Upsetting The Apple Cart

A Waitress’ Tail

Things are moving along in my monogamy journey, and I’ll get to writing about that again soon, but today I’m going to write about what has stolen my focus and zapped my energy for the past two weeks.

Waitresses, this one’s for you.

My first work, outside of the home, experience was when I was fourteen-ish years old. My mom and her best friend opened a tea and pastry cafe. I would go there after school to hand wash the dirty dishes.

My post-secondary educational experience was at a ‘working’ school. The school kept the cost of tuition down by having the students do all the work around campus. At the start of the year, we each got slips with available jobs and were able to select our top three preferences, but we were ultimately assigned the jobs that the supervising staff needed filled and believed we were well suited to.

All three jobs I was assigned to, throughout my time there, were kitchen related. Whenever I was assigned to a job one semester, I would learn and do the job so well that the supervising staff would reassign me to it and make me the lead. That was specific to me and not the general work advancement path of my peers.

When I was assigned to getting up at the butt-crack of dawn to peel potatoes for the day — the next semester I was reassigned to the job, I was made the head potato peeler. When I was assigned as a dishwasher (my first exposure to a typical, industry standard dishwashing machine) — the next semester, I was made the head dishwasher. When I was assigned as a waitress for the school’s sit-down mealtimes — the next semester, I was made the head waitress because I could be trusted to train and lead the others well.

When I finished school and went into the workforce, I worked in a corporate chain restaurant located in a very busy summer destination stop here in Maine. Over my years there, I learned to do and worked every job I felt capable of doing. I was a waitress, a dishwasher, a hostess, and I worked behind the restaurant’s ice cream counter. When corporate set up an industry standard competition of ice cream scooping for the region, a coworker and I were entered, and we won.