15 days from today I will have been working at the IR for 3 years. 3 whole years of my life asking "soup or salad?," taking crap from strangers, essentially begging for money by letting them give me crap. Add on my previous job and it's actually 4 years of serving all together.
Having worked at a couple different restaurants and 4 different IRs, I have noticed that the, shall we say, "morality" of the workforce is never impressive. I am not claiming to be above this myself, this job makes me racist, bitter, bitchy and hope that horrible things happen to rude people after they leave. It makes me want to drink and it makes me want to blog about how much I hate it. But I have to wonder, was I already this type of angry, bitchy, snarky person, or has 4 years in the trenches made me this way?
Among our coworkers we see abundant drug use both in and out of the restaurant, excessive drinking, promiscuity, infidelity, gossiping, seeking of power, seeking of destruction, apathy, rage, and every other morally objectionable action and emotion one can conjur. So did we come into this place a bunch of drunk angry sluts? Or are we victims of the industry?
It's the classic 'nature vs nurture' debate. As the typical Libra, I am going to shoot down the middle and say it's a little of this, a little of that. I for one know that I have always had a tendency towards being a gossip (though I try not to be a malicious one, I think of it as sharing information and try not to hurt people in the process), but working in a place where everyone is constantly doing crazy shit that's gossip worthy makes my natural tendency towards talking shit go into over drive.
Somehow I think at the core of it is the fact that we are employed as slaves basically. Our job is to let people order us around and treat us like crap all in the hopes of getting a tip. We are often degraded, demeaned, insulted and harassed, and we are expected to endure it with a smile. This can take even the nicest most good-natured person and turn them into a fucking bitch, at least while they are on the clock. So what about the kitchen staff and the bussers and the managers? They don't deal with the guests the same way the servers do. But they still feel the sting. Bussers get shitty tips from servers, cooks get yelled at, managers have to fix everything that gets fucked up, which makes them see us all as fuck-ups. It's a vicious cycle.
But hold on here. Am I really saying that working in a restaurant will turn Pollyanna into a cokehead slut? I don't know, maybe. I just have to wonder that aside from the obvious answer that restaurants don't drug test, why do most of the people we work with smoke like fiends and drink 6 nights a week. Or fuck anyone or anything who will sit still. Or make it their personal mission to make everyone around them feel like shit. Or act like they are better than you. Or write spiteful blogs that they would NEVER want to be read by the people they talk about?
I am not talking about anyone too specifically here, except maybe those like BM or super server who would never read this. We are all different people than we were before we worked in a restaurant, and although we can say we "learned a lot" from it, probably no one can say it's made them a better person.
Lets take super server for example. Before she worked here, was she a know-it-all who took herself incredibly seriously? Not form what I've heard. At her previous jobs, did she alienate everyone around her by acting like she was the shit because she followed all the rules? I doubt it, mostly because your average job doesn't have 5,000 rules like we do, and especially not ones that are so easy to break, and so inconvenient to follow. My guess is that she is just a perfectionist who ended up working a job where perfection is not possible. There is the "right" way to do something to make the management happy, the "right" way to do it if you want to make the most tips, and the "right" way to do it if you want it to be easy. Because she wants so badly to be the best, she realized she could either please the management, or have her co-workers like her. And she chose to please the management. She became the kind of person you feel like you can't trust not to "tell on you" for doing something "wrong." She became a brown noser and an enemy to her peers, and I hardly think that is who she wanted to be.
So, are you the same person you were before you entered the industry? If you were plunked down into a more "normal" line of work, would you fit in with the workforce, or would you stand out as some kind of degenerate, people wondering why you are so bitter. Would you be surprised if your coworkers weren't all drinking every night after work, that they didn't get pleasure from your demise, that they didn't all hate their job. Would that seem "weird" to you?
I surely hope I get the chance to find out.
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