I come to greet your table with a huge smile on my face. I politely ask you how your day has been and if you have any plans for this upcoming weekend. I make small talk with you while you look over the menu to decide what to drink. If you have any questions at all, no matter how stupid, I answer them. If I cannot answer them I am more than willing to ask someone else who can. I get you your drinks and make sure you have plenty of refills. I take your order and keep an eye on your food to make sure it will be out of the kitchen in good time. I am your waitress, and I am sick of being treated like I am less of a person than you.
You look at me like I have no talents or abilities outside of carrying 4 cups of water to a table. You look at me like my intelligence ends at writing down your order on a notepad. You look at me like I can’t get another job or I don’t have the motivation to do so. If you think I like working nights and weekends until 2 am, you are wrong. I would much rather have a job with a steady income and regular hours that goes Monday through Friday. I am working here during college to pay my rent, to pay for food, to pay for my car payment. I am not working here because I like bussing tables or because I like being rudely interrupted when I ask for your drink order. I am not working here because carrying food to customers brings me happiness or because never knowing what time I will be getting off work keeps me on my toes. I am working here because I can’t work during the day because I am taking 21 credit hours in college. I am working here because they work with my extremly busy schedule.
It is not okay to treat your waitress poorly if it took 5 minutes to get your drinks. It is not okay to treat your waitress poorly if they forgot to bring you ketchup. It is not okay to treat your waitress poorly even if it takes 45 minutes for the food to get to your table. I bet you don’t think about your server having 7 other tables because another sever called off sick. I bet you don’t think about you server taking longer to get your drinks because the kitchen floor was wet so they slipped and now they have to clean up what spilled. I bet you definitely don’t think about the money your server makes if they don’t get tips, which is about 2-4 dollars an hour, just for your information. Serving is hard and a lot of things come up that make it even harder. So stop treating your server like they are less of a person. They are trying. They are working terrible hours and depend on your tip for their income. Serving is hard work and speaking to rude people all day isn’t as fun as it may seem.
