
"I'm not doing that!" I said.
"No! It's Donna's. She'll get home and see it and think it's funny."
We went back and forth for as long as we had...probably ten seconds...and finally I bit into the leftover half sandwich in the container and put it back.
During closing, Chastain said to me, "You know that sandwich that you bit into? It wasn't Donna's. It was that  [malicious, spiteful, or overbearing woman] that's always here on Fridays."


We had a pretty limited menu at the place. Most people came in knowing what they wanted, we got it for them and they left.  Every now and then somebody would ask for some small out of the ordinary thing. People who didn't eat pork would ask that the cook use a different knife when he prepared their food, or people from other countries would ask for "Glass vatter pleze, no ize." 
I can't recall what it was, but I remember an upper-crusty type who wanted one of the regular items prepared in a way  that was way out of the league of restaurants to which ours belonged. When I tried to explain to him the limitations of the kitchen, he retorted, disgusted, "Well! I should think they'd be able to do that. This isn't the Ritz, after all."
Exactly.


I own a book entitled Waiting: the true confessions of a waitress, by Debra Ginsburg. I identify with nearly every story she tells.  One of the chapters is entitled, "I am your waitress," in which she writes about customers who don't recognize the waitress as a person when they see her out in the real world.  
Being a waitress is acting. Put on the uniform: become a clothed smiling mirror.


Every waitress develops her regulars whose orders she can give the kitchen as she sees them approaching the door.  She and those customers share a little intersecting piece of their days and enjoy what seems to be a friendship. But isn't, really.  Some customers make the mistake of thinking the waitress, as she is in uniform, is as she is in her real life. I let it happen to me only once. A woman with whom I had interesting, if short, conversations during her lunch, invited me to a Celtic festival, to see a particular singer. She had a little crush on him because of his brogue, I think. We had a bit of trouble finding him, and she was disappointed. "He is such a spiritual man!"  When we were about to give up we happened across him and listened for a half hour or so. She kept looking over and smiling in confirmation: "Isn't he wonderful?" He sang the songs you'd expect: Danny Boy, Greensleeves...  He rollicked into The Scotsman's Kilt, and at the punchline, I shouted with laughter and my customer's jaw dropped. She turned away in embarrassed shock. As we hustled to the exit, she harrumphed that she had thought he was "such a good Christian!"
I think I probably swore once or twice while we were on our outing and not only did she not invite me anywhere else again (for which I remain, to this day, grateful) but she stopped coming in for lunch.
She was one of those people who think that performers are their performances. 


Editing to add: There's that tiny font again! Sorry.

More restaurant stories for Joe

Big kitchen. Big walk-in freezer. Old big walk-in freezer. Newer ones have handles you can punch if the door closes behind you. Old freezer. No handle. It took twenty minutes for the cook to figure out where I was. Trust me on this: No matter where you live and no matter how hard your winters are, they are nothing compared to being trapped in a walk-in freezer for twenty minutes.

The air conditioning had one zone and in summer we always kept it set it on STUN because the back of the house was so hot. One Saturday night a customer complained that she was freezing and wanted me to turn down the air conditioning. I said,

"If we turn down the a/c the cooks gon' pass out."

Customer didn't say a word.

One day during lunch one of the cooks did pass out. Right after he had an epileptic seizure and whacked his head on the corner of the oven on his way to the floor. Us waitresses picked our way carefully through the blood and walked across a broke-open cardboard box before we hit the carpet. The rest of the cooks worked around him until he came to and the manager took him in back.

Rule Number One: Ain' nobody call no amba-lance to no restaurant!

There was a back kitchen with three gigantic stainless steel sinks, the dreaded freezer, the walk-in cooler, and right in front of the door to the waitstation, the dishwasher. The dishwasher was a machine, not a person . . . us waitresses would run it in between scooping ice out of the icemaker and carrying it to the sink in the waitstation, picking up our orders, taking care of our tables, changing the soda canisters... The manager's desk was at the back end of a long tunnel-like room with its door just opposite the dishwasher. I was hustlin' from the back of the back kitchen with a bowl of salad for the salad bar. I got almost to the dishwasher when a chef's knife whizzed through the air past my face and stuck quivering in the wall between the dishwasher and the door to the waitstation. The assistant manager was in the office th'owin' 'at knife . . . he playin' wit' me.

He say he know he ain' gon' hit me . . . he know right where I wuz.

I lay him out in lavender. I tol' him jus' where the bear went in the woods. I tol' him just whut I do widdat knife do he play me like dat from here on forwar'. He ain' never play like dat wi' me again, I tell you dat.

Word.

New waitress in training.

Firs' thing she tol' me wuz her name. Secont thing she tol' me she havin' a baby.

I thought she meant right that minute.

Firs' few shif's, th' way it work she follow somebody 'round an' learn how to do evvything. She don' get no tips. Trainer get her tips. She get minimum wage until she get tips, then her pay go down. I wuz trainin' her. I tell her "Good idea go do this now, time to do that now...."

You can tell when they get it and when they don'.

I say, "Here . . . take this tray an' go clear that table."

She crinkle up her forehead and twitch up her mouth an she put on a mad face and say, "Tha's a lotta work. I'm havin' a baby."

I say, "That's the job."

She ditten move. I went and cleared the table. And took the tip.

Next night my friend trainin' this new girl how to close. Breakin' down the salad bar. Back on that two-foot square dishwasher tray go all the crocks fulla cottage cheese, slice cucumbers, salad dressing. Things always weigh a ton, but you balance it right ain' nothin'. Waitresses got good biceps and backs. Thirteen crocks, two dishwasher trays full, to go back to the cooler.

My friend loaded up both trays and said, "Okay. Now we take 'em back to the cooler."

New girl she say, "I can' carry dat. I'm havin' a baby."

My friend, she say, "You aren't havin' a baby. You're pregnant."

New girl didn't come back next shift.

One day as lunch was winding down I was refilling the salad bar. The kitchen was big and it was a long trek with a big square dishwasher tray of full two-quart crocks. I still had tables so I was beatin' feet. One of the cooks decided it was about just about the right time to mop the floor in the waitstation.

Quarry tile. Greasy quarry tile. Water on top.

I made it nearly to the diningroom carpet when my feet went up and my face went down. I don't know where the crocks went, but one of my fellow waitresses told me later she'd had to clean Russian dressing off everything . . . the cash register, the phone, the shelving...

Not five seconds after I hit the floor, while I was still facedown on the floor next to the cash register, a man was at the counter with his business card in his hand for the manager. He sold some floor treatment that would keep accidents like that from happening.

I mean . . . I'm layin' there and this guy's sellin' his wares.

Word.

Next morning I woke up feeling like a truck had run over me. I asked Husband to call in sick for me and went back to bed.

Two hours later the store manager phone. "June! Where you at? You op'nin' this mornin!" Husband forgot to call.

I said, "Wait a minnit." I looked in the mirror again. I had a baseball on my cheekbone and a black eye. I went back to the phone. "You gon' hafta fin' somebody else."

I did go to work the following day and all my customers thought I'd suffered domestic violence. I got good tips that day.

June do a blackcent

It wasn't fifteen years ago that I stopped waiting tables down in the city's gut. Anything you do for money is work, but that job was as much fun as a hard job can be. I got pretty good at the local dialect and body language, and I apparently have a face from which people do not expect such an accent.

An' you know whut? Ah steel gottit; Iss lite ridin' a byesthicuh...

A few weeks ago a young African American man came in to my office. He doin' he street strut, he dress in black and colorfully printed nylon running pants, a matching jacket and shades. He held out a business card to me, and asked if he needed a permit to operate a cab company.

"Where you plan on garaging these things?" I asked, and he told me they'd be garaged in an adjacent town, so I told him he needed no permit. He said he'd been operating his cab company in a town a little west, "...but they don' like me no more, so it time to move."

I slipped into the my old waitress persona.

"Why they don' like you anymore?" I asked him.

"Well," he say, "the KKK startet not too far away, and i' hasn' change much. At the end o' the day I'm still a black man, and this is a little closer to the city, so I figure it's diff'rent."

"I hea' dat," I said.

He doubletaked and said, "You hea' dat? Dat's gud." He noddet, satisfi'.

So many stories from my time in that restaurant, most of them fun.

One of the cooks innat city restaurant, he name Finesse. He real name Napoleon, but he din' like 'at so he wen' by he street name, Finesse. Finesse' brother, Ezon (as in ...Downna Road) work there too. One day some fine lookin' young women came in and Finesse tryta put some moves on. Dey wudden' havin' it, and when he back off, one woman, a curl to her lip, ask me,

"Whut he name?"

"Finesse," I say. "I don' know what that mean, but that what he call'."

"It mean 'fine,'" she say, "but he ain' fine."

The manager of the store was a black woman, the assistant manager a black man. One day during the after-lunch/pre-dinner lull, the three of us were leaning on the counter, watching traffic through the plate glass window. The manager remarked that the store had a lot of black employees. The assistant manager began to list the workers: "....he black . . . he black . . . he white

. . . she black... June . . ." he gazed at me for a second or two, "she pink."

We all dissolved in laughter.

I guess I wore excessive blush in those days...