The Service Snake
Part I: The Restaurant Rattler
The service industry is soul-crushing and demanding. The Poor and Educated know this. It is venomous and constricting.
I’ve spent almost all of my working life in a service industry job. In fact, I’ve only ever held service industry jobs. My first job was a single day strapping customers into racecars to the speedway experience. I spent half a decade in a restaurant. After that, I moved to grocery stores where I worked for the last 3 and half years. I’ve held positions from busboy to management positions. My experience is varied from all the many different positions I’ve held. The one I was in the longest was as a waiter.
As a waiter at a BBQ restaurant in Texas, I was paid minimum wage. Not the $7.25 an hour minimum wage. The waiter minimum wage. $2.13 an hour. Somehow restaurants are allowed to severely underpay their staff with the expectation that the customer will make up for it with a tip. The owner gets to offload their expenses onto the already paying customer for no other reason than it is what is expected and a social norm. Seems to me the restaurant owners are getting a subsidy from their customers.
The restaurant industry is like a rattlesnake. You can hear the rattle shaking, warning you that you’re about to get bit. Little things that warn you that something is about to get you. Small inconsiderate jabs from a customer criticizing your choice of degree. A manager getting pissy because the sidework wasn’t done the way they wanted it to. Then it strikes.
The day before Thanksgiving 2019 I was working at the restaurant. Holidays at a big restaurant are stressful and busy. That day was no different. We had an hour wait and a half hour ticket time. For the season, we were doing alright. I had a full five-table section the whole day. Toward the end of the shift, I got saddled with a walk-up party of 14 which was nothing new for us. There was a man who sat at the end of the table who was clearly the leader of the family. I am a smaller man, and I was especially so then. This man was pushing 6’6” and looked like he could be a starting lineman on any NFL team. I was half his size. When they first sat down, he was kind and joking with me about how long they had been waiting. Nothing to be afraid of. Things went pretty normal, I got them their drinks, took their food order told them about our ticket time, and brought them over some bread to snack before the food came out. The man would make slight comments every time I walked by while waiting for their food. Little jabs of irritancy about having to wait for his food after waiting to get sat. About 25 minutes into their 30-minute wait, I was walking by with some dirty plates from another table. The man grabbed me by the arm and yanked me towards him. He threatened to “rip my arms off and beat me with them” if I walked by again without bringing his food. I was shaken. His wife laughed and told him to “stop and let the poor kid go”. I pulled away mortified. I had been assaulted at work. I had been bitten.
I went up to my manager and told him what had just happened. Foolishly I was expecting my manager to go talk to the man and kick him out. Workers should not be getting assaulted by customers at their place of work. His response was,” Well, you better get his food to him.” The assault was the bite, the response from my manager was the venom. The bite was shocking, but the venom festered and stung. The comment wasn’t made as a joke. It was very matter-of-fact. Very serious. A condemnation of how quickly I was getting food out to my tables. There was no support. No backing me up. No shock at how a customer was treating one of his employees. Only criticism of the one who had been assaulted.
It became very clear to me where my manager’s priorities lay. It wasn’t with the employee who saw me multiple times a week over several years. It was with the money coming from the check that the customer would pay. It was with appeasing our Scrooge of an owner. My mental and physical well-being was much further down the priority list.
I have a dozen other stories similar to this one. A customer lashes out at a worker who was doing everything they could to appease them only for the worker to go to a manager who should protect them to be stung by a manager who does nothing about it. I have had managers who have stepped up and stood up for their employees. They are the managers that make life bearable at restaurants. However, I’ve seen far more that are willing to toss their employees under the bus to make a customer happy who in turn appeases a greedy owner.
I was bitten more than once by the Restaurant Rattler. An embarrassing amount of times. Eventually, I was bitten one too many times and left the rattlesnake in the desert while I made my way to a different environment. I survived my encounters with the Restaurant Rattler. I know some continue to fight with it. Some have not survived. It was with the help of others that I managed to escape. Thankfully I had coworkers who were willing to suck the venom out of my wounds and keep me alive.
The restaurant industry is dangerous and venomous. There are major issues with how all workers in the restaurant industry are treated by customers, management, and owners. Those issues are compounded by owners who are stingy in paying a fair wage and having to rely on customers who willingly mistreat them for their livelihood. It was by banding together and supporting each other that we survived. Waiters, bussers, cooks, hosts, dishwashers, and more have to rely on each other for support and well-being. Almost like a union.