employablog

Today I ended the strange three-month experiment where, for some reason or limp force of nature, I was a waiter. I went in without any experience or desire to be a waiter. I just figured, I’m OK-looking, I should be a waiter, it seems easy.

It isn’t. I spent nearly nine hours writing explanations to calculus problems one day at work, and being a waiter is a lot harder than that. You have to placate people, you have to be impossibly nice, and you have to balance a lot of liquids, often hot liquids, and I am proud to say that I only spilled someone’s drink all over them once.

But that period is done. Today was my last brunch shift, I am no longer a waiter, but I am forever someone who has put their time into the service industry. I kept one shift because I liked the people at my restaurant. But working six days a week was too much, especially considering the ritual sacrifice of my Sunday afternoons, not to mention the enforced moderation on my Saturday nights, because waiting hungover is hell. Hell on ice.

But this place got me on my feet, fed me, and took me with no experience or reason while I looked for a ‘for real’ job, and that allegiance kept me trudging in there, Sunday after bloody Sunday.

But finally I woke up today. The thoughts of Sunday afternoons had been tugging at me for a while, gently blowing in my ear, tempting. I saw that my manager had goofed on the schedule, leaving off my shift, and giving me the perfect out, he wouldn’t even need to correct the error.

And like that, I was free.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Cubeland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.