Everyone who has waited tables knows the long hours standing on your feet serving unappreciative customers. You learn to have tough skin, to be patient, and how to cover yourself when you may actually have forgotten to put in their appetizer. I personally think every person should experience the server life at some point because, once you know the struggles of taking care of others who will inevitably judge your character and abilities in the form of a dollar amount, you treat people differently.
As a young college student, I wait tables and it has given me an endless amount of writing material because you see so many different individuals every shift. The family constantly screaming at each other, the man throwing back drinks while his children nervously watch, the woman sitting by herself waiting for someone who never comes; all of these people you can encounter in one night. You learn to read people if they may need more interaction with someone, if they are being difficult for the sake of being difficult, or if they have been a server before and know your experience. I have found more grown adults more afraid of onions than they are to yell at a 20-year-old server they just met in a chain restaurant. You know when there is something bigger going on in their lives, and you are simply the punching bag that crossed their path on their way to cheese sticks.
You will also learn to savor the customers that randomly leave huge tips you didn’t expect, raving reviews to your manager, or even a little note on their receipt. The confident teenage boy who will leave his phone number on their receipt in hopes that you, the much older server, fancied him because you gave him extra ranch will make you giggle the rest of your shift. You will put up with the chatty regulars that will tell you endless stories of their time when they were your age because they tip very well. The speech of where you are going to college and your major will come from your mouth every night in hopes that they will be nicer to you when they fill out the receipt.
Despite the goal of earning the most tips you can during a shift, you gain so much more. You learn to treat other servers with respect and understanding. You have experienced a slow kitchen and impatient tables, so you know that not everything is the poor servers fault. You respect service industry workers no matter the company. The time you spend serving will teach you that you never know what is going on with other’s personal lives which are making them act so immature over something as minute as a soft drink. Though you go through constant scrutiny you must learn to care for yourself. Yes, you will be used as an outlet for grown adults to take out their aggressions from their day but you are a human being who has feelings and thoughts as well. You learn self-control not to react with the same disrespect despite the strong urge to retaliate. You will always remember that one time when something got mixed up and someone who has never been in your shoes yelled at you for it. So, when you experience a shuffling server struggling to keep it together helping your table, you know that the last thing that is going to get your food out quicker is to yell at someone who has no control over how fast it takes a chicken to cook.
The lessons you learn from serving tables will benefit your interactions with the world for the rest of your life. You can learn understanding, mutual respect, and politeness in a way that you can't if you only ever are the ones sitting in the booth. This world would be a lot more respectful if everyone saw it from a server’s eyes. Yes, you will learn to dread people on some days, and at the end of the day when you’re driving home tearing up from what that one person said at the beginning of your shift, you know you would never treat another human being that way. Though those days will come, you will come out of it a better person because you will soon extend the respect and friendliness everyone deserves in a restaurant because you can empathize with people. A serving job may be small time in one’s life, a buffer period till you get your dream job, but it may be one of the most entertaining and valuable time of your life.
