When it comes to picking a job, there are few options a young teenager can take. I know when I started working at sixteen, the only options I could really find were fast food or retail. After a long search of applying, interviews, and no answers from the places I really wanted to go, I decided that settling with fast food wasn't all that bad. A lot of people work in fast food for the first job. I'd seen the movies; working in fast food was easy and was supposed to be fun. I had high hopes of getting some quick cash and having a good time doing it. Oh, was I in for a surprise!

My very first job was at Arby's, but before they had their now catchy slogan "WE HAVE THE MEATS!" Because I feel like if they had that slogan when I was first applying, along with there now extensive menu options, I would have just kept looking for a job. It was a very exciting time. I was getting to be more independent. I had just gotten my license, I wasn't the itty bitty freshmen in high school anymore, and now I had a job and didn't have to ask my parents for money. It was all leading up to exciting things. Kind of.

What people do not tell you when you first go into working in the food industry is that customers suck. To put it nicely. My whole hate side of the relationship always came from the people I had to take food orders from and very rarely the actual working part. I never noticed how rude people could be, and all because of food. God forbid that fresh fries do not pop up instantly--they take a little bit. Or that somehow in your $200 order we forget an order of onion rings. Small things that I thought could be justified as honest mistakes and taken care of in a reasonable fashion just never happened. It was always the end of the world. The joys of working in the fast food industry came the people I worked with. This was mainly because everyone was so different that if we met outside of work, we probably would not have said two words to one another. It was because we spent so much time together and had to deal with insane customers all the time that we bonded.

As the years went on, I moved on from Arby's and into the big bad world of the restaurant business, thinking that maybe people attitudes would change if it was more of a sit-down setting, and they had to talk to you for more than ten minutes. Nope! If there is anything I have learned from making the switch from fast food to the restaurant scene, it is this: the longer you have to spend with the people, the worse it is.

I did not jump right in to serving when I moved into the restaurant world, but started small as hostess and worked my way up. You would think just sitting people does not put you under fire for being verbally attacked by people, but apparently I did not get the memo. Obviously, I did not understand that having to wait fifteen minutes for a table meant starvation. Or that the customers knew the company and the rules better than I did as an employee. Being the first and last person they see led to some interesting remarks from complete strangers. And some of the remarks were things I couldn't even control.

Moving up to a server meant more money and more drama. After working as a server, I feel like it should be a requirement in life to do so. Everyone should have to experience waiting on other people, basically hand and foot. I feel like then they would realize that you extra side of ranch really isn't that important. Or that having a total of 30-plus people to take care of makes you forget things sometimes and that I am, in fact, only human.

Again the salvation to this was the fact that the people that I worked with knew in some ways how to cheer each other up and make fun of the things we had to deal with on a day-to-day basis. There was also the occasional good soul who knew that things happen, it is in fact only food and the world will not end if a mistake is made.

So word of advice to all who read this. Be nice to your food industry people.