Angry Waitress: The Weeds

It’s Monday night, 8pm – after the dinner rush and on a day when servers are usually sent home early. But the heavy, humid temperatures outside seem to drive all of Princeton inside, hair deflated and tongues parched. I’ve been working a double since 10 a.m. and my ankles are starting to swell. A bus of high school students with tickets to an opera unloads on the sidewalk out front. Suddenly we are out of pint glasses.

The hostess must not have noticed my increasingly harried scurrying, because all at once my entire section is sat. Back and forth from the bar, to the kitchen, and then back to the bar, then careening towards my section weighed down with balanced trays of glasses – I recite the names as I place them carefully on the table: 22 oz Peroni, Ruby Red Cosmo, double Tanq and tonic, Shirley Temple.

It’s a rhythm and a language you learn quickly in the service industry. The aching in your knees reminds you that you are not dreaming, and that you still have four hours and a list of sidework left before you can breathe.

Other servers rush past me, in the same practiced pace. The manager, in her impractical silk blouse, pauses to ask if I’m alright before delivering desserts to the bar. I honestly don’t know how to answer.

Table 21 needs four fajita setups, while the loud round-top of 10 keeps flagging me over for more celebratory rounds of Guinness and fancy cocktails. A family of five takes fifteen minutes to order and by the time I’ve finished scribbling down their overly-complicated substitutions, Table 30 is glaring at me. I’ve forgotten to bring them water and they’re already halfway through their appetizers.

Then it hits me, a phrase that until that moment, I’d only heard in passing:

In the weeds. 

Oh holy shit was I was in the weeds.

For those unaware, to put it simply, I was overstretched. Couldn’t keep up with the rush. Too many diners, too many orders. Too much, too soon. Being in the weeds means that you’re fucked, basically. You’re fucked and you’re on your own.

The incompetent waste that we call a hostess doesn’t care that you need to get drinks and prep desserts – she’s going to seat a family of four with rambunctious children and you need to get on that before Junior starts screaming. And if you can’t handle your own, the veteran servers – old battle-worn women who carry trays with one hand – will steal your tables and the tips along with it. And the Chef is going to kill you if you dare to bring back a single mistake. But how can you not make mistakes? How can you not?

This kind of discussion means nothing to people who haven’t worked in a restaurant. It’s a secret code that most people who haven’t worked for $2.35 an hour can’t even begin to understand.

How did I end up here? Twenty-something, college educated and I’ve found myself settling down at a corporate-owned (gasp!) restaurant and bar in the very center of an affluent Ivy-League town, at an upper-class version of Applebee’s.

Hair pulled back, dressed in my freshly ironed uniform, apron stocked with extra pens and lighters, I tackle each day with an oddly familiar feeling of coming home. Or going to war. I’m not sure which it is yet. Before each shift, our army of servers prepares, strategizes.

“You’ll cover station two, I’ll take the banquet room, put the new guy in the back and Charles can take station four. Don’t forget to read the specials! We might have a reviewer coming in tonight so DON’T FUCK UP.”

But with all the experience I’ve racked up over the years, nothing compares to that feeling of being utterly swallowed. Like you’ll never catch up. There is nothing quite like having 40 hungry diners staring at you, demanding their martinis and well-done steaks NOW.

But we push through. Somehow, each night, we manage to sweep them in, feed them and usher them out with a smile. Everyone is happy. Or happy-ish.

An hour later, after the dust clears and my diners are all happily munching away or sated with alcohol, one of the older servers pulls me aside. Charles is my favorite – a former architect with a fiercely intelligent mind and an appreciation for crossword puzzles. He reassures me that at one point or another everyone get slammed by the rush.

“If you let yourself get overwhelmed you’re done for, but if you keep a calm head it’s not so bad.”

It’s something that comes with time, he says. Kid, wait until you’ve been doing this 20 years, he says.

“And hey. After all, it’s only dinner.”

A lesser version of this story was first published in July 2008. Gorgeous Angry Waitress illustrations drawn by Will Cook.