The Detox is Over?

 Waiter Detox Day 7

It's been a week.

And I feel great.

What's really amazing is how much mental space has been freed up in a mere seven days. When I think of the nature of being a waiter, I don't really find it as stressful as many people do. Sure, waiting tables has it's own stresses, but whatever, at the end of the shift, the shift is over and it's time to be drunk or become drunk again. I was, however, taking the emotional impacts of interactions home with me over the last few years.

What I really think is fuck up in restaurants is that as a waiter you're constantly juggling tables, all the feelings and special requests and allergies both real and imaginary with all your guests. Then you have to take those requests to the bartender and to the kitchen. And the really truly amazing part of all of it is that I would ask the kitchen for a special request and I'd have cooks tell me no, tell me to fuck off. And they could keep their jobs. What they were really saying, of course, is that the guest could fuck off. If I treated a guest the way a kitchen person treated me, I'd be fired. I loved being the monkey in the middle. I loved being angry and pissed off in the back of the house and then putting on my saccharin face in the dining room. Fortunately, for the last few years I did not care about things. I did not care about the guest, nor did I care about the feelings of kitchen staff. I just made the façade of doing my best. Of course, for the last few years I worked in a tip share house, so I did not have the same amount of stress when it came to individual tips.

But, then there is the real feelings I have. I feel like everything that goes on in the operations in a restaurant are very petty. In recent years, everyone sitting in a restaurant can be, but probably shouldn't be, a critic. Reviews on OpenTable, Yelp, Trip Advisor and Google have made monsters out of some people. If you have something negative to say, say it to a face, say it before you leave, and be done with it. Only a coward will write a review and hide behind anonymity on the internet. It's a lot of nonsense over something that will be in the toilet, literally, within hours of a restaurant visit. And to the bartenders and cooks out there, some of you are not any better. When the food becomes more important that the person who's eating it, you've lost. When you start to make drinks that force people into glass that they are not enjoying, then you've lost.

Everybody, be kind to one another. I may not have always been kind as I'd have liked, but I always tried to be respectful. Even with that, people who I wanted to get as far away from as possible, I was always extra polite in my interactions.

The dynamics in a restaurant are always interesting. There are always the big personalities and then the push back from those personalities. I was always a big personality. And I never once had a problem with the other big personalities. I never needed the other big personalities to be kind, but the point they stopped being respectful, was the moment I lost all respect for them.

Initially, I thought I would be on this waiter detox for a long time. I thought I would take a week for every year I worked in a restaurant. I thought it would be a 21 week detox. That's a lot of thought about something that really no longer needs a thought. After a week, a serious week, I feel like my mind is already on the next thing. Perhaps, I was in the process of detoxing for a long time, many years. And the only real detox was needed for the last year. Who knows?

Here we are. I spent 21 years in the service industry. I no longer work in the service industry. I'm unsure how I really feel about things, I just glad to be doing something else now. And I don't even want to step foot into a restaurant ever again.