I have had a wide variety of jobs throughout college. I have been very blessed to have thoroughly enjoyed them and to have made lifelong friendships from some of them, as well as have been lucky when it comes to having good pay. Up until November when I first became a server, I am embarrassed to admit that I believed servers were whiny and entitled when it came to their wages because I would often see their rants and their complaints about crappy tips and rude customers.

It was not until I had no choice but to repeatedly witness a 72 year old man's privates all in the open in order to walk away with a few bucks, while remaining smiling and oblivious to the fact that I kept questioning in my head, "Is this sexual harassment in the workplace," that it hit me that servers do not make a fraction of what they work (literally). That was not a typo, I forever have burned and branded in my memory an elderly customer eating lunch commando in a booth, like it was any given Thursday afternoon while his junk was hanging out of his short shorts. The worst part is that my coworkers and I are convinced that he was intentionally doing it on purporse because he kept staring at us provocatively, while his wife was sitting across from him. Oh, and i wish I could say that the money I made that day made up for all of the "nastiness" but I clocked out of work that day declaring a whopping $4.50 in tips. Want to know why? Because even when you leave an irrelevant tip and it is a slow day, we still have a little thing called "tip share," where we have to tip out the hosts, who usually stare at you like you have a nosebleed if you ask them to raise a finger, and the bartenders. Guess what that means. If you decide to be an even bigger prick than Mr. Commando and leave no tip at all or a smaller tip than our tipshare, it is possible that we end up owing on your meal instead of earning from it. That is correct, I could have to pay to be tortured watching X rated Senior Citizen's Gone Wild.

There are some days I come to work after having a full day of classes or another job, no sleep and starving. So believe me when I say, I do not have the ability to pretend to be patient enough to be saying to a customer, "Yes ma'm, I will be right back with another 1/2 and 1/2 tea, no ice in the cup, side on the side, with a bowl of lemons, a mixture of oil and vinegar, 2 extra butters, fresh bread in a bag to-go for your dog Muffin, and to tell the cook that you want your steak cooked between medium rare and rare, but also well-done on the outside. Oh, what's that? Of course, I would be delighted to list every single alcoholic beverage, the ingredients and each price." And then five refills later, when you send your food back twice, get a free desert, and leave a lousy 10 percent tip, what can I do about it? All I can do is be thankful that I at least got something because my other table wrote "God bless" on the tip line instead of a dollar amount.

Believe it or not, that tip and total line, along with how you treat your server, can tell me more about you than your Christian Mingle and Tinder bios combined. Keep in mind next time you go out to eat that servers have to live off of the money you leave them. Many servers have kids that they are trying to put food on the table for. Others, such as myself, are working for tips to pay for college. I can also guarantee you that we cannot feel our feet when we get home and accumulate several burns that turn into scars. So it is safe to say that leaving a 20% tip (which is the current average tip) after being provided excellent service, is the least you can do. If not, maybe you should reconsider your values and respect for others.