I don't think anyone grows up wanting to be a waiter, but it can be a good way to earn some cash while you're in school or pursuing something else. The problem for me is I'm not really sure what else it is I'm pursuing right now. I thought I wanted to go to law school for a while, but I sort of lost interest in it. Now I'm thinking that I may want to get into film production. But I know that's a long shot. I just don't want to do this forever. I have to find some other way to make a living because it can really suck. I mean, I like the people I work with, and we laugh a lot together sometimes, but customers can really treat you like shit.

Like last night I had this table of two couples, and one of the guys was really obnoxious. He kept raising his hand and motioning me over, and calling to me from across the room; you know, like he's Donald Trump. A real pain in the ass. I think some people just want attention for the sake of it, you know? Anyway, he orders a steak done medium-rare and it comes out too rare for him. And it was like I'd just punched his mother. I said I was sorry and that I would have the chef cook it some more, but that didn't matter. He carried on, trying, very obviously, to humiliate me in front of his date. I really get sick of it. It's like people just want to fuck with you. And the worst part is you really can't talk back to them or they won't leave a tip and almost all of my income comes from tips.

Waiters get paid half of the minimum wage, plus tips. After they take the taxes out, our paychecks are usually nothing. So it's all tips. And even the tips aren't all ours because we have to pay out the food runner, the busboys and the bartender. What that means is that all the tips from every table go into a pot and at the end of the night we give the bartender 10 percent, the busboy 10 percent, and the runner 15 percent. Then the waiters split the rest of the pool. The end result is that I'm earning only 65 percent of my tips and that's it, so you better believe I'm going to eat a lot of shit to get them. And I do and I am rewarded for it; I typically take home around $200 a night.

I work from 4 p.m. until about 1 a.m. four days a week. I couldn't do five days in a week without killing somebody. We come in at 4 to set up, we have staff meal at 5, and then we open at 6. We don't serve lunch. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to work here; because I hate to work lunch. Prices are lower, which means that the tips are lower. The staff meal is probably the most enjoyable part of the day. The kitchen and floor staff all sit down and eat and gossip. The food they give us is excellent. I've worked in places where they feed the staff crap; old shit that they are trying to get rid of. But this restaurant is very good to us in that way, very decent. The owners here are really good guys. They've both worked in restaurants for a long time, one as a cook and the other as a waiter and host before they opened this place, so they know what the job is all about and how hard it can be. There aren't a lot of bullshit rules. And I really like everybody I work with. I hang out with some of them after my shift is over sometimes.

But I don't know why I do this for a living. I often ask myself, especially after a bad night. I can tell you some of the good things about the job: I've become pretty used to it and I like getting paid in cash. But in its own way, that is a problem; I don't end up saving any money, and I make just enough to keep me from going to look for other work. And there is no future in this. You don't get promotions or raises, or anything like that. I also don't have health insurance; the only benefits I get are that I can drink as much as I want, but I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

And some of the people who eat here are just born assholes. They just don't give a shit; it's like you're not even human. I had a woman drop a magnum of champagne on my toe one time, and she couldn't understand why it might hurt, or why I couldn't run and get her friend another drink immediately, or why even an apology might be in order. Maybe it's the same in other kinds of work, but I think some people feel like they can treat waiters and waitresses like garbage and it won't matter.

I think the biggest problem with this as a career is precisely the thing that makes it attractive: it's because we work for tips. We work for gratuity, for favors, and so we get treated like shit. We get what we ask for. Customers think that since they are paying you directly, they can do whatever they want. And they hold it over your head like that.

If you go into the supermarket, the wages of the people who work there are included in the price of the products. That's probably why people who work in supermarkets can be so rude. They don't have to care; they get paid no matter what. I think I would be a healthier person if I were allowed to be rude and not just swallow all the psychic shit. I'm not saying the jerk at your grocery store is a great person, but they are responding to their working situation in a normal, healthy way. Customers treat them like shit, they treat customers like shit. It's a just world. Waiters don't live in that world.

I think people who eat in restaurants should be grateful that the waiters and waitresses are generally so nice and accommodating. Granted, it's mostly fake, but we do at least try to be nice. I mean I genuinely try to help people have a good time. Under the best circumstances, you have the chance in a restaurant to help people unwind and forget about how hard their day was at work, and that kind of thing. And I try to do that sometimes, and I am usually greeted with nothing but rudeness and disdain. So then I just think about the tip and shut down and that's it.

Nobody should become a waiter. I mean that. It's not a job for human beings. I think it's okay if you're trying to earn some money in the summer to put yourself through school or something like that, but I think you'd really be better off temping as a word processor because you can probably make about the same amount of money and you would at least be learning some valuable skills. Also, I think people probably treat you with a little more respect in an office. As far as becoming a waiter and having that be what you do with the entirety of your life--well, it just shouldn't be an option.

The only thing the job has really done for me, besides give me a decent-but-dead-end lifestyle, is to make me more bitter, a more angry person. Although I also think I am nicer to people in service jobs now because I know what they have to put up with. In that way, I think I've learned quite a bit about people and human nature. I mean, I think you can discover a lot about what kind of person somebody is by how they treat a waiter or a waitress. For instance, if you went out on a date with a woman and she was nasty to the waiter, I would advise you not to go out with her again because it would just be a matter of time until she started to treat you like shit.

I guess I've developed a pretty decent sense of humor doing this work. Bitter humor, but still--it can be a pretty interesting job sometimes. A lot of strange stuff happens in restaurants late at night when people start to get drunk. Recently, I was working with another waiter after all the other floor staff had been sent home because the place was empty. We were the two late waiters. And then for some reason the entire restaurant filled up, which is rare after midnight. We were completely slammed, and running around like madmen. And these two guys sat down in my coworker's section, and it was obvious that they were fairly drunk. They ordered a bottle of wine and two steaks, and he figured that instead of telling them they were too far gone to have anything else to drink, that it would be easier to feed them and just get them the hell out of there. So he turns the order in and tells the chef to rush it.

A couple of minutes after he sets the food on the table we're both up at the bar and I see that one of the two guys is standing beside the table with his hands at his throat and a long string of spittle hanging from his lower lip. His friend, meanwhile, is just sitting there eating. My buddy goes over to the table where the guy is by now turning blue and pretty much choking to death, and performs the Heimlich Maneuver. Then the choking victim spits up a huge chunk of meat and just vomits all over the floor. It was pretty rank.

But then the guy sits down and starts eating again like nothing happened. Of course, by this time, we are both just hopelessly behind. So we're trying to catch up, and neither of us has had the time to go clean up this pile of vomit because all the customers are all over our asses wanting their food and cocktails. And I go up to this table which is right behind the two drunk guys and these two women are really steamed. One of them says, "Do you realize that there is a pile of vomit on the floor?" And I tell her that I do, and that it is there because the guy behind her was choking to death. I then go on to tell her that we would clean it up as soon as we had time, but that it was really busy and we were trying to take care of a lot of people all at once. They just got up and left. And if you want to know the truth, I was kind of glad that they did.

I've been telling that story to friends and laughing about it for weeks. So, you know, I do have fun at work sometimes; I try to make the best of it. But that's pretty slight compensation, you know? Some funny stories, some cash, a bunch of abuse--and that's my life? I have to get a new job.

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