Tip Your Server and Save the World [View all]

[WilliamPitt]

(Photo: Brian Blanco / The New York Times)

Tip Your Server and Save the World
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Thursday 07 February 2013

It's your fourth shift in a row at the restaurant, all doubles because you only make $2.65 an hour and need to pay for rent and heat and electricity, and your section is a set of booths and tables - six four-tops, four two-tops, one eight-top - that seat forty-four customers total, and it's been packed from start to finish across your whole rip with couples and clusters of workers from the accounting firm next door and families with children and foreigners who can't read the menu and have never heard of tipping, and twenty different people in your last two shifts have sent their meal back because the cook is new and in the weeds and can't handle the volume and keeps screwing up the orders, and that's not your fault, but the customers take it out on you because you're there.

And your feet are throbbing and your back is a bag of iron rods and your arm is knotted with aching muscles from carrying huge trays of food and drinks as you weave around and through the small sliver of space available after table three joined with table four and their chairs are sprayed out into the lane, and you move through them like smoke balancing six dinners and seven drinks on one hand without spilling a drop or disturbing a soul.

And your biggest table empties out, so you swing into action and police up the plates with half-chewed food and the glasses smeared with lipstick and the pile of napkins filled with snot because one of your customers had a cold and kept blowing his nose and leaving his snot-saturated napkins on the table in an untidy pile, you grab it all up and clear it all out and wipe the table down and hit the register and give the boss his money and pocket the 4% gratuity they left you, and you wince because you know you're not making enough to pay that rent and those bills, and you wonder where you're going to live next week after they evict you, and then the door opens again.

And eight people come barreling in and get shown to your table, and you approach them on your aching feet with your back in agony and your arm trembling, and you smile the biggest smile that has ever been smiled by anyone in the history of smiling, and you hand out the menus, and you say, "Hi, my name is, and I'll be your server, can I get you some drinks?"

The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14397-tip-your-server-and-save-the-world

A large number of my best friends are in the service industry. This article means a lot to me. I hope you give it a read, and if you like it, pass it on.

Thanks.