Food For Thought, Thoughts On Food (industry)
Good weekend, albeit pretty damn quiet. Gave me a chance to rest my ranting muscles.
Got to help pay tribute to my friend Len for all his help last year when I went to his reading this past Saturday. Thank you again, Len. For everything. I'm sure my improvised speech will provide the best unintentional comedic moment when you play it back later.
On Sunday, to celebrate my financial recovery from last year, I treated myself to seafood at one of the local restaurants and not at the restaurant I used to work at. The law warns me not to name the Nazis directly, but I'm sure you can figure it out.
For the first time in ages, I don't have to worry about any near-crippling tax burdens as a result of waiting tables for that or any restaurant. I just had my cousin and godchild come up to me on Friday and say he was thinking about getting into the service industry as a chef. I told him to get some kind of entry level job before he graduated because this was something he needed to be sure of. Either that or he can read this and my broken down lessons that I've learned.
Not that chefs are as financially destitute as waiters (I refuse to use the term, "servers," too close to "servants"), but the atmosphere is something I am glad to be away from. The thoughts I had about others and myself were not pleasant. The things I heard from others were even less pleasant. A level of racism and xenophobia (to which no one was immune, sadly, as some of the most racist comments I heard about African American customers came from an African American co-worker) permeated amongst the staff so much, you got the idea that if the Fourth Reich ever surfaced and conquered America, the only thing that would have disappointed the waitstaff would have been all theese German people running around.
Worse, once you get into the business, it can be impossible to get yourself out of it gracefully with your financial well-being intact. The taxes from my three final months as a waiter in 2002 reminded me how the job almost penalizes you for changing professions and giving up on the big score.
Lesson One: Waitstaffs are the worst treated and paid out of any worker. Period. Don't tell me bussers have it worse. True, I don't envy them, but their main source of income are waiters, who have been burnt too much by the public (a whole other rant entirely) to do the same to anyone else. Either that or they can't afford to lose even a bad busser. Most of management, on the other hand,has a bonus coming to them almost because of our poor morale.
Every year, more and more students and other new residents to the city are drawn to waitering jobs for the simple allure of quick and easy money, never realizing that a lack of taxed wages doesn't help when combined with the government's continuing determination to end the deficit by making sure all waiters and waitresses are taxed on their tips until they bleed their brains out of their nose.
I feel bad for some student friends that have to worry about credit card debt AND their taxes, which will surely bite them in the ass once they graduate and their delayed penalties come down hard. Most are too busy blowing their forty dollar afternoon wages on a sixty dollar meal at Charlie's, determined that they'll make it all up in the evening. And if not, they can always pick up a shift or two, or three...
Ah, the old junkie mentality. Brings me to Lesson Two: Money is a drug folks, on par with whatever is being exchanged on the streets and in college dorms today. That's why it's hard for a waiter or waitress to turn down the idea of straight cash in favor of everybody else's regular payday, even if on some days you make less than the minimum wage per hour with tips. When you're not sure what you'll have to go through physically and mentally to make ends meet, you're willing to spend a bit more on booze and other er, commodities to dull the pain in your joints and reduce your stress level before the next day. Straight cash is a drug that leads to other drugs even quicker than marijuana does. And once you're on a roll with regular nights and a semi-reliable system, it's hard to tell that you're actually poorer than you would be if you had a steady job. The few former co-workers I still talked to insisted that I made less now than when I was working with them. They casually forgot that from January to March they're struggling to pay back their two-to-three thousand tax bills. Either that, or they aren't paying them (one friend has professed to have never paid them. Ever).
How did I stay out of serious debt? My rent was less than $400 a month, I had no car, no girlfriend, no drug habit, did not drink and kept my parent's insurance until I finished graduate school. Even with those benefits on my side, I didn't last long on the plus side.
And oh, those wacky restaurant benefits. This year, in my relatively new job, my raise was delayed; but this fall, when it finally kicked in retroactively, I got a lot extra in my check over two weeks (one week for regular time, one for overtime). It was five times what I got from my restaurant health insurance for being out a month due to a serious operation. To make things even more interesting, I ended up owing money for x-rays, even though they were done to determine that I needed an operation in the first place).
What does all this have to do with my aspiring chef cousin? That's Lesson Three: In order to be successful in the business, you have to be a total bastard. From bartenders on up, the amount of garbage they dump on those lower them increases with rank. And most like doing it. I shudder at the thought of my godchild growing to have the inclination to enjoy this type of behavior.
Many managers and their ilk are able to sense this sadistic streak in people who are either naturally inclined to this behavior or are tired of being on the bottom rung and desperate to do anything to better themselves (and in the restaurant business, where you learn virtually no skills applicable to other fields, bettering yourselves either means promoting yourself closer to management or finding another restaurant to and a slightly more profitable rut in for yourself). Once a waiter is promoted, their ability to care about their former comrade dwindles down to almost nothing. Their ability to expound on the benefits of company policy they were laughing at months before is interesting when you first witness it, but not much afterwards.
If only they could have been bastards only to me, so I could seem more paranoid. Alas. Most bartenders I was at ends with were fired later for stealing funds (I credit my dislike of them then to instinct and feel vindicated nowadays). Whenever I meet a bartender who has children and a house, I can't help but be suspicious. Chefs would rather see most of it's waitstaff not worth trying to fuck out in the streets or dead, or both. Managers--in fact the majority I've served under with maybe three exceptions--are people who are an ugly colored tie away from being an unskilled laborer in some factory, lacking in all but the most basic social skills and proponents of job practices that human resources departments in any conglomerate would put a stop to within a week of someone complaining.
Bastards can sniff each other out, because they need all the support they can get. I remember one co-worker barely a month into the job. He called out on a Sunday due to court. Yes, of course court is closed on weekends. You read that correctly; he said Sunday. Said teller of lies ended up going into the restaurant that very day to eat with his family and (allegedly) his lawyer. The manager, a bit of a player and scumbag himself, comped the entire meal.
Lesson Three A: Like attracts like, like promotes like. A half-dozen or more managers and assistant managers worked on one particular individual to make him management material while he bounced between rehab and working while wasted, eating off customers' half-finished plates, etc. They even let him teach a wine tasting class before letting him go. I almost wished he crashed then, causing a chain reaction that would have scandalized and humiliated an entire restaurant chain, if not an industry. His premature death (which seemed inevitable when I last saw him) would have at least meant something.
The most pathetic example was a manager who was promoted to heading a new restaurant only to be let go quietly for sleeping with two waitresses who just happened to be friends as well but didn't realize they were sharing until there was a public cat fight. Back in Boston, this putz found work in another restaurant but frequently visited his old boss. Despite having inside information, he ended up hiring someone who was fired from our store for stealing a co-worker's credit card and letting his girlfriend try to use it in a store across from us while he was with her and still wearing his uniform.
The most these people can hope for with this inner circle is a few moments of amusement before eventually leaving, fired or not. That's the only thing waiters have over management and chefs and even bartenders. We usually stick with one place if we're smart, or at least we have this option. When you cook or do something that passes for leadership, you either move around to different stores within the company or you move on entirely. Is this out of boredom? Frustration? The only way people can cope with the idea of doing this for the rest of their miserable lives?
A shit life, all in all, and I'm thankful to only have to go in my old personal hell when the family wants chowder.
*ahem*
Like I said, I had ranting muscles rarin' to go by the weekend's end.
As a disclaimer, none of this fully applies to people who work in small places or want to start their own, mostly because I never worked in one. I salute those who try and will wish my cousin the best of luck, but I can't help but think they're swimming upstream.
