Now I'm twenty-five and I work five days a week, mostly double shifts, plus I do a little bartending and I go to Minneapolis Community College. I'm going for a business degree and an applied science degree. My goal is by the age of thirty-five to own my own restaurant/bar. I have a six-year-old and I like the nicer things in life. I want to live in a townhouse. I want to drive a new car. (Laughs.) I've already got a portable phone. So waitressing makes sense for me.

The only real drawback is the hours: if you want to make the money, you have to work at night. Dinner's just a much better shift. The entrees are much more expensive, people have more appetizers, they drink. But it means that you don't get to go out on the town on those nights. And it's a real physical job. You're lifting a lot of stuff. You have to be strong to deal with it. Once a year I take a three-week vacation and when I come back, I feel like I'm out of shape. You know? You have to be physically up for it. That's another reason why I wouldn't want to do it forever--I don't want to be the physically old, haggard waitress.

My main job is I wait tables full-time at Tejas, an upscale Tex-Mex place. Then I also bar-tend two nights a week at this cheesy little sports bar down the street. At Tejas, I begin my shift at 10:45 in the morning. If I work a double, I'll get home after midnight, so it can be a very long day. We open at 11:30. You have to do a lot of things to get the restaurant going. I start out getting all the butters ready and putting all the corn sticks on a tray, then I roll the silverwares, make ice tea and fill the water pitchers, make coffee, then it's cutting fruit, getting ice from downstairs for the ice bin, and finally, lighting candles, making sure the tables and chairs are clean, lighting the fireplace--everything you need to do so when they open the doors, the front of the house is ready.

Tejas is a nice, family-owned place. I would never want to work in a stuffy place like a seven-course dining thing. Generally when people go to a stuffy restaurant, they don't want to have a conversation with their waitress. They just want you to serve the food and shut up. That's not my personality. My personality is to talk to people and treat them like they're coming into my own home. I don't want to deal with stuffy, snobby people. There's a difference between being a server and being an order-taker. I prefer to be a server and a server has a personality and they use it and that's part of your dining experience. At a stuffy restaurant, where you're just an order-taker, your personality doesn't get to shine through. And besides the fact that that wouldn't feel right, I believe that I wouldn't make nearly as much money if I didn't use my personality. The thing I like to bring to it is to make people feel good, make 'em feel comfortable. That's the thing I can do best.

It's all about personality. It's almost like being an entertainer. One of the hardest things is when customers come in and their nature is just rudeness and you still have to kiss their butt because they're paying your bills. And when they're rude, and you know that it's nothing you've done, it's hard to be nice. When you know that no matter what, they wouldn't've been happy anyway--they've had a bad day and they're bringing it with them, when they shouldn't even be going out. When their attitude is just so piss-poor or they're just so high on themselves and they think they're better than you because you're just a waitress--that's what I hate. But I deal with it by knowing that it's part of the job and there's a different situation at every table. And I get to interact with different people at every table. Real people. So if there's a rude jerk here, there may very well be a great person over there. And so you deal with it.

The funny thing with the rudeness is that some waitresses make more than the people sitting at the table. I've had years where I've made forty-five thousand! Which reminds me of another good thing about being a waitress: half of your income isn't claimed. I shouldn't be saying that, but it's true. Half your income's tax-free because you don't tell the IRS about it. In the realm of waiters and waitresses, nobody claims all their income. If somebody says they do, they're lying.

I don't like to work for corporate restaurants. You know--Houlihan's, Sizzler, Bennigan's--those kind of places. I have done that in the past, but I wouldn't do it again. I like to work for family-owned restaurants. You get the real feel of real service. In corporate restaurants, it's not real. They're telling you what you have to do, how to fold your socks, what you need to say to your tables. It's too generic. Family-owned restaurants are more of an art. It's a different feel and you have more input. You're not just a paycheck or a social security number. Your personality is valued. Plus, at a family restaurant, everybody knows everybody. There's better communication. You come in when someone else calls in sick, you help with the books if they need you to. If you work for a corporate restaurant, you might climb your way up the ladder and become a manager or something like that, but who cares? That's not for me. For one thing, I wouldn't want to be working seventy hours a week just to make $30K plus a measly bonus. I can make more here at Tejas, depending on what shifts I get.

But it's a crazy job. It makes me insane sometimes. Once I was working at this cheesy bar--Gatlin Brothers--at the Mall of America. It was a country bar. That was back when country music was really big, in like '92. Tacky as shit. High volume, just a lot of drunks coming in. Just obscene drunkenness. We used to get some of the hickiest people. But there was a lot of money to be made. For example, if you did a beer tub, you could make five to seven hundred bucks a night. A beer tub is a big tub filled with ice and tons of beer, and you sell like $3,000 worth of beer at $2.75 a bottle. People generally tip you the change or a dollar plus the change. So you're talking big money.

Anyway, one night I was working there, and I was tired, I was ovulating, and I wanted a cigarette. I'd worked for like, six days in a row, and the place was packed, and there was this guy from like, Alabama, who kept ordering rounds of drinks and rounds of drinks and rounds of drinks. He kept picking up the tabs, like $14 a round, every round, and he kept stiffing me! And after a while, I was getting really ticked. He was right in the middle of my section, so I couldn't avoid him. And he and his friends, they're getting really plowed and they start ordering shots of tequila, and he asks to do a body shot. A body shot is where instead of just giving them a lime wedge and a salt shaker, you get one of the people to lick the other person's neck and then you put the salt on the person's neck where the other person licked it.

So this chick licks her yahoo boyfriend's neck, and I start pouring the salt on his neck, and I just suddenly lose it. Right out of nowhere, I doused his head with salt and said, "You know, if you don't start fucking tipping me pretty soon here you can just walk your ass up to the bar, cuz I've sold you at least $150 worth of product and you've been stiffing me." So his girlfriend hands me $20 and yells at her boyfriend--she's really embarrassed--and tells him he better start tipping me. But I didn't care about the money any more, I just wanted to work somewhere more mellow. That kind of job is great for like, a twenty-one year old. Maybe it has to do with me growing up and being more mature, but I can't handle that anymore. The bar I work at now is a very quiet affair. That place burnt me out. It burnt me out huge.

But of course, there are also very nice experiences. Last year, I had a small little stock-broking company come for their Christmas party, you know, like ten employees, and they pushed all these tables together, and the boss was paying for everything. And they were there for a few hours, and they were really fun. You know, "Bring us a shot! You pick!" And we were telling jokes and shooting the shit. I was like part of the party. I was entertaining them and they were hilarious. And at the end of the night their tab was like $300 and something. And the dude gives me a $300 tip. He said, "You know what? You were so much fun. Half these people never loosen up. You really made it fun." And that was great.

It's not just the big tips--it's when people love you. It's hard to explain, but when you give people a good time and they tell you that, it makes you feel good. You know, when they listen to your suggestions about the food or the wine and they like 'em--and usually the wait-staff does know all the best stuff, 'cuz they've probably eaten everything on the menu like fifty times. Or when people soak in all the information and they pick up on your sales technique hook, line and sinker like a fish--it's fun. You're having this great time with 'em. Even if they give you just a normal tip, if they really like it, it's great. I shake some of my customers' hands when they leave. It just makes me feel good. I'm glad they enjoyed their dinner.

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