perspective

i found this today on my sister's computer, a little essay i wrote well over a year ago. being that i have written next to nothing lately, it made me feel good to read something i produced which i actually kind of like. also, my current job hasn't been going so well lately, but this sure did put that into perspective. my job is a fucking holiday in the sun compared to just about every other i've held, and i'd do well to remember that more often. so here we go...in the computer i titled it 'experience', but that's a bite off martin amis, so i'll just go without one here.

For me, there are a few select activities that rise above all others when it comes to how serious an aversion I have toward them, and how they have consistently lived up to my distaste for them in the history of me. Moving and Oral Reports are definitely one and two, and at number three, we have Starting a New Restaurant Job.

“So, how was your first day?” This is a question posed to me by Dennis, a curly haired, slightly pudgy waiter, and it catches me completely off guard, mostly because I have been here for six hours, and he is first person to speak to me directly. It is almost as if I have suddenly materialized in the room, having previously been invisible. Unfortunately, he has paused now, in the midst of a strongly whistled rendition of ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’ to acknowledge me less out of good will and more out of a somewhat sadistic desire to drive home my sense of unworthiness. Not yet realizing the trap, I clear the cobwebs out of my throat to give him an answer.

“It was fine,” I croak, lamely. Dennis, only too eager to interpret my crusty delivery as shellshock, summons all the condescension of a frosty second-grade teacher to a less than brilliant child, and says, “Well, it was really busy today.” He moves on without waiting for a response, carrying his inane whistling and hyper-conscious preening over to the service station. Despite Dennis’ claim of busyness, I now recall the numerous times in which I observed him eating bagels, or having a good inside laugh with the gang at the service bar, or whistling as he breezed, carefree, through the dining area. Yes, this is clearly a jab at me, and not the show of sincere interest I had initially hoped.

In his absence, I am left to reflect on the following, which helps take my mind off of being the least regarded person in the room. In the industry of service of which I have been a part for the past 12 years or so, I have realized that all things are relative, and anyone who fails to realize this is undoubtedly infused with a crippling misconception of his or her own self worth, at least in this capacity. This, I can recognize from our last six hours together, is the case with Dennis and every one of his fellow staff members. For individuals of this stripe, their perception of their job holds it as something that they and only a few other select persons on Earth are capable of performing, and as a result, my appearance in their midst this morning is an insult on the order of a surgical team finding out that their extra set of hands for that brain surgery is going to be crazy Willie who lives down at the bus terminal. Their reception of me is chilly at best; at worst they refuse to even look at me, with any verbal communication taking the form of a barked command or passing comment designed specifically to illuminate my incredible stupidity in thinking I am worthy of being in their way.

I have a half hour until I am scheduled to leave, and it is clear that there will be no goodwill ambassadorships on my behalf, so I let my mind wander, rolling over the many inceptions of the term “busy” in the arena of restaurant service. It is true that they did a nice brunch this morning; the restaurant was full for hours and there was always a wait of ten or fifteen minutes at the door. But the sort of “busy” that Dennis has implied, the sort that might spook an infidel such as myself, well, that is a horse of an entirely different color.

It is true, in my opinion, that waiting tables is all about experience, although my definition and application of that experience is almost certainly different than the kind a boss wants to see on a resume, although to my thinking, they are very much related. For me, experience has taught me that once I hit a certain level of suffering in a particular place, I should never again obtain a position where I might experience something similar, and if for some reason, the initial warning signs are missed or hidden, to make for the exit as soon as they appear. Everything else is just a matter of doing, whether it’s picking up wine knowledge or learning a new computer system. The real experience comes in when it’s time to decide whether the situation is going to suck hard enough to preclude me doing a good job.

My bar for “busy” was set at a restaurant in New York City where I worked for four months over the previous spring and summer. It was less like working and more like indentured servitude, mainly because the flaws in the management left the entire situation without parameters, and at any given moment one was subject to being impressed into working a double or triple shift or giving a pint of blood, or going down into the basement and using your body as a support beam; whatever it was going to take to keep the place afloat for one more night or day. Although I was aware pretty much from moment one that this wasn’t an ideal situation, other factors at the time made my retention of this job somewhat necessary. Namely, I was involved in that precarious equation, which I suspect is familiar to quite a few New Yorkers, in which the margin between the cost of living and income is extremely thin.

Anyhow, the folks running this place were nice enough people, they just didn’t have the foggiest idea what they were doing. On most days, we subordinates acknowledged to ourselves that clocking in wasn’t simply the start of a shift, but an offering of our bodies and our sanity up to whatever horrors might be in store that day. These were always formidable, but at the time it seemed that the day would go forward, and the bullets would be dodged. At the very least, lodged in uncritical areas. Either way, we would all survive, and if we were particularly banged up, it was nothing that a few drinks couldn’t erase.

This particular day, however, promised early on to bring with it obstacles that might at best be insurmountable, and at worst, might succeed in doling out a nervous breakdown to each and every one of us. Every Sunday, the restaurant did a large and extremely unpredictable brunch. Aside from being one of the few restaurants in the neighborhood, it was also in a park, which meant that there were multiple external factors that could play into the volume we would experience. There were also multiple factors on our end, such as the aforementioned lack of organization on the part of the management, a tendency towards irresponsibility in the staff, and a less than fully equipped building. The day in question was Father’s Day, a beautiful, soon to be scorching Sunday in June, and by 9:30am, my armpits had already made short work of my deodorant. The building, charmingly, was too old for air conditioning, although I never did figure out exactly what that meant. (If our building, from the 1930’s, was too old for AC, wouldn’t that mean that the majority of buildings on Manhattan island shared the same fate?) Either way, our only ventilation came from ceiling fans, or occasional cross-breezes, which are about as sparse in Manhattan as parking spaces.

With 200+ reservations already on the books, we also had a dining room that now included a large expanse of last minute outdoor seating, which was conveniently located about five hundred feet from the nearest service station, bar or kitchen. The chef, who was last seen the night before, buying cocaine in a dive bar down the street, had failed to show up and was not answering his phone. We were also down two servers and a busboy, not to mention the two high school girls we typically relied upon to sit in the basement and brew carafes of coffee, when they weren’t reading US Weekly or text messaging on their cellular phones. The latter duo had informed us of their absence, as they undoubtedly had previous holiday engagements with their CEO fathers, which precluded their faux show of “employment”. The management had not replaced them, maybe because they had no one to replace them with, or perhaps because they failed to see the urgency of having someone to press a button on a coffee maker. However, as the person who would now have to find a way to descend three flights of stairs into the basement every ten minutes and start a new pot of coffee, only to run back up, try and accomplish something in the three minutes or so it took to brew, before returning to pick it up, I felt they would be sorely missed.

The other three had most likely recognized that the pain and suffering which would comprise the days labor would be in no way compensated by whatever grim monetary denomination we would take home. I myself had desperately entertained the idea of bailing out, but my rent was due, and my conscience was somewhat burdened by the idea of sleeping while my friends tried to pull this off without me. We needed everyone we could get; even crazy old Willie from the bus terminal would have been welcomed with open arms.

Of the staff that had shown up, two of them hadn’t slept in days, due to some unfortunate habits they were indulging at the time. Another was useless when given more than three tables at once, or “slammed”, as we call it in the biz. The other three of us, two servers and a bartender, were strong and had the necessary skills, but at this point, it was plain that this day was not going to be about the typical things that comprise a good waiter or waitress, but about sheer mental fortitude and perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds. It was also, to a degree, going to be about the clock hopefully continuing to move forward and bring us to four o’clock, when we would technically not have to wait on any more people. It was certainly not going to be about eating bagels and hooting and hollering in the service station to make those around us feel inferior, however, since it was quite obvious to everyone who would be getting the short end of this stick. There were going to be a hell of a lot of unhappy people between now and then, and they were going to be popping out at us at every turn like the mechanical ghosts in a low-fi haunted house.

Right before we opened the doors that day, (in retrospect it seems incredible that we even opened the restaurant under those circumstances), to the waiting crowd (yes, crowd) that had gathered for the first seating, due to the utter lack of discretion on the part of our nineteen year old hostess, I met up with Seamus, one of the cooks, in the basement. Seamus was in culinary school, and had the misfortune of being assigned our shambles of a restaurant as his internship.

He looked at me; sweat dripping from his stringy black hair and bushy eyebrows, his face a mask of pure anxiety. “So we’re really going to open?” He asked, incredulous; he was well aware of at least some of the serious disadvantages we were working with.

“Yeah,” I told him, shrugging. In a contest to see who was more jaded, I took Seamus out in straight sets at the quarterfinal round. “We’ve got 250 on the books, we don’t really have a choice.”

“Jesus,” Seamus said, in a half-whisper. “This is going to be a clusterfuck.”

I nodded at him, sadly. I knew that later on, when I again met up with Seamus, to smoke our post-clusterfuck cigarettes, he would likely be far worse for the wear. I, too, knew I wouldn’t last much longer at that location, as it was simply not worth it. But I viewed the situation less as scarring and more as experience.

This is certainly an extreme example, and it’s only to someone’s credit that they have managed to avoid such conditions in their job experience, but it does serve to illustrate my point that anyone who has spent any time serving people food and drink has their horror stories and is almost certainly battle-tested. And so when Dennis, my bagel eating, excessively swaggering friend, working a well-attended brunch at a well-organized, well-staffed restaurant, used his opportunity to make me feel less uncomfortable to instead patronize me, I decided right then that I would not be returning to take that job. It was not a decision based on my fear of a clusterfuck of any kind, but rather based on my disinterest in spending forty hours a week in the presence of a bunch of stuck-up nitwits, who would eventually allow me access to their gang, but who would always remain shitty people, even when they pretended to be nice to me. And that, my friends, is experience.

pod city, baby.

things have been pretty fucking wonderful for me lately, but at the same time, altogether weird, and i will tell you why. i have spent pretty much my entire adult life being uprooted and moving around and feeling as if i had no real sense of stability or continuity, and that intensely appeals to me because i have always sort of felt that stability and continuity were overrated. but now i have this uproot-ion(as in "uprooshun") and it is all of those things, yet now i also have this other thing, which is by definition stability and continuity. and it is BLOWING MY MIND. or at least making things really interesting.

the thing i feel the most detatched from is my own little previously compact world, and i can't help but assume that this is a good thing. i always assume that when you are being forced to do something that you normally would avoid because it's more difficult than your day-to-day, that you are gaining something pretty fucking important from it. and you can call me a tree-hugger or whatever. i ain't ever hugged no tree.

i miss this blogging stuff. i think i'm gonna have to make an effort to do it more often.

and i refuse to sleep on syracuse. i think they have this march madness thing on lock, but i suppose we will only really know the truth about that on thursday.