Anonymous
Tucson, AZ

Server Fantasies

R thinks there should be a National Tipping Registry. You get a card with an ID number and every time you go to a restaurant your tip total is entered into a database. Tip less than fifteen percent? You lose your EOP (Eating Out Privileges) for a week. Less than ten? No EOP for a month. And so on. Taken to its logical extreme, as all good fantasies should be, and the penalties become increasingly severe. Something involving, say, wailing red lights above the table, public finder-pointing, a perp walk out the door by two large men carrying automatic weapons. And wearing aprons.

There is of course a simpler, more realistic solution to the problem of low tips: A livable base wage. Until then, we all have our fantasies...

L told me the same story I've heard at every restaurant I've ever worked. She swears it's true. It happended to her best friend's sister. Anyway it goes like this: Well-dressed guy walks into restaurant, sits down, places a stack of bills on the table and tells the server (in this case L's best friend's sister): "This is your tip. Every time you make a mistake, I take a bill off the stack." Our fantasy, mine and L's, is something like that scenario in reverse. "Fifteen percent is your starting tip. This gets you basic, prompt professional service. Anything beyond that is gonna cost you." For example, L favors the idea of an extra dollar for every unnecessary trip to the kitchen. Sample the soup? No problem. But decide, after L's already brought the soup, that what you really wanted instead, was to sample the gravy that comes on the country fried steak - that's a buck. Suddenly realize you're not interested in the soup or the gravy but since L's heading back to the kitchen anyway how about a sample of the house dressing - another buck. Two extraneous trips: Two bucks. Simple. L figures she'd clean up on condiments alone. Not enough to pay off her health and car insurance of course, but still...

I like to imagine this idea carried further: for every extra job we're required to perform, we should receive an extra wage. Now we're a friendly group by nature, fairly good with directions, and sure, we'll clue you in on a few points we consider to be of interest, but if you're looking for the kind of detailed knowledge of the city usually associated with tour guides, cartographers, and historians, we'd like to be paid as such. We'll bring your kids food, crayons, and a towel to clean the congealed mixture of juice and spaghetti sauce pooled on the table, but if you expect full daycare service, we charge by the hour. Likewise, if we have to compete for your attention with your cell phone, we expect at least the same monthly fees and cost per minute. Plus roaming charges. I've been told that in certain therapy groups, the patient is encouraged to scream out their frustrations and primal rages, sometimes directed at a surrogate inanimate object, such as a doll, or at a therapist in a mask representing some traumatic figure from the patient's past. Now if you've decided that the uniform I'm wearing, emblazoned with the same corporate logo you've seen at the same restaurants across the country, somehow qualifies me as one of these surrogate rage targets, then go for it. But pay me the going rate: I don't know what the doll makes an hour, but the therapist probably does pretty well. CPR is, naturally, on the house; but please, try to chew your bruschetta more thoroughly next time. As for management, while it is true of your servers that if "we have time to lean, we have time to clean," then it is presumably also true that you will have the time to look up the hourly rate for janitors in this country, which, I suspect is a little more than $2.35. I've made these arguments dozens of times. In my head.

Which brings us to revenge fantasies. What you'd like to say (or in many cases do) to the corporate managers, the slacker coworker, the dude in the Stetson at table 7 who keeps calling you "boy." Sometimes these fantasies are of the poetic justice, eye for an eye variety: "I'm gonna go to his work and cut his salary by fifty percent because his report arrived ten minutes late." More often though it's just a bunch of obscenities you'd never say out loud. My personal favorite: K, a waitress who'd been stiffed by an obviously affluent diner and who had waited to vent until she was safely in the kitchen, said: "Oh, I'm so mad at that asshole doctor!" (The customer in question was a proctologist.) Another favorite revenge fantasy, verbalized but never acted upon by my former manager P, for dealing with particularly rude customers, was summarized neatly in the following proposition: "You bump; I'll spill."

Aside from the common fantasy we all share of achieving basic human dignity and earning an income commensurate with that status, there are other fantasies particular to specific groups. For example the artistic class. These are the servers who earn their living conveying food, but who consider themselves to be "really" something else entirely: An actor; a painter; film maker; clandestine essayist on the working condition. They envision themselves at some distant future point, accepting an award or granting an interview in which they can proudly reveal how they "kept it real," and "know how the working class actually feels." An interesting subset of the artistic class is that rarified group who fantasize about their actual art: the painting, the poem, the film. These are the folks with the distant look in their eyes, who most likely will have forgotten most of your order by the time they reach the kitchen.

One class of servers, perhaps the majority, fantasize not about themselves, but about another group altogether: Their families. When servers with families have time to dream - in the break room, between shifts, on the long commute to work - they dream of seeing their children succeed, grow and thrive. It's these kids who they envision on the stage, making speeches, accepting awards (often something no more - and certainly no less-- than a diploma). It's these kids and their distant futures in which the servers invest their imaginative capital ( not to mention tips), and all available energy. (That is, when they aren't being overwhelmed with the demands of the immediate future and the inexorable mathematics of rent, insurance, clothing, medicine and yes, food.) Not just their own biological families, buy the step children of marriages, divorce; the children of sisters, aunts, mothers and fathers and all those too sick or poor or institutionalized t care for themselves: It is these people whom the servers truly serve.

To imagine anything else is pure fantasy

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