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February 8, 2006
Big River Essence
For the past three years, I've spent my Mondays through Fridays 9:00 to 5:00 behind a desk ( thankfully not in a cube, but rather a work station) working in finances and have officially reached the point of complete burn-out. The job is so easy that if my 3 co-workers were gone and I had to take on their responsibilites in addition to my own, I could still probably get it done in a day without sacrificing the occassional perusal of TWoP recaps and forums. The office is stealing my essence ala The Dark Crystal, but there is an end in sight. My husband will be an associate at a mid-sized firm here in Boston (I'm in Atlblogs because of my co-writers if you were wondering), and I will be able to quit. I will have the opportunity to do whatever I want, and that? is terrifying. I will probably end up going into graphic design because I think I'm okay at art and could manage to do well. I would be a part time student, maybe and get a job at a little cafe or something. Which brings me to my point at last: I miss waiting tables.
It's a little crazy, but I think I've romanticized all my six years in the industry. I remember being so ready to get the hell out of restaurants and get things like paid vacations, weekends off, holidays off, and the ability to watch prime time television (to which I am now enslaved). But after gaining all these things at the cost of creativity and my soul, I realize that the rush and the people and the flirting (yeah I flirted to up my tip, so what?) and gossiping and frantic smoke break because thank God everyone is settled for 5 damn minutes and the complaining about management and the drinks in the bar after work...it was all so energizing. And I was good at it. No matter how crappy my tips were (despite giving the best service ever), or how many little shitty kids I had at my tables, I loved it and felt proud of myself at the end of every night. I worked at Big River in Chattanooga, TN during my senior year at Covenant College. Academics were never my cup of tea, having always been a C/B student (except in art classes I got A's), and going to work after classes was a like a balm to the frustration I felt because maybe I couldn't remember what the hell we talked about in Medieval Woman Writers, but damn it, I could balance 6 tables, sidework, demanding jerks, strung out co-workers, and more without skipping a beat or letting my fantastic fake smile slip.
I miss the lingo, too, and recently forgot what the abbreviation for a certain job at Big River was. It's highly distressing. A friend that worked at Sticky Fingers down the road, also blanked when I asked him (because they had the same thing). And this is actually why I began writing today: If anyone out there knows what it was when you would work in the kitchen opposite the cooks, pull the tickets, garnish the meals and group them together to send out, please respond because I couldn't even Google it and what the hell do you do when you can't Google something! Panic, that's what! I think there was a Q involved? Thank you.
I would never go back to that kind of establishment. I like my days off and weekends and primetime television far too much, but if I could find a cute little joint to kick around in part-time? That would be nice.
| By heidi | 12:58 PM