Bad waitress pt. 1

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Becca Schuh on being both a writer and a server.

When the pandemic temporarily closed restaurants in March 2020, I had been waiting tables since I graduated college. I was free for a month or so when I moved from San Diego to New York City in 2015, but otherwise, I’d never taken more than a week off. I waitressed for longer than I attended college, longer than I’ve been writing professionally, longer than I’ve known many of my friends, longer than I’ve lived in New York.

My last workplace, before the pandemic, was by turns both intensely casual and casually intense. I wore velour pants nearly every day. I wore crop tops or chopped up beer t-shirts over sports bras. I texted in the bathroom and got in trouble for it rarely, maybe once every two months. One day, one of my managers said that I’m “the only person who doesn’t give him any trouble.” My coworkers laughed and laughed. If I wasn’t the worst waitress, I was certainly the most mediocre. I worked an easy schedule, and I made good money. When I didn’t want to work, I’d put my shifts up on an online scheduling platform and someone would pick them up within minutes.

I walked, I talked, I carried beers. I didn’t apply for 'real' jobs. I always said, soon, soon, things like this cannot last forever. I thought I’d get too tired to keep waiting tables, I thought if I waited much longer I’d lose the chance to get a ‘real’ job, in publishing or media or who knows what industry. I knew I couldn’t wait tables forever, though I certainly never thought I would be stopped by a global pandemic.

The job at that bar was the best job I’ve ever had, in concert with the life I’d always wanted—publishing my writing, running a literary magazine, having several close circles of friends, living in the city I’d always dreamed of. I loved my apartment and I had the money to do things like get facials and use ClassPass. I took vacations and went to literary awards or friends’ book launches and plays and fancy dinners, and one night when I was sad I bought a pink suit, and then I felt better. Waiting tables gave me a life I didn’t think I’d be able to attain for myself. I was a lackluster student in high school and I went to a small college in a strange town where we didn’t get grades. I’d never gotten a response when I applied for a job, an internship, or even a volunteer opportunity in the arts. Waiting tables felt like the bane of my existence, but it also gave me access to everything I loved. I didn’t see any of it coming. Where do I begin?

I started waiting tables at an IHOP in Mira Mesa, California. I was 23. I had no sense of distance in San Diego, where I'd moved a month prior, so it seemed like a 20-minute drive was not too far to go to work, when in reality, why would you drive to a suburb when you lived in the city? But by the time I realized this I already had the job, and it was paying me instead of firing me, so I kept it.

I lied explicitly and exuberantly on my resume. I said that I’d been serving for several years at the University restaurant at my college (a real place, called the University Club) where professors ate lunch and students brought their parents on visits.

When I interviewed at IHOP, I was wearing a miniskirt and a dark blue Hollister tank top. I still got away with wearing Hollister because it was Southern California. The manager, a bald guy only a couple years older than me with thick, dark eyebrows, said, after a short chat, “You can start on Friday.”

I’d interviewed at other jobs—telemarketing for a ‘real estate tutorial system,’ being some kind of assistant at a company that sold—headsets?—in Chula Vista. I didn’t get hired at any of them, and I got hired at IHOP. Waitressing didn’t seem permanent. Nothing ever does.

The manager of the IHOP, Aaron, figured out very quickly that I had lied on my resume, because I was very bad. A customer said to his face: “Wow, you hired a fresh one!”

He said, “We can train her. She’s a natural.”

Unfortunately, he was right.

There were a few bad weeks. I brought out the wrong omelets, backing up the kitchen. Servers had to take over tables in my section because I was overwhelmed or hungover or both.

One day I forgot pants. I was supposed to wear a certain type of pants, and I thought they were in my car, and when I reached back I realized that the black mass of cloth that I’d assumed were pants were what—a sweatshirt? An apron? Something else black. I swallowed and went inside and told my boss, dear sweet Aaron, that I forgot my pants, and that I had to go buy another pair. He laughed, and let me, and didn’t fire me, despite this being ridiculous and resulting in me being 45-minutes late. There are angels everywhere.

I leaned into the idea of serving as an identity. I joined all the Facebook groups, followed #serverlife and server memes on Instagram. I brought my IHOP menu to pregame with my friends and memorized it while drinking vodka and grapefruit juice and sitting on a bean bag. They took pictures of me and posted them on Instagram and a girl I’d barely been friends with in college said I looked beautiful.

I fell into a routine at the Mira Mesa IHOP. Aaron would come in with his pregnant wife, Megan, and I’d serve them milkshakes. Aaron would order the only pasta IHOP had on the menu, and request it without the accompanying bread. I would tell Miguel, my best cook friend, to put the bread on the side, and I would squirrel it away for my own consumption.

Like any green server, I had a running commentary on how awful servers are treated, and that clearly people who have no agency in their own lives try to be rude to servers as a way to exert control. I wrote Facebook posts when customers were particularly upsetting. I had regulars, and when they said, “you know how I like my coffee,” I said yes, yes I do, grimly acknowledging that this is what took up my brain space now, rather than the literary theory I’d studied in college.

I used to carry a book into work to read on my break, my break where I’d get omelets and ask Miguel to put in whatever ingredients I wanted to try. I’d carry the book around in my blue apron. I was trying to cultivate an image of the person I wanted to become. A waitress at a shitty IHOP that’s not even in San Diego proper isn’t much to start adulthood from. But a waitress at a shitty IHOP that’s not even in San Diego who’s definitely for sure going to be a writer—well, it’s the start of a story. And that was all I needed.

I only worked at IHOP for six months. In the sixth month, I got in a fight with the owner’s daughter (Bridgette, Aaron’s sister, sibling heirs to the IHOP throne), because I was asking the kitchen guys to put too many extra ingredients in my omelets. Bridgette and I had been friends—we’d roll silverware together in the morning, she’d talk about her fiancé, I’d talk about guys I slept with who wouldn’t text me back. But on the day of the ingredient incident, she came storming into the kitchen and yelled at me, flailing the ticket in my face, and I thought: oh.

This fight with Bridgette was enough to get me driving in my light blue Buick LeSabre all over San Diego, with a resume in a fancy font that proclaimed me to be an ‘experienced breakfast server.’ I somehow got an interview at the best breakfast place in San Diego. It happened to be two blocks away from the house I’d recently moved into in Hillcrest.

When Johnny, the owner of Hash House A Go Go, interviewed me, he said “I see you’re at IHOP. So you’re looking for a way out?”

I replied, quickly: “No, definitely not. My manager is the son of the owner of all the IHOPs in Southern California, and it’s been such an honor to learn from him. But I’m looking to expand my career and I so admire Hash House as a business.”

I saw the way he looked at me change, in that moment. Of course it was bullshit, and I’m sure he knew, but ten minutes later, he put down my resume, stood up, and said “I like you. You’re smart. I’m going to hire you.” And I knew it was because of that answer—that bullshit answer changed my life.

It was faster than IHOP, it was 20-pound plates of mostly potatoes and sauces the color of red peppers and salmon. We didn’t have computers, so we handwrote all our tickets on those traditional green server pads. There was a very specific way you had to write down orders, because we also rang up the tickets by hand. They warned me: if you wait to ring your tickets until your tables need them, you’ll always fall behind. Ring your receipts anytime you have a free moment.

At the end of every shift, we added all our receipts together on the 10-key calculator to figure out our sales. You had to add the food totals, the beverage totals, the alcohol totals, the tax totals, and get four separate figures, and add those. Then you added the charged totals. If the first number was more than two dollars off from the second number, you had to do it all again. We only had three calculators, so people would always be glaring over your shoulder. Everyone hated it, but this was my favorite part of the day. Sitting and pressing the numbers was cathartic after eight hours of carrying 20-pound plates of potatoes, juggling tickets and alcohol and trays of orange juice, and thinking that everyone hated me for how bad I was.

The third or fourth week I worked there, one of the older waitresses took me outside at the beginning of the shift. She said that Johnny had taken umbrage with my personal appearance. She said he’d made complaints about my hair, that another day I’d looked hungover, that he thought I should wash my aprons more. Embarrassed, I tried redoing my hair right there, in front of her, but she told me to go to the bathroom and try to fix it there, out of sight.

I started wearing makeup to work, every single day. I’d never done that before. A bartender said to me: it doesn’t matter if you come in hungover, it doesn’t matter how you come in, you just have to put your face on first. I put my face on, every day. I started buying fancy hair gadgets to try and make it seem like I was taking Johnny’s personal appearance obsession seriously. I wanted my embarrassment to recede, but instead I came into work every day paranoid, wondering if this was going to be the day that I was fired for smudged eyeliner.

It took me a while to make friends. I thought, who are these people, they’re so cool, and intense, and good at their jobs. They’re going to hate me. At the beginning, they did. Even after the personal appearance fiasco, I could tell they thought I was slow and stupid, because I was slow and stupid in that context. It wasn’t as bad as my first days at IHOP, but this was a whole different breakfast game. I’d never walked for so many hours uninterrupted, I struggled to finish the endless lists of daily side work: cleaning every ketchup container, vacuuming with a machine that had been operating as long as the restaurant—you had to stop periodically to pull out hairballs with a knife. Some of the servers tried to help me, but many of them ignored me, and I could see in their eyes what I was: an idiot, incompetent, young.

I’d always skated by in life on my personality, but now I didn't know who I was anymore. The art and relationships I stuffed my brain with in college were fading away. I tried to talk to the other servers, but it was like I couldn’t remember how to have a conversation. They made plans and left after work, and there I was, with the vacuum, sitting on the floor.