Forget It — One Angry Waitress

Recently, on the dregs of a Friday night, at the point when we just wanted everyone to go home, a patron came in and began telling myself and the bartender that he knew how we should run the pub. He figured that there should be girls behind the bar, a security guard at the door and scantily clad women everywhere—the very thing that would cause me to quit my job in a second—at this point I’ve been doing this job so long that if you so much as tell me to take off my sweater, I’ll unclip my apron and walk out laughing.

I’d seen the guy around for years, he was a neighbourhood resident that used to come in with his girlfriend who was a very open, aging call-girl that drank double vodka slimes who, judging by the way he now sits alone at the bar, had finally had enough of him too.

There had been a time that we had the sort of owner who forgot that he too had daughters, and we had to wear these ridiculous short skirts. I was embarrassed to go to work back then, and even more embarrassed to leave it if I had to be somewhere and had forgotten to bring a change of clothes. I can’t for the life of me remember why I put up with it.

At work, I am there to bring you food and beverages and I might even smile when I do it, but the service stops there. I suspect that this is widely understood because of the general sourness on my face (at this point, it’s like crossing your eyes: your mother was right, your face can freeze like that), that no one has so much as laid a hand on my shoulder in years.

I don’t miss the places that I worked in my early twenties, where the waitresses wore mini dresses in January (even when the heating was questionable and the oysters froze to the buffet table) and we all stomped around in shoes that no one wants to spend an eight-hour shift in. Power to you if you want to curl your hair before noon and be helped into a dress for the lunch rush, but I’m enjoying the rolled out of bed look these days.

There are a lot of things I don’t like about my job, but I do love that it’s not a whole bunch of leaning low over tables and giggling. Something I doubt I would’ve ever been much good at anyway.