The Transition from Waiter to Salesman

Every successful waiter knows what it's like to be under-appreciated.

That feeling of knowing that you'd do anything to please a total stranger is something that a career waiter can't just extract from his psyche like a skilled neurosurgeon. Many waiters find that they are able to make their living selling, but what is it that keeps a skilled waiter from making a respectable stipend as an actual salesman?

Salesmanship is a logical next step up from the base floor of "Occupational Order Taker." It seems that anyone who can establish him or herself as a waiter could have potential as a salesman, and what waiters do (if they enjoy being tipped) is make alluring recommendations to enhance their guests' experiences. If you suck at recommending dishes and beverages, you become an order taker. So in essence, what makes the occupations of seller and salesman different?

I've taken a long hiatus from regular restaurant work to actually DO sales, and I've since found it relatively unrewarding. The fact that family men, scholars, public servants, and circus folk can serve people and make a menial living and be treated similarly is both fantastic and comforting, but completely sucks balls. We all keep doing it however, because we find enough comfort in providing strangers dinner because it seems preferable to any other time-consuming, emotionally limiting professional endeavor.

That's why people with decent jobs still keep a couple shifts waiting tables on the weekends.

When a guest sits down at your table, he or she kind of understands that you are there because you HAVE to be, and that servitude isn't ever glamorous. When a person complains about a dish you didn't cook for them, they're generally innocuous about it because in essence it's not your fault.

I once knew a great lawyer who studied and worked hard to dominate her profession. She kept five shifts a week waiting tables because it was good money, and because it was comforting and equally tormenting. It ended up ruining her social life because the effort she put into selling was dominating her life as a good person in the legal profession. When an implacable ass-clown at one of her tables yelled at her on a busy night for messing up a slightly intricate order, she broke down in the back of the restaurant and swore she'd never come back. I remember asking her why she never cried in a courtroom for defending a family from the crazy heart-breaking rantings of a drunken father lying to save his shitty life, and to this day never got a comprehensive answer. Having left the waiting profession for good, she is doing much better.

Life sucks as a middleman. The true power of it is that you find a way to make your customer's experience worthwhile. When a customer complains, you tend to establish yourself as a professional when you empathize with them and work to fix their every trouble. Either that mentality drags you into a deep dark hole, or it lets you believe that eventually you will find redemption as a "good person."

Sales contains none of those ideologies. When you're selling a product, you're promoting value, gaining trust, and easing someone's mind. If you're falling short of any of these tasks, you're probably just a waiter.

Stuff I Drew at Work (Vol. 2)

Here's the next installment of "Stuff I Drew at Work."

I have a morbid fascination with lobsters. Because I find that they resemble giant undersea cockroaches that have mouths that look like vaginas, I find them quite terrifying. Despite that, they seem pretty defenseless. Their claws aren't that hard to get a rubber band onto, and they just sort of flop about until their undeserved fate as someone's dinner. Watching people eat them is another story--their shells and limbs are cracked and shattered while people suck the meat from inside their steaming carapaces.

All I'm saying is that if lobsters can't really defend themselves by means of having some sort of evolved ability to fire laser beams out of their antennae, they should at least grow large enough in size to be able to wield firearms and combat armor, stand on their tails, and stroll up onto our beaches to kick a little ass.

At least then I wouldn't feel so badly about eating them. It's this mindset that inspired my picture of the "Lobster Commandos."

Text; "Did someone order the surf n' turf?"

Stuff I Drew at Work

So I decided that when things get slow at work and I find myself standing around with my whole fist up my own ass, I'll do something productive for my awesome blog. Every so often, I'll be doing installments of "Stuff I Drew at Work."

Here's the first one!

Lobster - "No, YOU get in the pot."

A Long Time Coming

If you’re wondering why I haven’t posted any new restaurant tales in the last three weeks, you are probably reading this now for one of three reasons. Either you;

A) Think I’m a fantastic writer who deserves the leniency and undying devotion of an anonymous audience in order to support his craft
B) Live with your parents, are unemployed, and really have nothing else to do
OR
C) Really hate me and are wondering whether or not this next post is a device being used to announce or predict my own untimely death (such as a suicide note)

Great news, everyone!

I’ve just been injured and unable to work. I’m not dead after all!

I returned to work in the restaurant after ALMOST dying, and almost immediately found myself able to pick up where I last left off!

Here’s the next installment. Oh, and for those who picked letter ‘C,’ I’m really sorry to have disappointed you.

Disgusting, Unsanitary Vermin

If you’re a regular human being, you probably have a restaurant or bar (or even two or three of them, if you‘re me) that you really enjoy going to. These places are typically somewhere where you go to relax; you trust the cuisine, the atmosphere is ideal, and you are probably on a first-name basis with the people getting you loaded.

That said, there are certain things you may see when you are there which you are more likely to overlook.



Depending on your tolerance for the locale, you may adjust this particular preference to taste.



If you’re an established regular at that place, you probably wouldn’t send the whole meal back. After all, you’re on a first name basis with Hugo the owner, and his feelings would be pretty hurt if he knew you weren’t happy with your croque monsieur.

The situation changes however, when you’re not a regular patron of a particular restaurant. Not only will you look at everything under a microscope, you’ll be more encouraged to be critical (especially if you’re at a function on someone else’s dime).



In one particular instance, I was helping a fellow waiter of mine clear the tables at which his party was sitting. One of the patrons abruptly grabbed me by the arm.



Oh boy, here it comes...




Mice are nothing new to me. Mice tend to sneak into homes and restaurants all the time. They whiz around at lightning speed, constantly terrified to be discovered by humans. They’re the very reason why all restaurants are required to store their food at least six inches off of the ground at all times.

But most folks don’t know that.

Most people will see a mouse and then immediately classify the restaurant they’re currently in as a dilapidated cesspool of rank filth, unworthy to even be judged by 3rd ½ world standards.

So I decided to ease this woman into the realm of restaurant reality. Our conversation ensued as follows;

Woman: “Aren’t you going to do anything about it?!”
Me: “I don’t think so. That mouse is way too fast for me to even attempt to catch it. Best we can hope for is to let management know, set out a few more traps, and hopefully we’ll catch it by morning.”
Woman: “That’s not good enough. Do you pass health inspections here?”
Me: “Ma’am, not only do we pass government health inspections, we ace our monthly company inspections, which are much more rigorous than the FDA requires. I suppose if you had to wonder about the occasional mouse, let’s just assume that the mice conveniently hide when the inspectors show up.”
Woman: “That’s ridiculous.”

At this point, I decided that I should at least make the faux play at placating her. So I feigned concern.

Me: “Did you happen to see where the mouse went?”
Woman: “Yes! It ran that way.” (Points somewhere)
Me: “So you’re saying it ran away from you?”
Woman: “Yeah…”
Me: “So in that case, we’ve got nothing to worry about.”

With that, I turned and walked away with my stack of dirty dishes. I had a feeling this lady was infuriated with me and my color commentary, and that my incendiary words had inspired her to take her complaints to the next level. To my surprise, she didn’t mention the mouse to anyone else. The managers never caught wind, the server at her table was never told and as far as I know, the secret stayed between us.

This outcome could have been for several reasons. The first one that jumps to mind is that restaurant guests are fairly used to being placated. If they complain about something, restaurant staff are all pre-programmed to make sure that person gets whatever they need to buy their silence. When that doesn’t happen, the fragile illusion the customer has comes crashing down. When the realization surfaces that his or her complaints are falling on deaf ears, the customer will begin to take a tally of what they like about that establishment, knowing that the restaurant staff are not necessarily motivated to bend to the whims of the customer’s grievance terrorism.

The Stanley Cup Story

I've been putting off telling this tale for some time, so I figured I'd better publish it before it got too late/I forgot it.

A friend of mine who works in the kitchen at an undisclosed restaurant told me about some relatively inhumane conditions he once experienced. He regaled me with the intricacies of slaving away in the unfurnished armpit of "Satan's Ass, Indiana" where the Fahrenheit temperature rivals Stephen Hawking's IQ.

In the restaurant business, food is typically required to be cooked. As a restaurant owner, you would do well to understand that factor and then take care of your kitchen employees...unless the nearest air conditioner was further away than the nearest alternative form of employment. If that was the case, you’d have nothing at all to worry about.

But if your employees were melting (And you hadn’t happen to have Frosty the Snowman working the grill or the Wicked Witch of the West on the steamer), you’d take action to ensure your kitchen’s steady success. As a kitchen supervisor, you would do this by granting your kitchen prospects their minor wishes!



One of the line cooks at my place of employment had caught wind of a rare and secretive moment; the Stanley Cup was being presented for a private party in the next building over.

Because the local hockey team had recently won this highly coveted trophy (and being the die-hard hockey fan that my cook friend was), there was simply no way in this plane of existence or the next that he was going to let this opportunity slide right by him.

So he nonchalantly asked for a ten-minute break.





So my cook friend left on his pilgrimage. He would not fail.



Now I can’t really imagine what lengths someone would go to in order to get the one thing he or she wants more than anything. I wasn’t particularly clear on the details of how my cook friend was able to gain entry to a private event and lay his hands on something that less than 1% of the population of the Unites States and Canada get to ever be in an enclosed room with. So I decided to fabricate everything after this sentence.

My cook friend approached the door man in his greasy apron and told him flat out he was here for the event. The doorman asked for his name so that he could look it up on the guest list. My cook friend gave him a fake name, and when the doorman looked down at the list to search for it, my friend whipped out a concealed frying pan and bonked him upside the head.



As soon as the doorman fell to the floor unconscious, my cook friend proceeded to step over his body and make his way into the room.

Upon entry, my cook friend spied a foreign dignitary with a monocle and holding a fancy cocktail, chatting with other well-to-dos about how barbaric hockey was. My cook friend walked up to the dignified gentleman and made a wildly inappropriate comment about his grandmother’s cleavage, causing not only several old-timey exclamation such as “well I never!” and “I do say, good sir!” but also for the gentleman’s monocle to fall dramatically into his drinking glass. In the ensuing confusion, my friend grabbed a bottle of exorbitantly expensive champagne which had been displayed prominently at the small table’s center and made a wild dash toward the Stanley Cup.

After roundhouse kicking a security guard out of the way, my friend uncorked the champagne with his right eyelid and without haste, emptied it into the Stanley Cup. In one smooth motion, he hoisted the cup over his head and dumped its contents directly into his face.



And that is how my cook friend was able to hang out with the Stanley Cup and somehow not get arrested and fired.

The Waiter Test

So it’s been a while since I decided to update this blog. I’m not okay with that. But here it is.

I've got some news, however;

Recently, the management at the restaurant where I work decided to implement a thorough test for all of its current employees. For many of the new hires, the test was significantly difficult.





For the rest of us, the test was incredibly easy.



Although it broke my heart to watch the newer portion of the staff racking their brains to find the complete compendium of ingredients in the lobster melt, I was infinitely appreciative that nobody actually asked me to take the test yet. Whether that was intentional or not, I was ultimately grateful that the management didn’t need to have documented proof that I had the ability and the know-how to sell a shitty bottle of wine to a throng of old ladies.



The saddest part of all of this was that someone eventually found out that I never took the test. So they sat me down and put one in front of me.

How bad could it be?



I was determined to bang the test out at quickly and exit the restaurant at my earliest opportunity. I trained dozens of employees throughout my tenure. I showed plenty of waiters how to operate terminals and serve food. I taught countless men and women about the inner workings of kitchen etiquette. How hard could this test have possibly been?



I was shit out of luck. I didn’t know the majority of the answers. The information would have come more easily to me if I had slept in that day and dreamt the answers up. So I scribbled in a bunch of subtly fictitious answers.

As if on 3-day cue, my manager approached me to screen the answers to my test.



I was so definitely boned.

…Or so I thought.



What the hell...

...They believed me.

And I'm still employed.

Beringer - White Zinfandel

In many instances, there's a wine on every restaurant's list that doesn't really deserve to be there. It's like warning someone that the knife you're about to hand them is sharp. You know it could cut you if you misuse it, but that's the only thing its meant to do.

In this case, I have spared you all a decent post because I've been attempting to start the newest ongoing joke in the restaurant/service business.

In case you're curious, take a look for yourself and invite your happy self on down to the facebook group I've created to tout this new mockery of culinary libation.

...if you have the guts.

The jokes begin with "Beringer - White Zinfandel" and end in a slogan that you, as the potential VP of marketing, have designed. The catch - you know your product is mediocre. Have fun!