how to be a waiter, lesson 1

i know that none of you are going to believe this, because i hardly believe it myself. but prepare thyselves, dear readers, for a startling revelation.

ahem.

i can be a little bratty in restaurants. i know, i know. if you've been following this blog from the beginning you're probably saying to yourself, but robert. it's clear that you're a kind, caring, giving individual, the kind that helps old ladies across the street without even trying to get them to pay you or even stealing their pocketbooks. we know that you treat a waitperson with the same dignity and respect with which you treat all the rest of god's creatures. and usually, dear reader, you'd be right.

see, i was a waiter once. i worked at a restaurant called the mount vernon stable (and saloon). for those of you who don't live in baltimore, let me paint you a picture. it's basically, like, if TGIFriday's and Applebees and Harrigan's were all rolled into one, and were individually owned. and then you plop it down in the middle of baltimore's gay neighborhood, giving it a nearly exclusively gay clientele, none of whom know that the owner is a horrible armenian bastard who hates gay people. so this is the restaurant i worked at. here's what each shift was like:

1. lunch: get to the restaurant at 10:30 to prep, aka do half the cooks' jobs for them. run around like a madwoman for four hours, fetching asshole business people, all of whom expect to be treated like the queen of sheba, their nasty $7 sandwiches. walk away, exhausted and a little less human but $21 richer. i shit you not, dear reader, that's the most i ever made on a lunch shift.
2. dinner, or, gay hour: have ass pinched at least 5 times a night, without fail by older homosexual gentleman with a gray beard and leather vest. pride rings/bracelet/necklace optional. be the butt of more nasty gay jokes and come-ons than you could imagine (unless, say, you're brian and worked at the gay bar in baltimore, in which case you can totally imagine). walk away with 5 times what you made at lunch, completely stripped of your dignity.
3. late dinner: and i mean late. like, the kind of people who roll in for dinner at 11:30 because the kitchen, due to the incredible greed of the bastard armenian owner, is open until midnight. fetch countless people, people that you have spent the last two years avoiding talking to on the street, plates and plates and plates of ribs. ribs slathered in barbecue sauce. ribs that come with a side of horrible homemade cole slaw that you have to glop out of the huge cole slaw container yourself. with their ribs, inevitably, they will order a mug of hot water (no tea). when you bring them the hot water they will first complain that it's not hot enough and then they will demand lemons from you. if you're left a tip, it will be less than 10%. after the last patron has been cleared from the restaurant (usually around 1:30am), vaccuum the entire place. walk away, broken.

so, see, i did that. i did that for a whole, um, five weeks. so i can be nice to wait staff. seriously. i can be nice until i'm confronted with a situation like at lunch today, in which my waiter didn't acknowledge my presence for 20 minutes. in an empty restaurant. and then i forget all about numbers 1, 2, and 3. and it ain't pretty.