High School Never Ends — One Angry Waitress

It’s true what they say about high school being an enduring part of life: the same archetypes will keep showing up throughout your life no matter what you try to do to avoid them.

There is always going to be some form of that kid who no one but the teacher liked, you know the one. They tattled on everybody else way back then. But now you’re both adults and they work with you, and you’re not passing notes anymore, you’re trying to keep a job.

Sure, you might’ve waltzed in, ten minutes late, with a drink ticket still plastered to one cheek, but the boss really doesn’t need to know about it. Except now they do thanks to the tattletale, and you’re furiously trying to backpaddle, never really having developed the skill in the first place.

It’s a bar job, and in order to do it you occasionally need to get so drunk that you slide under the kitchen table and spend the night there, dreaming that you’ve never peered into a patron’s used pint glass and tried to determine whether it just contained beer with napkins shoved into it or actual vomit. And now you’re wondering why you never can just get off with detention in your adult years (though this might actually be what prison is).

There is also the popular kid that you did actually go to high school with (why didn’t you move further away?), still wandering in every now and then to tell you that she doesn’t know how she ended up the head of her department, it just happened, tossing her hair and smiling as you wonder if her skin always was like that because of voodoo. Meanwhile the only leg-up you have on her is that you still weigh the same thing you did back then (a hold you’re just perilously hanging onto).

Then there are the same sort of mean girls that you remember who pretend to want to know what else you do with your time. “I mean, you must be in school or something…” they say trailing off, with no sense that others might have feelings, (it seems they’ve sold theirs to the devil for something).

And then they order something ridiculous (because who wants to drink a Pina Colada in Edmonton in January?) as if the world owes them something with coconut rind. “Is it organic?” they ask, looking around them at a bar that could only be improved upon if it were leveled.

“Yeah, we source the coconut puree from Toronto.”

“Oh, that’s just lovely.”

Three Broken-Down-Golf-Carts down the road you’re watching her shove hair extensions into her table mates’ mouths (how does this monster still manage to have friends?) and berate them until they swallow.

Various jocks may make an appearance too, except now that we’re all adults and they so rarely have time for organized sports anymore, and you can take a little bit of comfort in the fact that they couldn’t catch you to shove you into a locker anymore. Sure, you still have to serve them, but life is a little bit better with the knowledge that their cocktail straw was up your nose.

So, it turns out that life is pretty much the same unless you’re the really weird kid that figured out how to turn phones into tiny, sentient beings and now you own your own island. But try your best to enjoy it, and the knowledge that at least you get to home at the end of the day and laugh about it, even if tomorrow you don’t have a job.