Hey everyone. I’m back with another tale for my section: Tales of The Unemployed. True and usually unfortunate happenings from my past work life.
Enjoy!
Kevin
Have you ever spilled water on the first table you waited on? (A mother and child no less.)
Welcome to the nightmare that was my career as a waiter.
I have a theory that everyone should serve the public at least once in their lives. In the food, retail, or hotel industry. I’ve done it all but hotels. And I rate my level as average at best.
Once upon a time, my family was annoyingly insistent that I help pay for my college by getting a job. In my typical reckless throw logic out the window approach, I started off college in an expensive private school that blew all of my savings. My parent’s ultimatum was, if you choose the private school, you pay for a semester. And if you go past four years to graduate, you pay for the fifth year. I did both of course.
The trouble was, you don’t get to goof off and party all of the time when you have a job. And my already suffering grades would suffer even more.
But my brother was a fantastic waiter along with some other friends and was making really good pocket money for a college kid. So when I transferred to the same school, he helped me get a job at his employer Red Lobster.
Red Lobster used to be the premier seafood-eating establishment in my college town. (Draw your own conclusions.)
It started off innocent enough. Because I had zero waiting experience, they started me off as a host with the possibility of earning my way up to a server.
I liked being a host. I got paid to smile at people and shuffle them away as quickly as possible to seat them for other people to wait on. I got to know some of our patrons quite well, as being the “hot” restaurant in town, we usually had forty-five-minute minimum waits and our lobby would be packed to the gills with hungry (hangry folks) ready to break apart and start munching on the wooden fake crustaceans we had on the walls.
Our manager was something else. We’ll call him Jim.
Jim fascinated me as I had never met anyone quite like him. The composition of our staff was made up of townies and university students. Some of our staff were what Jim called “professional waiters.” They were probably only in their thirties at the time, but seemed like they had been waiting tables for no less than fifty years. Then there were also excellent university waiters I knew like my brother, my buddy Brian, and my friend Michelle. Sharp, efficient—chasing that beer money.
Then there was me, your friendly neighborhood university miscreant.
I say Jim fascinated me because while he appeared almost Mr. Rogers-like on the outside, I saw flashes of deadly intent from time to time surface in the corners of his eyes.
It became clear to us college kids, he had it out for us. I’m not sure how it is now, but at the time if you worked a job and mentioned you were a student at the local university to certain people with no degree, it could rub them the wrong way and become a challenge to their ego and deeper insecurities.
Jim would often tell us that while he did start at an illustrious university that sounded about as easy to find as Hogwarts, alas, better opportunities arose. Like foregoing a higher education to answer his life’s purpose: to become the manager of a podunk Red Lobster. Huh?
I believe Jim thought he would produce such magnificent profits at our location, one day he would be magically whisked away and promoted into General Mill's higher management. And who knows? Perhaps he was. I can tell you this, he sure as hell tried.
Hmm. How to say this? Jim had no ethnicity about him. He was perhaps the most vanilla white man I’ve ever met. Which led to his unfortunate yet still puzzling enunciation difficulties. One of our evidently trickier menu items in particular to say, quesadilla, was an absolute tongue twister for him.
As he prepped us, he would clap his hands together and say things like, “Always upsell. They must start with an appetizer, like our delicious quesadilly.” Yes, he—scout’s honor—added a “dilly” at the end.
He also encouraged us to push Red Lobster’s specialty drinks. I can’t recall the name of them, but one was perhaps concocted of strawberries, pineapples, and rum or vodka and came out looking like an actual sacrificial lobster had been blended into a frozen drink with whipped cream and cherry on top. Jim encouraged us to dance along to the rhythm of the blender as it crushed the daylights out of the ice cubes and whatever its mystery contents were.
“They see you dancing, it’s contagious. They’ll want to have what they’re missing!”
He was all too right about that.
“And! And!” Jim emphasized, “Tell them they get to take home the glass!” he said like we were booze vendors at Yankee Stadium peddling souvenir cups. The glasses were an unnatural shape like the figure of a person on a fad diet that produced grossly uneven curves. I’ll bet I had at least a dozen of those odd-shaped glasses in my apartment cabinet by the time I graduated.
After a few months of hosting, I got my chance to become a waiter in training. My least favorite part was the cold table approach doled out to the waiter in training.
I would be paired with one of the ‘career waiters’ someone named, say Fonda. Fonda would give a million-dollar welcome to every patron, then say sideways out of her mouth, “And this is… Kevin. He’ll be shadowing me tonight, a waiter in training.”
Real translation: “Any kind of negative experience you may have tonight will all be Kevin’s fault. Flog him at will.”
After a few rounds of these blood-curdling greetings, Jim would materialize from the back to “observe” me observing Fonda. No pressure, right?
“Now Fonda, on the next table let’s let Kevin try to pitch the Frozen Atomic Lobster and some yummy quesadilly’s!” Jim would coach us. Fonda scowled and gave a bitter nod.
The thing is, I was excellent at pitching. I’d like to think I still am. I would smile and sell craptons of weird-sounding appetizers and expensive souvenir drinks.
“He sold them,” Fonda reported back to Jim in a flat tone and expression.
“Great Kevbo!” Jim practically screamed. “Now dance for them!”
For some reason, I thought the dancing while the frozen drinks were being made was a hoot. Little did Jim know, I was merely ripping off the Lemonade Guy from Baltimore Orioles’ home games. If you went to a game in the nineties in Baltimore, you know exactly who I mean. The guy was busy the entire game, gyrating his whole body like he was impersonating ice in the blender while he mixed their lemonade drink for them on the spot.
“GO KEVBO! GO KEVBO!” Jim practically salivated. “See how he does it? EVERYONE should start doing it like that!”
Uh oh.
From that point on, whenever someone new joined our Red Lobster family, Jim would grab me from wherever I was regardless of whatever I was doing in the restaurant. I’d be highlighting parts of our menu and have my arm nearly yanked out of its socket by Jim. “I’ll take your order for you. Show them Kevbo! Show them how it’s done! See? It’s done with fun!”
As I said, everyone should work in a job where they serve the public at least once in their lives.
Jim also had a crazy notion that everyone in the restaurant should be able to handle piping-hot plates that felt like they’d melt off your fingertips. Jim would say to one of the ‘career waiters’ like a proud papa, “Fonda, show them how it’s done.”
Like a freak show exhibit, Fonda would then open palm multiple scorching hot plates and stand in front of us for a full thirty seconds as if she had been raised in a volcano, her poker-faced expression never changing.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” Jim clapped. “Now give the plates to Kevbo.”
Like a dare or some twisted rite of initiation, I took the scalding hot plates with my trembling fingertips then proceeded to crab sprint to the nearest table with tears leaking, practically frisbee-tossing the plates onto the table, hemorrhaging fried shrimp and fries.
Jim smiled and shook his head with evil twinkles lighting his dark eyes. “Hope college is going well for you Kevbo, ‘cause I don’t know,” he sang. “I don’t know.” I swear he experienced sheer glee by torturing us—especially the college kids that struggled with hot plate training like yours truly.
If I was good at hosting, I was a freaking exceptional waiter in training. Because only salesmanship was required of me. I didn’t have to do much else.
Fonda would walk about fifty miles per hour across the restaurant with both arms raised in the air with about twenty drinks and jumbo fried seafood platters she twirled about with great ferocity, and much like her eighties styled permed hairstyle with the requisite “poof” on top, never moved. I never saw her spill a single drop or crumb.
I would bring the biscuits. And the inevitable second, third—or fourth!—round of those cheese and butter-made, artery-clogging yet undeniably addictive biscuits.
A quick side story about those biscuits. I was a starving and broke college student. I had no problem taking uneaten food home with me that would normally have been thrown out. My roommates and just about everyone else that lived in my apartment building would wait for me to get home as I’d bring them a couple of styrofoam containers chocked full of those biscuits that would be gobbled up in about thirty seconds flat.
Do you know the ketchup bottle that always mysteriously disappeared from tables? As the waiter in training, I brought that to their table before they needed to ask. Piles of napkins for messy seafood eating? Got it covered. Need some more water? A new fork? Want a clean souvenir glass that looked like it was designed in the sixties by insane asylum patients? Kevbo was your guy—no problem.
Fonda would count out a pile of cash from her earned tips at the end of the night and give me enough for beer money and a king’s ransom of Ramen noodles. I give her credit for being generous with her tips. She also told me I had nice legs when she shaw me in shorts one day.
Unfortunately, my success as a shadow waiter in training led to a quick promotion: the midweek lunch shift. This was the “safe” shift, where new possible buffoon waiters only had to deal with the occasional customers disturbing the almost library quiet and gathering dust when the rare consumer that desired to eat a heavy seafood lunch would shuffle in.
And as I was sad to report on my very first table, I botched my automatic water delivery. My hands are strong but small and evidently incapable of any semblance of inverted steadiness when involving a round tray. The mother and child were extremely nice and patient and they gave me a nice sympathy tip.
“Way to work the clumsy waiter approach, Kevbo!” Jim said, but not before he slapped me with a sideways look of disapproval.
I did pretty well with the lunch shift because the stream of customers was a trickle. I think I made an average of something like ten bucks a shift—easily less than what I was making as Fonda’s shadow. Somehow that amount of tips didn’t quite compute that the gig was worth it. But it wasn’t long before I got promoted to the full-on firehose of prime-time, weekend nights.
It turns out I was an amazing waiter… if I had a maximum of two tables. I was personable, responsive, great at selling, making menu suggestions, and getting to know what really made my patrons tick. So for about the first thirty minutes of my shift, I was golden.
The second I got three tables?
“I’m in the weeds, in the weeds!” I’d proclaim, running around our Red Lobster like Henny Penny. Never before had I suffered the stress and the hustle of remembering simple requests and the ability to serve food at an adequate level. I was terrible. The waitmares that followed were horrendous. In my waitmares, there would be a table that I kept forgetting over and over again. It took me years to shake them completely.
Worse, Red Lobster offered five dollars off coupons with every local newspaper. And you’d better believe the good citizens of my college town would literally wave these coupons in your face as you approached the table for the first time.
There was a counter scheme hatched by some of the more cynical waiters to tack on five-dollar coupons to any tables they waited on that didn’t have coupons. They would ensure themselves an extra five-dollar tip per table. I think I tried this a couple of times and then realized it was a pain to do, and it made me feel awful inside. I also instinctively sensed I would be the one to get caught.
If anything, I made a far worse criminal than even a waiter. I’m the one that got caught just about any time I’ve ever strayed to the dark side even for a split second. For instance, if I walked into a bank moments after a bank robbery had occurred and decided to pick up a quarter off the ground, I can almost guarantee you I would be the one to get nabbed for the robbery.
Anyway, Jim moved me over to bartender per my request shortly after I turned twenty-one.
The math was the same here. I was a decent bartender if there were only a few customers, not so much when the few trees became a forest with their busy little branches sticking in my face. It turns out I could not do the Hippy Hippy Shake like Tom Cruise nor my lemonade protege in Baltimore.
After another very short waiting stint at an Italian restaurant where all of the cooks were Mexican and I waited on a wedding party by myself with disastrous results, I hung up my waiting apron for good.
I wound up bartending nights at the University I ended up working for as a second job with the goal to save up enough to move. It was my most successful food service effort of them all, as I typically waited on very nice, wealthy business executives at our overnight hotel pub that wasn’t too overwhelming in number and usually part of the same company. Some of them would jump behind the bar and help me concoct their more complex mixed drink requests. Often times the leader of whatever company was staying with us that night would approach me as I opened with $200-$250 and say “This is for you. Take good care of us tonight.”
I can tell you they got the best out of me by far. Probably why they ran successful companies as well.
I will say that I am grateful for the experience of serving the public and have a greater appreciation for those serving us.
But in my heart I knew you didn’t want it to be me serving you your quesadillys and especially a tray of ice water glasses filled to the brim. (I would likely also forget to bring you extra rolls or napkins as well.)
So I encourage patience for your public servants. While many of them won’t become anything close to professionals, they are, (in most cases), doing their best.
Really enjoyed this. I really think everyone should work with children at some point as well.