(Back from out of town; sorry about the light posting.)
Another rant from a disgruntled waiter, this time with a book deal in the works. What is it about food service jobs that provokes such vociferous tirades on hipster blogs, all the sanctimonious posturing about how the way one treats waitresses is an infallible guide to one’s character, how customers who send food back deserve to get their entree with a healthy side of saliva? Sure, waitstaff are overworked and underpaid, but that hardly makes them unique, especially in an era where worker protections are being eroded across the board, and somehow I have yet to be warned that I’d better tip hotel cleaning staff or they’ll spit in my bed. All I can think is that a lot of upper-middle-class hipsters worked some kind of food service job at some point in their college careers and see their fellow servers as more worthy of consideration than those far less cool minimum-wage workers.
Lawrence Kestenbaum | 15-Jul-08 at 11:52 am | Permalink
All kinds of dark thoughts occur to a highly educated and credentialed person who works unloading trucks or emptying trash bins or delivering pizzas for a meager living. The fact that millions of other people do this kind of work for a lifetime only deepens the gloom.
I’ve never waited tables myself, but I imagine that people accustomed to abusing waiters are especially unhappy to find themselves on the receiving end.
Leah | 15-Jul-08 at 1:56 pm | Permalink
I can’t speak on all the other waiter blogs out there but I do have to stand up for the writer here, who’s book is an outcropping of his popular blog waiterrant.net. As a forty-year-old man who, despite having previous jobs, is basically a career waiter in NYC, this is definitely no hipster. Plus, his blog usually covers problems with various restaurant workers as much as customers, and more ofter just his general philosophizing about life.
Though I’d imagine a certain number of pages in his book devoted to bad customer behavior (and I admit that reading this stuff, as someone who knows how to behave, is pretty horrifying and funny at the same time), I think the tone of this now out-of-context list has more to do with Readers’ Digest than the original author.
Young Urban Amateur | 15-Jul-08 at 7:09 pm | Permalink
Meh, there’s a book deal involved; money is, of course, a significant cause of bloviation. Cf. the entire journalism industry.
Andy | 15-Jul-08 at 8:00 pm | Permalink
No one forces you to work as a waiter. If you don’t like it get another job. I’m sure there are plenty of people that would be happy to have it.
hector | 15-Jul-08 at 9:15 pm | Permalink
Actually, it is not that uncommon for a waiter/waitress to make upwards of $80,000 in an upscale restaurant; not to mention that most of it is “cash”.