this is not a duet

All it does is show me you have a superiority complex and deep rooted classist tendencies. I’ve been a waitress, a barista and a sales associate, so your talking down to others just tells me at one point you would’ve talked down to me. This guy in the queue tried to buy me a coffee today, after ripping into the guy behind the counter about his skills and his job. Don’t care what people do for a living, if you don’t treat ‘em like (very important) people when you deal with them, we can’t be friends.

“A person who is nice to you but cruel to the waiter isn’t a nice person.”

I don’t understand how people don’t get this

It is terrifying. It means if you don’t adhere to their demands or if you make on little mistake, they can turn on you. I don’t deal with people who are nasty to others.

F-cking *this*.

http://notalwaysright.com/tip-of-the-entree-iceberg/27669

Brown-haired Man is my hero.

Let’s talk about just how “unskilled” my minimum wage labor is.

At IHOP, I had to memorize a vast menu of possible breakfast combinations. Did you know the system contains more than thirty different choices for how an egg should be prepared? Then choices of pancakes or French toast, what kind of toppings, was this a custom order or was it one of our seasonal specials? Oh, yeah, the seasonal specials. Every three months, we had a four hour staff meeting to discuss the new food items that would be added to the menu. Most of us came in and spent this four hour meeting in addition to the nearly twelve hour shift we would work later that night or had already been working early that morning.

Better memorize the seasonal specials, too, or else you’ll be screwing up people’s food left and right. And screwed up food means screwed up tips, especially when it comes to breakfast. On that note, guess how similar all the dishes looked. When you work primarily in a breakfast diner with infinite combinations of specials, pre-designed plates, and custom orders, it is very easy to mistake your table’s food for someone else’s when it comes out. You definitely don’t want to make that mistake, though, since IHOP has a system where you might run another server’s food out to their table. You have to be able to see what a dish is by sight and be able to distribute it to a table whose order you did not take. Some of my coworkers who had been doing this for years could take an order completely by memorizing it at the table. When you are often expected to serve up to eight people at one table, often several tables at a time, this is a truly incredible feat.

Oh, and dishes come out hot. At my IHOP, the dress code dictated a short sleeved collared white shirt. The lack of sleeves meant that I had to balance a number of very hot dishes on my bare arms, then walk to the table and distribute them without dropping anything. If you’ve never had to successfully balance ten hot plates on your arms at a time, I suggest you pop some in the microwave right now and give walking across your living room a shot. (Might not want to try unless you have carpet or money to spare for new plates, though.)

During football season, IHOP was the only restaurant open late in my town with enough space for large parties. On these Friday and Saturday nights I worked until 5 or 6 in the morning, having started my shift at 4 or 5 that afternoon. I took orders for parties of ten, fifteen, and twenty, often at the same time, with smaller tables as well. I was expected to split checks and understand how to divide incredibly complex orders, and then take payment without losing credit cards, mixing up checks, or any other disastrous thing that can happen when you are holding fifteen forms of payment in your hands at once.

Even when the actual serving had ended, there were a number of meticulous shopkeeping duties that had to be done at the end of each shift. Sometimes that meant I’d be filling 200 tiny cups with salad dressing at four in the morning, and others it meant I’d be taking meticulous inventory in my short sleeves in the freezer, restocking from storage where necessary. Everyone had to roll silverware every night, and when you’ve been on your feet for eleven hours, you can imagine how it feels to have to roll two hundred forks and two hundred knives into two hundred napkin and put the sticky tab on each one, after you wash off all the water spots and polish the utensils.

Did I mention there’s a lot of lifting in a minimum wage service job? I’m sure that’s true in other areas as well, but even now that I’m working as a soda jerk and not a server, there’s tons of lifting heavy objects. I have to lift large boxes of supplies from the stock room in order to make sure everything is, well, stocked. I lift gallons of frozen ice cream. I carry bus trays full of solid glass dishes and half-finished drinks to the kitchen (you think this job is unskilled? You try scraping all those plates without actually touching someone’s half-eaten pancakes. It’s impossible).

Not to mention handling to-go orders without tips, people who come in with coupons that slash their order to nothing and then tip according to the adjusted total despite you delivering the same level of service, the fact that the prices were already low because it’s IHOP so tips were meager. I could complain to you for days about experiences with bad and ignorant customers that took all my control, all my people management skills, all my thickness of skin to get through, and I didn’t get paid any extra for putting up with that shit.

Remember, I only get paid the equivalent of a meal at McDonald’s for every hour of my work. I deserve better. We all do.

many kinds of skills are ignored/erased in our society. however - even if a job isn’t very skilled - a person’s life is a finite resource. spending hours of it doing something should get them enough remuneration to survive on and enjoy, like, a full 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours of doing what they want.

don’t yell at cashiers if they are asking you to sign up for a charge/debit card - their employers are pushing them to ask everyone

don’t yell at cashiers if they’re taking too long folding your clothes in your bags - their managers are telling them not to ball up your shit bc it shows you care

don’t yell at cashiers bc they are taking a while to scan your card- machines fuck up

don’t yell at cashiers pls

If someone yelled at me whilst I was working I think I’d cry

DO NOT DO THIS.

This makes me so angry.

If you work in a movie theater and you do this I have no respect for you.

My younger brother is Type 1 Diabetic.

When we go to a movie theater, we always get him diet soda. If he were to get regular when we asked for diet, we would not give him the insulin he would need for it. If that happens, his blood sugar level could go so high he could go into a coma, go blind, or even die.

If somebody gave him regular soda instead of diet without telling us, that person could be responsible for a nine-year-old being killed or blinded.

Just thinking about that makes me so angry. I get scared every time we take him to a movie in case the people working there saw this picture and decide to do the same thing.

Please signal boost this so people know.

This also applies to baristas

Fun story about the baristas doing this kind of shit. 

I am very sensitive to lactose, not Lactose intolerant but because of stomach ulcers that are still healing. A couple years ago I went to Starbucks right after my classes with some friends and asked for a green tea latte with soy milk. The barista, for some reason out of malice and/or hate for her life so she took it out on me, gave me whole milk in my latte.

5 minutes after my first sip of latte, my stomach cramped BAD. Not the “Oh! time to poop!” kind of cramp but it felt like someone had stabbed me with a knife and twisted it. Now I’ve had this happen before so I knew the cause of it. I went up to the barista clutching my gut screaming at her that she put dairy in my latte rather than soy LIKE I REQUESTED. She denied it and called me a “pretentious white girl for wanting soy”and so my friends got the manager. I had to explain that I had stomach ulcers that were still healing and if I were to go to the hospital for this incident, they would be responsible for it.

Manager flipped his shit and the barista was terrified out of her mind. Pretty sure both thought i was gonna sue. Manager actually fired her on the spot because of the negligence. My friends managed to get me home in one piece while I stayed home for 3 days in absolute agony and missed my midterm.

So remember kiddies, if someone is asking for Diet or “Skinny” or “soy” or anything that is not regular, give them what they requested because it may not be them being healthy, but a dietary need that can possibly be life or death

This applies to wait staff who get “annoyed” about patrons who ask for gluten free options.

I’m sorry if you think it’s an inconvenience that a customer can’t eat gluten. I’m sorry if you think it’s a fad.

It’s not your place to decide if they’re “just being a hipster”, and your decision to ignore their request for no croutons or anything similar could easily trigger a terrible physical reaction.

You do not get to decide if customers deserve to receive their orders correctly.

This should be common sense, but for those who were unsure.