Adventures in baby-sitting
What your restaurant server really thinks of you.

By Charles Russo

WAITING TABLES IS fascinating. It is also humiliating, demented, menial, haphazard, and exhausting. But, most important, waiting tables is fascinating. Night after night, at table after table, the strengths and frailties of human nature intermingle to create every possible combination of friendship, disaster, and romance. And what better city than San Francisco to take part in such a self-mutilating experience involving so many potential characters: punchy seniors, hokey tourists, sexy couples, families somehow even more bizarre than your own. Just as baby-sitters cannot remain wholly indifferent to the antics of the children they watch, so too do servers rarely respond with stoic silence to the various personalities and fiascoes they come to experience in an evening.

Somewhere not far beneath the obligatory smiles, the "sir"s, "ma'am"s, and "how is everything here?"s lies a perpetual fascination, a constant assessment of human – that is to say, customers' – behavior. Like sociologists marveling at the peculiarities of their own species, or slaves relating the endless cruelty of their masters, servers bear constant witness to the night-to-night spectacle in which they play a central part. In this sense, anyone who is friends with a waiter knows that the question "How was your evening?" is really an invitation for a retelling of the server's strange and elaborate tales. After all, the word "restaurant" ends in "rant," and so too do many of our evenings.

Slave to the grime

My first service-industry job came when I was a junior in high school. Now it's probably not as good a story as the one where I poked a customer in the eye with a butter knife (accidentally, of course). Or when I mistakenly accused Cate Blanchett of cheating me on the bill. And I know it's not nearly as exciting as when that surly crew of old lesbians came to blows over their weekly game of Uno. But it was, after all, my first experience as a waiter, my initial loss of dining innocence.

Two of my friends and I were sink rats, not waiters, and though we didn't interact with the customers much, we could tell from our grungy post that there was something inherently absurd and demented about the entire industry. What was it beyond those swinging doors that regularly caused waiters to return in tears? And why did cooking food incite our boss to violent fits involving property destruction? My first boss, Tony, was a knot of stress about as stable as a Middle East cease-fire agreement. If he was our captain, then it was obvious we all sailed on a ship of fools.

Once during a Christmas banquet while we were running extremely late with the meal (Tony's assistant, Mr. N., forgot to turn on the ovens), a waiter was unfortunate enough to drop a huge tray of pasta on the dirty kitchen floor. Tony, gesturing with knife in hand, was livid – "No! No! Pick it up! Pick it up!"

All of us dishwashers rushed in to clean up the mess, thinking that Jerry wouldn't dare stab the lot of us. After pulling hairs, orange peels, and broken porcelain from the mess, the waiter deemed it a lost cause: "Tony, this is no good. I need a new tray."

"No, it's fine," Tony said, frantically scooping the pasta from the floor and onto a clean plate. "Bring it to your least favorite table."

Later I could almost picture the scene: "Enjoy your meal, ma'am, and Merry Christmas."

My first shift waiting tables came during the dinner rush at a wedding reception, when a server took a spill in a huge puddle of kitchen grease and was too foul-looking to go back into the dining room. I soon got elected to fill his place owing to my obvious qualifications (I was the only dishwasher wearing a black T-shirt). The world beyond the kitchen grime was a lively mixture of pleasure and pain. I flirted with bridesmaids, listened to drunk uncles jabber, and fielded the senseless requests of old ladies. By the night's end the father of the bride had called me a half-wit and the best man had poured me a shot of Hennessey.

Senior year my dad got me an office job, and though I made more money and spent most of my time out running errands, the dullness of it all was excruciating. Before long I concluded that after experiencing the "normality" of a nine-to-five office gig, I'd rather be back in the kitchen with the lunatics.

Role call

Waiters are a gregarious and eclectic bunch. Although a consistent majority of wait staffs are composed of artists from every field and philosophy, there is still a sizable showing from the ranks of international travelers, persevering moms, and lately, hordes of dot-com refugees humble enough to take up the apron, even after thinking they'd finally cast it off. "Waiting" is in fact the perfect term, for while backgrounds vary, the theme of transition is consistent from top to bottom, and the characters quickly become familiar: the actor waiting for his first major role, the many students waiting to graduate, the mother waiting for the means to buy her daughter braces. Yes, a server job can be a great way to weather one's transitional periods. By focusing on the vibrant social atmosphere, sizable cash pay, flexible schedule, and attractive coworkers, it is easy enough to temporarily block out the servile role you've agreed to perform.

Notes from the 'Serve-us' industry

"Excuse me!!"

"Yes, ma'am," I ask with a sense of trepidation. She's scowling at me like I've insulted her ancestors.

"This salad has walnuts. I asked for no walnuts."

I look down at her dish – spinach salad with goat cheese, no walnuts, just like she ordered. Still, she's offended and glaring at me despite there not being a walnut for several tables in all directions. I look to the three others dining with her to see where I stand. Quietly they go about eating their appetizers, comfortably aloof. Cowards. Should I dare take the bait and profess that the emperor has no clothes? Not a chance. I'd sooner embrace the drama of telling a four-year-old that there isn't an Easter Bunny.

"Qué?" – back in the kitchen our pantry chef, José, is perplexed. Yes, the psychosomaticism of the elite must be difficult to understand in a foreign language. Luckily José is a veteran. He tosses the salad into a bowl, musses it a bit with his hand, and puts it on a new plate. Same salad, different plate – the charade continues. Back at the table the woman is now pleased. I bow and apologize, and the emperor's clothing is indeed beautiful.

Thank you, sir, may I have another?

The advantages of a waiting job all come at a price, and from the graveyard shift at Denny's to a gig at one of the temples of haute cuisine, every waiter pays it in abuse.

It is always cowardly to mistreat servers, if only because most servers have little choice but to take it. Few college students and struggling artists who are living paycheck to paycheck are in a position to risk their income by contesting an abusive customer. In this sense, what these customers are doing is not much different from instigating a fight that can never be fought fairly, and though such contemptible examples only surface on rare occasions, they do surface.

It is also repulsive to see a grown man throw a temper tantrum in public. It is even more hideous when it is your job to host it. While such disgraceful diners constitute a minority of restaurant patronage, their melodramatics and ill will are often enough to overshadow every other aspect of an evening. With this in mind, waiters who have endured the casual madness of restaurants long enough begin to get a feel for the varying types of disorderly diners they may face. Like a superhero all too mindful of which villains are at large, a server can become downright terrified by the lineup: the Time Bomb, the Anomaly, the Dominatrix, the Miserable Asshole. Sure, there are new and unusual species being discovered almost every shift, but some types have become well established throughout the industry.

Take, for example, the Time Bomb. This customer's temperament is simple: after a lifetime of being waited on hand and foot, the Time Bomb expects everything to come to the table unreasonably fast and efficiently. When it does not, there is likely to be a detonation. Time Bombs are not much of a threat when the pace is slow, but get one in your section on a busy Saturday night among your seven or eight other tables, and his or her ticking will pound in your ears like Edgar Allen Poe's telltale heart. The way these people explode is as crass as it is absurd; I once had a stockbroker who actually went behind the bar to pour his own drink after determining that he had waited long enough. Like most abusive diners, he was so wrapped up in his own convictions, and so gratified by the apologies of the manager, that he continued to consume drinks from the bar without ever pondering what the aggrieved bartender might have done to them.

The Anomaly is an important character to mention but a tough one to describe ... and that is mainly the point. The Anomaly is the UFO of the restaurant industry and tends to inspire the most intrigue in the kitchen, where the staff will scratch their heads and pitch various theories. What can you make of the young mother who fusses over every aspect of her six-year-old's meal and then forgets him at the restaurant? How about the blue-haired old woman who keeps trying to order a Manhattan from the wine list? Or the businessman who demands a curry dish at a Chinese restaurant? I'm still trying to figure out the sexy brunette who sat by herself and then tried to pay in Malaysian currency. The Anomaly is simply a manifestation of human nature at its most peculiar – entertaining, too, since the server is usually too puzzled to be offended.

The Dominatrix, on the other hand, is among the most feared of all abusive diners, mainly because in the Dominatrix's sick mind the gratuity is the rental fee for a dinner slave. Dominatrices tend – naturally! – to dominate everything at their table, including the other guests, and they act as if every other customer in your section is a lower priority than themselves. Not too long ago I almost fooled myself into believing I had successfully navigated the handling of such a person. However, it wasn't long before he was snapping his fingers and shouting out "Yo!!!" as if he were flagging down a hot dog vendor at Pac Bell Park. He informed me that he and his party were done with dinner and commanded that the plates be cleared. In fact, there were three or four people at the table still eating, and rather than protesting his imperial decree, they instead shoveled as much of their half-eaten meals into their mouths as possible before I could get to them. It was, of course, little surprise when he finally opened the floodgates and threw an all-out fit on learning that we were out of his choice of dessert. The Dominatrix often leaves you wondering, "Would this person own slaves if it hadn't been outlawed in 1865?"

The final category is one we all know well in one form or another and is easy to sum up. I like the term Miserable Asshole, namely because these people are assholes, and their mission is to make everyone miserable. Yes, they are the industry's version of pure evil, and they don't seem to come out so much to have a meal as to inflict their toxicity on others. Miserable Assholes will ruin not only a server's night but that of every customer in the vicinity as well. They are unable to enjoy themselves or their company in any way, and therefore every moment during which they are not distracted from their own vile presence is simply unbearable to them. As a result, they project their foulness onto others, usually their server.

In light of these dining hazards, the best servers have developed a keen sense for which angle to use with which personality. It is not so much a sense of social ability as a sense of social strategy that will determine servers' success in the baby-sitting/house slave/tightrope act that constitutes their profession, and indeed, many veteran servers have learned to effectively reduce the potential catastrophes to an infrequent mishap.

The show must go on

In addition to baby-sitting full-grown adults, defusing bundles of hostility, and fending off unwanted advances, servers are constantly struggling to overcome a wealth of bizarre and debilitating hurdles that differ from night to night but always manage to pile up. If customers had even an inkling of what was really occurring in the kitchen, they might be disposed to stand up and applaud when their food finally arrived, rather than, as is more likely, berate their server. "Your steak took 20 minutes, sir? Well, the prep cook just went blind in one eye, the owner's wife called to say she wants a divorce, the pantry is on fire, and the busser ... well, sir, we're not too sure about the busser."

Essentially, you are juggling on a tightrope, and while you're at it, the circus owner hollers up to inform you that the safety net has yet to arrive. Servers are held accountable for the end results, without regard to what's happening offstage. It is in this capacity, as the public face of a restaurant and potential scapegoat for whatever might go wrong there, that waiters truly earn their tips. On the mechanical end there are broken dishwashers, cranky credit card machines, and fickle plumbing. If you add to that the human elements – the owner's ulcer, the cook's coke habit, the busser's undiagnosed narcolepsy – it can often seem a wonder that meals are produced at all.

When I was 19, I worked in a pizza joint I called Ringling Brothers Pizza, for it truly was the greatest show on earth. Not only was it a total crapshoot as to which employees would bother to show up each night, but we also had this remarkable recurring tendency to run out of such useful items as cheese, dough, and pizza boxes. In fact, I can vividly remember one Thursday night when we were about to run out of pizza sauce in the middle of our dinner rush. As usual our manager headed to the nearby supermarket to plug the shortage. Time passed – 20, 30 minutes, no manager, no sauce. At this point all pizzas were on hold, and the customers were becoming unruly.

Finally, after 40 minutes, there was a knock at the back door, and we opened it to find a local police officer holding two shopping bags of pizza sauce under each arm. It turned out that our manager had decided to get all his shopping done in one fell swoop, so after stopping by Safeway, he headed downtown to score some crack. That obviously didn't pan out as well as he had expected, but lucky for us and our customers, one of the officers was nice enough to deliver the groceries and get us out of our jam. In the end, a few pizzas went out late, but they did go out. Once again, we had successfully navigated the tightrope.

Although I've worked in restaurants since I was 16, I have yet to experience the well-oiled restaurant mechanism of legend, and rumors of such establishments seem about as authentic as the legend of Atlantis. (Everyone has heard of such places, but no one ever seems to have actually worked in one.) Realistically, chaos is the most common element in the entire service industry, and the more a customer can relate to this, the smoother the sailing for all involved.

In the meantime

Oddly enough, the daily lunacy of the service industry has come to suit many of us well. Amid the chaos and the mania, there is much to be said for the spontaneity and liveliness of a decent waiting job. After all, at its very best, waiting tables can be like hosting a festive dinner party in which you not only meet new friends but also earn your rent in the process. Though waiting tables is rarely any sort of long-term career goal, it is at least a fascinating alternative to the "normality" of a nine-to-five job. So until we get signed onto a worthy music label or find a publisher for our first novel, until it is time to travel once again or finally get hired for that dream job ... well, I guess we'll just keep on waiting.

Charles Russo is a Bay Area writer and photographer. He can be reached at truent23@hotmail.com.