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.

second day

Work: Got trained by the super waiter Stephen tonight. He has been there for 7 years and is in my mind the wise guru of waiting. Compared to what happened to me last night, I would say he actually trained me. Meaning he first sat down and went through the entire menu explaining everything to me, then gave me a tour of where everything is kept, then introduced me to the entire kitchen staff and essentially is the man in my book right now. He also explained all the computer stuff (that shit is crazy complicated-damn abbreviations) and introduced me to all the tables we had. Then I told him I'd never tried to carry one of those big trays so he took me to a side room, loaded one up with silverware and made me carry it around. Yeah I'm terrible at that too. It is so friggin hard to not only hold it up since it's so heavy but keeping it level? Forget about it I can't do it. Then he replaced the silverware with 6 plates and covers all stacked and it was (shocker) even harder. At this point I got a little better....well nothing fell off. Still can't get through doors though.

Nothing else of note happened. Next week I am all on my own. I am not optimistic about the results. At least I haven't spilled anything on a member yet.

continued from the previous post

Ok being trained by a ginger (forgot to mention that): it was a bit insane and we only had 4 tables and I basically became the drink orderer/deliverer which wasn't so bad but all our tables were on the patio aka farthest from the well anything (wait station, computers, kitchen, air conditioning, water). The first table we had was delightful, they all had the buffet meaning no work for us and between the three of them they ordered enough glasses of wine to total 3 1/2 bottles so they were no trouble at all. Love wine-drunk rich people. BUT the second table we got was scary. It the was man who owns Kohler furniture (um YEAH) and his super bitchy wife. Basically we had to kiss some major ass and be on that table every second to make sure everything was peachy.

This is when I first biffed it in a major way. Their son had an ice cream cone that was melting while he was off playing and they asked me to put it in a freezer. Well I did that, but when I went to get it I foolishly tried to pick it up by the plate I had set it on. This is when it fell off the plate onto the ground. My train of thought "SHIT! shit shit shit shit shit, where is that ginger to help fix it?!oh crap oh crap oh crap. Why do I have this job?! gah!" Then I mentally slapped myself, picked it up off the ground, put it back on the plate and walked over to the table. I didn't tell them it fell, luckily it was melted beyond repair anyway so I told them I would just get another and bolted. My flight instincts are on fire these days.

Second biff wasn't my fault. The hostess never told us we had a third table so we never went over there and the guy got super pissed, complained and we got yelled at. It was scary. This lead to ever more ass kissing and hyper attention to make sure he didn't have to wait anymore.

Then after everyone was gone we had a set up to do in the main dining room and it was by far the worst part of the night. The entire wait staff was just standing around bitching while a few were actually working and it was crazy frustrating as I just wanted to get the hell out of there. Then it was finally over and I got to sleep.

Final assessment: even though I was essentially wearing orthopedic shoes my feet hurt like a bitch, not blister or cuts just more of a throbbing/on fire/aching kind of pain that didn't go away when I took off the shoes. I don't think my feet will ever recover from this job. Generally I'm just tired as all hell.

first day of everything

I actually have a bit of time to write about my first day as I seem to have 20 minutes to spare before I have to leave for the beginning of day two.

First moment of awkwardness at the country club: After parking my car I realize I have no idea which door to go in. This results in me standing looking lost in the parking lot and eventually darting for the loading dock door (I figure I know I'm not supposed to go in the front door-that's right I'm the help, not the member aka class divisions are still alive and well in Southern Wisconsin). Well I get inside and I am completely lost. This is because although I was given a tour it was when I was (to be blunt) really hungover from going out for Samwise's graduation and had just driven the 3 hours (construction) from Point. So I didn't remember any of it. Panicking I run to the offices (ok I didn't literally run, but I walked really fast), find an adult and she leads me upstairs to the kitchen where I walked right into the middle of the pre-dinner meeting where the entire wait-staff gave a once over (I wasn't in uniform yet) and it was not pleasant. The meeting ended right about then and I begged someone to show me the locker room where I changed and going back to the kitchen find that they make us dinner (YEAH no more pb&j in the car!). This is when I start getting pretty fucking terrified as well I've never served before and no one seemed to be understanding that I had no idea what the fuck was going on or where to be or what anything was. Then lucky for me I found a girl who was cussing up a storm and essentially I latched onto her (her bluntness "I'm not serving that woman she is a ho" and potty mouth endeared her to me), peppered her with questions and then found out who was training me.

The girl training me: LOVE her, she was spazzy (up working another job since 5am, SEE I'm not the only crazy one here people I was only up at 8am working), hilarious, sarcastic, nice and really good at explaining things.

(gotta leave now so this story will be continued in another post about all the crazy shit that happened to me)