What I Learned This Summer

It has been AGES since I last wrote. This is not for lack of horrifying/awkward/hilarious things happening to me. No indeed, my life has continued to be a mixed bag of such events. However I simply did not have the time/motivation. My boss at the club decided to start scheduling me 4 nights a week aka ALWAYS friday/saturday/sunday nights till close so I had three nights off and would always be with my gorgeous friends as I am soon to leave them for school. Also my inability to say no to people meant I was stuck at the club until after 10pm every night I worked. Also also Ten Chimneys got crazy so I had no time to write while at my desk as my ear was glued to the phone.

BUT I am now done with both internship and work and want to share all the things I learned this summer:

1. I am really good at being polite to people.

2. Answering a telephone for 8 hours a day is why some people go coo-coo-bananas in offices. It is so frustrating sitting babysitting a phone while everyone else gets to talk/have fun/go to the bathroom/drink coffee/eat food.

3. I can carry big heavy waitressing trays of food.

4. With the help of google maps, I can navigate anyone to the inner depths of southern Wisconsin.

5. People will not give you zip code unless specifically prompted to do so.

6. Going out with your co-workers is rarely a wise decision. Just go home to bed.

7. Given a bullhorn and large orange baton I am really good at parking cars.

8. I can operate a walkie-talkie.

9. I know what Gnocchi is.

10. I am much better at serving trays full of beer than of food.

11. I am a master at apologizing.

12. I need a cup of coffee to function properly in the morning.

13. Entitled people are in all walks of life and are equally frustrating to deal with.

14. The actress Laura Linney is super nice in real life.

Some fun math from the summer:

Interning full time = 37.5 hours per week or 412.5 hours total

Working part time = 22 hours per week or 242 hours

For a grand total of = 59.5 hours per week or 654.5 hours spent being polite/gracious/running my ass off or answering a telephone.

Telephone calls answered for Ten Chimneys: 1,063

Tour reservations made from those calls: 532 aka saying the same scripted thing 532 times

Informational calls answered: 272 aka answering the same questions 272 times

All of this boiled down to be about 5 additional lines on my resume.

16 hours aka the amount of time I spent at Ten Chimneys as a PAID employee after my internship was over.

AKA all of this was WORTH IT times a hundred.

not my real life

"Not my real life" - what I repeat to myself over and over in my head/under my breath while waitressing these days.





The country club has successfully broken my spirit leaving me crying in the wait station multiple times/days this week. The tears were for many reasons stemming predominantly from being completely overwhelmed with tables/special food requests/lack of knowledge of menu and computer system/being passive aggressively reprimanded by the manager/lack of sleep aka the general failure of my waitressing attempts this week. I don't do failure well. What's the point of doing something not to the best of your ability, I say.





While being in a state of pre-breakdown, ridiculous things continue to happen to me/around me:


-I was serving drinks at a 50th wedding anniversary party and the old man gave me a hug when I gave him his coke that lingered too long and then when he pulled away his hand grazed my boob. And I didn't even get tipped. God dammit.





-One of waiters was fucking up so bad that the head chef said he couldn't have any more tables so he sat in the waitstation the rest of the night. And got paid the same amount of money as me. Maybe I need to stop teetering on the edge of complete failure and just allow myself to slip entirely into the abyss.





-We now administer detailed comment cards to the members of the club so that they can rate us. Our boss then puts all the data into the computer and posts a weekly service rating of all of us in the wait station. It's like the god damn stickers for good behavior system in my 2nd grade class.





Ergo I cope by chanting 'this is not my real life'

STELLA!

Last night I took drink orders at a party from 6:30pm - 10:30pm. Straight.

I stopped for 30 minutes to drink some water and take away empty glasses. I took trays of 12 beers with some wine glasses mixed in back and forth from the bar to the party pausing only to beg someone to open the door for me. I learned to tell Sierra Nevada, River West Stein, Sprecher Special Amber, Spotted Cow, Stella Artois and Miller Lite apart by color. I kept losing the people who ordered Stella and subsequently got to yell out "Stella" multiple times ala Street Car Named Desire. I made $60 in tips that I had to split with the girl serving the food.

Lesson learned: I make a significantly better bartender than a waitress.

I am not a janitor

"I am not a janitor": what I wanted to scream when the hostess turned to me and asked me if I wanted to clean up the old man vomit all over the patio at the club, along with "of course not you crazy girl-who WANTS to clean up vomit?" Don't pretend like you are being nice or accomodating when you ask me if I want to do it, really what you are saying is "Hey you are being paid and as a waitress are lower on the employee hiearchy than me so get a mop and clean that shit up because you are too nice to refuse like the other employees." God dammit.

Also "I am not a mind reader": so when you mumble what you want/don't want on your burger and when I repeat it back to you (or at least what I think you said) and you nod your head don't be surprised if it is not correct. Oh and by all of sudden becoming completely articulet when I bring out the wrong burger just pisses me off so why don't you try annunciating your request the first time instead of pissing me and the kitchen off, eh? Jeez.

Lastly "I am not in high school anymore": ergo I don't want to listen to your high school problems fellow employees. So take your "oh my gods" and "I can't believe its" and the whole "I'm only to going to do exactly what you ask of me and not try to help you out one iota even if you are clearly struggling and I'm doing nothing" attitude and get the hell away from me. And stop pretending to me shocked and offended by my off-color language/bad mood. I'm a waitress and by the time I get to the club I've been interning aka being super polite for 8 hours already and am a tad bit tired/frustrated.

she can't help how adorable she is

Precursor: this story is not nearly as good written down as it doesn't include the "oh my god I like to flip my hair and sound idiotic" voice that I so love to imitate.

I waitress with a girl who is a self-proclaimed adorable girl that everyone loves (she is 19 years old going on 15 I'd say). When I say self-proclaimed I literally mean I was in her physical presence when she said this, "I don't know, I think it's like just that I'm really pretty and nice so boys get these crushes on me really easily and I'm like I don't know what to do because I'm too nice to be like mean to them." YEAH. I mean how does one react to a person that says things like that? I just walked away, I see denial of her existence in my reality as the best way to keep an optimistic view of the world.

It gets better.

She spent this entire week subjecting me to her gushing about how attractive the host is. (Sidenote: he isn't that attractive. He is tall but he is not rugged/lumberjacky aka there is no way he could fix faulty pipes or cut down a tree. But he is quite funny so he is one of the two people that make waitressing bareable.) Literally the moment he walks away she stops mid-sentence of whatever inane thing she was telling me and says every single time "oh my god his ass is so hot" or "oh my god can you believe how cute he is" or "oh my god seriously how cute is his butt?" I respond with indifferent mumbles and walk away. I will not indulge such silly behavior.

Up until recently I hadn't said anything against her to Hunter aka the male host with the alleged nice ass because he seemed to enjoy the attention/think she was in fact as adorable as she declared herself to be. This was quite frustrating for me as I very much wanted someone to make fun of her with. Well what happened recently is this; she especially pissed me off one day so when she left the waitstation I starting ranting about her i.e. "I'm annelise and I'm adorable oh my god everyone loves me what am I to do, I'm so cute" barf. Well this is when Hunter laughed and started also making fun of her. It was delightful. So now I have a fellow sarcastic person to make fun of people with and it makes this waitressing a little bit more tolerable.

it's Friday Friday

Today I successfully managed to forget my socks at home so had to rush from the internship to my house to change super fast (in my haste I manage to stub my toe, knock some things over and liter my room with clothing/stuff) and run out the door to get to work. Half way to work I thought I forgot my name tag, resulting in a 5 minute frantic phone call to my brother and search of my purse, only to realize it was in my pocket. All of this adds up to hopefully convey a certain frantic/stressed out mind. But it is Friday so I put that most awesomely bad song on my iPod, rolled down the windows and blasted that shit two times on my drive to work.

Emotions felt when listening to "Friday"
1. Annoyed at the auto-tuned awfulness of it all
2. Stupid as the lyrics say nothing but simply stating obvious facts lik 'tomorrow is Saturday'
3. Ridiculously happy as it is so bad it makes me giggle incessantly
4. Like dancing as its simplicity is so damn catchy that I can't help but jump up and down
5. Embarassed that I ultimately really like it (shamed)
6. Finally just happy like how Robin Sparkles makes me happy-so kitchy/awful/basic that one can't help but revel in the possibilites to make fun of it

For all of these reasons; naturally I then had "Friday" stuck in my head while walking into work. And being me, I was singing it, which then caused the two gingers I work with to start singing it too since they love/hate it as well. Everyone else looked at us in disdain (sidenote moral: gingers just know what is good quality entertainment).

As the night progressed one of my closing duties was to check the garage door was closed and it is in a fenced in area blocked from view by everyone. Ergo when one of the gingers aka Jenny showed me where it was we closed the door and had a mini dance party while singing 'Friday'.

Then we got cut early so we went to a bar down the road, got beers and bitched about work/talked about her impending wedding (I swear I draw gingers and the engaged like moths to a flame).

Twas a lovely Friday evening.

waitressing sucks (shocker)

Although last night I was in quite a ranty-type mood over the waitressing I feel quite indifferent about it all at this point. Ok well just one quick observation/rant: by far the worse part about being a waitress is not shockingly enough the bitchy women snapping their fingers at you for attention and the snooty men expecting you to remember some overly complex drink (put down that vodka gimlet with 2 olives and a lime and be a man and order a glass of fine whisky or scotch on the rocks-that i will remember). The worst part about waitressing is the co-workers. There are of course a few stellar people I enjoy working with, but for now let's just forget about those lovely people and focus on the shitty ones. If they are not just standing around being useless or making a fucking mess (put your damn dishes on the dirty dishes tray NOT in front of the computer, gah!) they are bitching about how we can't leave yet. Hey what if you stop complaining and actually DO the work and then we could go home, what a novel concept. Or there is just mass miscommunication between what actually needs to get done and no one knows the answer. It is so so so so so frustrating to ask simple questions like where are the table clothes we need and have no one answer resulting in me wandering around in aimless circles of angst. Oh yeah and getting dirty dish water splashed all over my hands/shirt is truly my worst nightmare. Phew.

Ok I am done ranting because I had a really lovely moment last night. So one of my greatest paranoias at this job is that I won't be able to handle carrying one of those giant trays and will subsequently drop all the food/dishes on a member and get fired. Therefore when I successfully carried one full of dirty dishes with just one hand without dropping it I was really excited. But more importantly the guy who was training me and spent time trying to teach me how to do said carrying saw me doing it and gave me a thumbs up. I was ridiculously proud and simultaneously ashamed that I was so proud of such a thing.

There is nothing of note to report from the internship: I get to read historical documents and drink coffee and talk about how wonderful theater is. It is just plain great.