It couldn’t have possibly lasted.

In some previous posts I mentioned that I found a job and that I was miserable in it. I was not making any money (or at least very little) and almost everyone I worked with didn’t like me. It was a pretty bad situation to be in. And despite being otherwise unemployed, I wanted to quit the job pretty badly .

Maybe I was looking for an excuse.

I went in one day pretty annoyed at some other things but largely ready to work. It was a Wednesday and for some reason there were six or seven servers working. I felt like it was too many, but what the hell did I know.I looked at the section chart and saw, to my disappointment, that the section I was given was the bar overflow section. There were no real tables there, just high tops for the people who couldn’t get a seat at the bar. So if a group came in and wanted a table for four, they would have to be sat elsewhere even if it was my turn.

Well, I was wrong about that. Seemingly no one walked into the restaurant to eat, but plenty were coming in to just have a drink. And I was there to take orders and treat them like my customers.

About an hour into that, the first of the other servers came up to me to see if they could take a table or two from me.

Maybe a half hour after that, a different server came up to me angry that I had taken one of her tables. That table was in my section, which had been cannibalized. No one had told me that the manager had made this choice.

They cut me (‘cut’ in the industry means that you are wrapping your shift up) pretty early on, possibly so that the other servers could make a few bucks of my section. But I still had a bunch of tables and I wasn’t going to let them go. So I did as much of my side work as I could and then was waiting around for my tables to leave, and was watching as the bar overflow area slowly filled up. And for some god damned no one was helping them.

At some point I hear the phone ring and I watch the bartender pick it up. She then looks at me and asks me to go help a table (in my former section) that has been neglected. I assumed it was the manager who called in the problem, so I shrugged my shoulder and went and spoke to the table. When I turned around to walk to the  waiter’s station, there was the manager looking at me like I had lit his car on fire.

“You can’t take a table when you’re cut!”

I may not remember exactly what words I said to the guy, but the tone was approximately this:

“Jesus, FUCK OFF. No one was helping those guys, so I went over and they asked to put an order in.”

It wasn’t that I was right, nor was it that the manager was wrong, but I had never in my working life spoken to anyone in that kind of a tone. At that point I pretty much knew that I had to quit.

I finished my shift, left the restaurant, and sent an email resigning shortly thereafter.