Waitressing Nightmares — One Angry Waitress

I suspect with most jobs that when you’ve have a bad day you get to go home afterwards and, unless you’re a sadist, try your best to forget about it for the evening. Waitressing is not like this, you go home, suck down a glass of wine and then think about the entirety of your evening while you sleep.

I started having waitressing nightmares when I was eighteen with my first serving job. I had assumed they were something that I alone did, my subconscious being the equivalent of an over-active, self-flagellating priest. Until one of the other girls explained to me that she’d had a dream the night in which she couldn’t seem to stop answering the phone with, “Good evening, Mountain Peach,” instead of pizza.

Mine run more towards nightmarish, with me running around naked (yet still wearing shoes, as if my seriousness over having decent shoes for the job has bled into my dreams) in a room full of people whose demands I cannot seem to keep up with. We are always out of something that’s very necessary, say French fries or every sort of beer. And everyone is very, very pissed at me.

A few years ago I served a woman who told me that she’d quit being a server about ten years beforehand. “Do you still have the dreams about it,” I asked, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

“Oh no,” she said, “You’re going to have those forever,” she said this too brightly, the way someone does when you ask them if your cancer is curable and they report sunnily that no, it’s terminal. “In my dreams we’re always out of condiments. And port for some reason.”

“Who drinks port anymore?”

“Right?!”

“Are you also naked in these dreams?” I wanted to know.

At this she’d wrinkled her eyebrows, “Why would you be naked at work?” as if the dreams always made sense, and I shrank away from her after that.

Sometimes I wake up upset that the dream has ended before I could fix things (as if there is a way to stop an angry, slightly-intoxicated-but-not-intoxicated-enough mob from lynching me in the dream world), and at other times it takes me a while to register that this wasn’t what happened last night (even if, the more I think about it, it looks like a pretty good facsimile). It’s a bit like going into work twice in a day and getting paid only once.

I picture myself in my eighties, leaping out of bed, thinking that I forgot a beer thirty years ago and that’s why the guy at table 4 seemed so unimpressed with me. After that I imagine I’ll run to wipe down the table, and realize that I’m still in my pajamas, and that I haven’t had to split a five down to the quarter in over a decade. It’s a weird take on the future, but I suppose, all things considered, it’s not really that bad.