An Honest Waitress?

I have to agree with the person who expressed a heretofore unspoken reality concerning friendly waitresses or female bartenders. After having worked a few night shifts in a local club, I began to notice the starkly contrasting personality shifts that wait staff would undergo in between times spent in front of customers and the few moments they spent out of sight and earshot of patrons. That eye-opening experience caused me to pretty much stop eating out altogether. I began to wonder if every time I ate in a restaurant that the server was employing some uber-phony friendliness and really couldn’t give a damn if I was happy or not with my meal. If I wished to dine in the company of an actress, one well-trained in faking most everything, I would hook up with my ex wife.

So, dear waitress, if you see me sitting at your table please don’t patronize me with tossing a hip my direction or batting your eyes. Don’t twist your hair or try any coquettish nonsense. Don’t call me “Honey” or “Sugar”. Don’t ask me how I am doing or how my day is. You don’t give a shit and please don’t ruin my day any further by trying to convince me that you do. Be polite and be prompt. That’s all you need to do. There isn’t any chance in hell that you would interact with me were I not seated in your section. Don’t try to persuade me otherwise. You’ll get a better tip not treating me as if I’m some gullible, love-struck dupe.

Yet, why single out wait staff or servers for being disingenuous? Hell. We all smile for our bosses, our customers, and even our families when we don’t want to. We all lie to ourselves and to them in order to achieve some financial or social end. I think this is what disgusts me about myself sometimes, in that I have to play the game just to pay the bills and have a few dollars for fun left over. I can imagine the frustration of having to fake everything, perhaps not all the time, but enough of the time that one ends up carrying a huge Santa-size sack of unspoken resentments and hatreds. I should know.

We are all whores, doing shit we don’t always want to do for someone we sometimes hate. So, dear waitress, go ahead. Tell me you how much you don’t want to be serving these scrambled eggs and how my physical appearance makes you either sick to your stomach or brings on a painful indifference. Tell me that you don’t give a damn about the eggs or me. Be honest. I am so tired of being patronized, and I am sure that someone is secretly wishing that I, too, would cease being disingenuous with them.

People demand candid honesty, but turn hateful when it when it arrives. Go figure. Oh, dear waitress, here is yours. Where is mine?