Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg Page A

waitress, experienced this maneuver several times. In the middle of the lunch rush one day, her orders began stacking up and dying slowly in the window.
    “Number Nine, pick up,” a cook called. After a few minutes, he repeated the call. “Anyone seen number nine?” As if they’d preplanned it, all the cooks (and there were several behind the line) launched into a version of the Beatles’ “Revolution Number 9,” repeating, “Number Nine, Number Nine, Number Nine. . . .”
    Number Nine never picked up her food. She had left the din ing room, the park, and the state—the first of many to flee.
    Of course, the cooks were not immune to the call of nature and many of them were wolfishly on the make. More than once, I walked into the cavernous cold storage unit and found a cook rubbing pelvises with a waitress. This, too, was a scenario I would see duplicated in various forms in the years to come.
    The waitress-cook combination, however, is one of the few that allows the front of the house to fraternize freely with the back of the house. The waitstaff are part of their own unique power structure, one that resembles the feudal pyramids of medieval times. At the bottom of this pyramid are the busboys. Busboys have a symbiotic relationship with their servers. In a full-service restaurant, a waitress cannot perform her job without her handy slave cleaning her tables, delivering bread, and refilling water glasses. On the other hand, the busboy cannot make any kind of decent night’s wage if his waitress’s tables tip badly due to slow or inattentive service.
    Hosts and hostesses are a cut above busboys. In some restaurants, the host or hostess is given a considerable amount of power by virtue of the fact that he or she controls the reser vation book, the holy grail of the dining room. The hostess is the first person to greet the guest and the first to make an impression. A hostess can “get you in” at the table you want at the time you want. A hostess can also present a waiter with a section full of deuces or a section full of large parties. Some times, power corrupts. Although this was not the case at Yellow stone, I would work at a restaurant many years later that was almost controlled by a cartel of cash-hungry hostesses. These lovely ladies took tips at the door from guests wanting specific tables and actual kickbacks from waiters desiring profitable par ties. I’d spent years listening to my father complain about kick backs in the hotel restaurants where he worked, and I refused to knuckle under. As a result, for several months I received whatever was left over after the prime tables had been seated. No amount of complaining or accusing helped my situation, even though there were plenty of other servers in the same position. The hostesses denied everything up and down, and management backed them up (management, it turned out, was actually having affairs with the hostesses, but that’s another story).
    Servers are in the middle of the dining room pyramid and take up most of it. Often, they are the only connection between the guest and his food. Therefore, they alone deal simultaneously with the front and back of the house. Servers, too, are responsi ble for controlling the wild variables everywhere in between: disgruntled busboys, rapacious hostesses, hungry guests, surly chefs, and profit-minded managers, just to name a few.
    Managers and owners make up the top of the dining room power structure. As I’ve already pointed out, salaried middle managers often make less money than the servers they police, leading to resentment and abuses of their power. It’s very easy for a manager to impose punitive measures on a server without ever being held accountable. The schedule is key. Failing to com ply with a particular manager’s sense of subordination can guar antee a week of lunch shifts or, worse, brunch. A week of such shifts can easily cut a server’s income in half. Regardless of whether the manager is also the