You Never Stop Waiting Tables
I’m with Groucho: “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Having said that, there are some common experiences that make me feel connected to another human being. If a person has spent a month in a foreign country with a pack on her back, very few dollars in her pocket, and several stories of chaos in her wake, she is my sister. If a person creaks and cracks and identifies that pain as the result of endless joys experienced in games of pick up basketball, he is my brother.
And the people who lick their chops when the impropriety is imminent, the ones who nearly soil their seats when a dove is released at a wedding—only for it to drop dead. Those folks are my people.
I would add to this any people who have done hard time as waiters or bartenders. To be clear, I’m talking about my brothers and sisters who know what it’s like to stand between the melee of a kitchen run by psychopathic, drug-addled chefs, sous chefs, and line cooks and the carb-deprived appetites of a co-ed softball team on dysfunctional family day (aka the Sabbath).
There’s an easy way to tell if someone’s really been in the restaurant trenches. Ask this question: Do you have serving nightmares? This question is an acid test, a dead giveaway. A real server, the kind who knows what it’s like to live in the weeds, to get slammed with four tables all at once—senior citizens, prom dates, frat boys, and a support group for people allergic to four and a half of the five food groups—these servers will be all too familiar with serving nightmares.
While the nightmares are unique to each server, themes persist. After a double shift, you go home and crawl into bed. It takes no effort to fall asleep, but as soon as you do, you’re back in the restaurant. The shift starts smoothly enough, but the stakes raise quickly—and violently.
One minute you’re taking an order, and the next minute, your section is being sat all at once, and when you go to put orders into the computer, you can’t remember anything. People scream, babies cry, tickets fly out of the printer, managers threaten your livelihood. Finally, you wake up after eight hours of sleep, and you feel like you just finished another shift.
That’s the standard structure. The details are what make them particularly insidious. A friend once told me about a nightmare where a woman demanded to order by performing interpretive dance, and if he got her order wrong, she would bite off his fingers and toes.
In one of my own, as I was taking an order, a manager said I had a new table that needed to be greeted. When I asked which one, he handed me a pair of binoculars. When I looked through them, I could see that the hostess was escorting an elderly couple to a table out on the 405 freeway, about a mile away. “They want to dine in the fresh air,” he said.
My wife’s nightmares are consistent. She gets overwhelmed, runs back to dry storage and hides, all the while knowing that dozens of tables are waiting, getting hungrier, more impatient, and meaner…
A quick internet search will not only reveal the ubiquity of waiter nightmares, it will also suggest a few other surprising takes. One, waiter nightmares are a form of PTSD. And two, waiting tables is more stressful than performing neurosurgery. I’ve had waiter nightmares for almost 30 years, and even I initially thought this sounded like exaggeration, and then I did a quick inventory.
A head chef at a fine dining restaurant once yelled at me in his thick Austrian accent that he would cut my head off and give it to my mother if I ever screwed up an order again. He had a cleaver in one hand, a boning knife in the other, and a vein throbbing on his forehead. Chefs prone to violent threats are a mainstay in most American restaurants.
At a sports bar, I saw a man bump into another. Instead of saying excuse me, the man flashed that what-you-gonna-do-about-it? look that’s common amongst douchebags before raising a snifter of Hennessy to his mouth. Which is when the other man answered the question by punching the snifter, shattering glass in the man’s mouth and flavor-saver lip pubes. Drunks prone to violence are a mainstay at most American sports bars.
At a chain restaurant, a careless server forgot to mention that clam juice was an ingredient in a pasta dish. The teenaged boy who ate the pasta turned a pretty shade of blue before they managed to stick him with an Epipen. Diners prone to death as a result of stupidity are a mainstay at most American restaurants.
There are also the collective of crazy that factors into restaurant work. I’ve worked with college kids, single moms, deadbeat dads, parolees, drunks and junkies, drug dealers and cons, sex workers and strippers, Bible thumpers and cultists, and too many aspiring actresses to count. It makes for a lot of wonderfully bizarre interactions.
Take this conversation I had with a line cook named Eddie. Eddie was Mexican, and he looked like a quokka. Round and smiley, he was lovable—even though everyone knew he was up to no good.
“¿Qué pasa, Norm? Good tips tonight?”
“Not bad.”
“Can I borrow twenty bucks? You know I pay you back.”
“What do you need twenty bucks for?”
“Come on…”
“I want to know what I’m investing in.”
“For chucka chucka.” This was Eddie’s term for sex with a prostitute in Santa Ana.
“Chucka chucka is no good, Eddie.”
“Ah! It feel good.”
“Why don’t you get a girlfriend instead?”
“I don’t know…”
“It’ll be better for you.”
“Maybe, but it’ll cost a lot more than twenty bucks.”
Conversations prone to brutally honest, profoundly absurd logic are a mainstay at most American restaurants. So the nightmares make sense. And it makes sense that I keep having them, even though I haven’t said, “Evening, I’m Norm, and I’ll be taking care of you” for about twenty years now.
Recently, though, my waiter nightmares have evolved. They’re becoming more nuanced and genre specific. The last one started with me in front of a table of four women in their forties ordering cocktails. “Can you make a Velvet Guillotine?” one of the women asked.
“Do you know what’s in it? If you know what’s in it, we can make it?”
“We don’t know what’s in it, but that’s what we want. Four of them.” And then she shooed me away.
So I make my way to the bar, and this takes some time because the floor suddenly turns to quick sand. Quick sand often pops up in my serving nightmares, even though I’ve only experienced quick sand in Looney Tunes and Mel Brooks movies.
After an hour or so, I get to the bar and ask the bartender if he knows how to make a Velvet Guillotine.
“Of course I do, I’m a professional. But I don’t have any candied yam juice. So you’ll have to make some for me.”
“Um…”
“Have you never made candied yams?! Well, I’ll have to show you.” And then he leads me out back and we plant a row of yams. It’s a moving, emotional, bucolic montage of me and the bartender harvesting root vegetables like two brothers in a John Steinbeck novel. All the while, I’m keenly aware that those four women are waiting on their round of Velvet Guillotines.
After about six months, the bartender and I harvested, candied, and squeezed the yams, and I began my sojourn back to the table. Unfortunately, the women died. Only their corpses remained, slumped over the table. Suddenly, a homicide detective appeared and began reciting the Miranda rights. Apparently, I was being charged with murder for letting these women die of dehydration.
Just before they slapped the cuffs on me, my manager asked the detective if I could finish my shift. The detective nodded, and I looked at my section of the restaurant. It was as crowded as 6th Avenue during The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Which was enough of a heart attack to wake me up from the nightmare.
As horrible and stressful as they are, I sort of enjoy them. There’s a quality to waiting tables that’s somewhere on the spectrum of summer camp and a prison yard, and that makes for indelible experiences. And those indelible experiences? They’re the ones with all the flavor. Maybe not as good as candied yam juice, but pretty damn close.
If you’ve ever had a serving nightmare—or just survived a shift that felt like one—hit the Restack button and share your most ridiculous customer or kitchen horror story in the comments. Trauma bonding is important.
If you enjoyed this, consider reading some of my other stories:
Like Here Comes Stupid – About the time my basset hound turned my house into a crime scene with nothing but enthusiasm and a belly full of liquid evil.
Or The Boner Killer – A story that happened in one of my English classes, involving a literal-minded student and an unintentional lesson in word choice.
Or Send in the Clowns – My past sins as a parent came back to haunt me, and they came back in a clown car.
Or Manslaughter, Santa Claus, and a Hatchet – The time I created an adventure for my kids, which inadvertently invited one of them to single-handedly murder Christmas.
Or A Spicy Alternative to Antidepressants – a story I’ll be performing live this March at a show in L.A.
And if you haven’t picked up my dark crime comedy novella Dig, it’s its own sort of nightmare.
Norm, reading this was just like being in the Pub up the street. Most of the wait staff are young college students. They are really sweet and attentive, and now I will forever worry about them. I'll do my best to be a good diner. The first thing I did was teach them what I drink, down to the small twist of lime. So now they just bring it to me, as they prepared it the minute I walked past the bar to a table by the window. Then I pretty much order the same thing: A Shrimp basket with nothing but the shrimp, and substitute the fries and slaw with a baked potato, with sour cream and chopped onions. So now, as I'm studying the menu they have had for the past year without revision; they look at me puzzled as if I'm thinking about what I want, and say, "Do you just want the usual?" I am the perfect repeat customer and I give good tips because I know they only make about $2/hour. So hopefully they don't have nightmares on my account. However, last night when I was there, just when I commented on how quiet it was, a few groups of people came in at once and plopped down at 4 different tables. And, how does a waitperson get their orders without a pen and order pad?? That amazes me more than anything. I can't remember what I order half the time....how can they possibly remember it on the way to the kitchen when 5 other people ask for more napkins, another drink, where's the restroom....and on and on. Now, I'm having heart palputations just thinking about them. I guess I'll have to up the tips again....Thanks, Norm, for the dark side of their jobs in full color....
This is right on. My dreams have no plots, they just always involve a burned Brown Derby Top Sirloin, ordered MR that I’ve forgotten on the hotline for a month or so.
Then there’s the Krystal waffle I forgot about and kept wondering what the annoying continuous Ding signaling a cooked waffle was. But that wasn’t a dream.