Maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, I fell in to a social group in New York City with many people who consider themselves to be intellectuals. I’ve been privy to countless conversations about how intellectual labor is labor, about how someone needs to do the sitting around and thinking and theorizing, with the thought underlying this being: and it certainly wouldn’t be the people who carry things for a living.Why don’t websites hire service people to write about food? How do ‘restaurant journalists’ exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.
a few people directly recommended this piece to me & they were so correct in that impulse that i am going to quote multiple parts from it that intensely resonated
I’ve never received a paid sick day. I started buying orthopedic shoes when I was 28 years old. I’ve watched coworkers be sent to the ER bleeding at 3 am only to come back and work a shift the next day. I visited a place I worked at for a summer in the East Village and chatted with my former manager. He told me he’d been on the verge of leaving the job, but that his replacement had died of a heart attack on the restaurant floor. These stories are commonplace.You just keep grinding, turn and burn, count tips at the end of the night. Then you go home and dream that your section is getting slammed and your feet are stuck to the floor and everyone’s screaming at you. Or, in my most recurring dream, I’m watching the tasks pile up, the tables staring at me, the food cramming the window, and I can’t bring myself to deal with it, so instead, I walk out the door into Midtown Manhattan and walk away from the restaurant. I think this is my version of lucid dreaming. In the dreams, I can walk away, while in reality, you’d never dream of leaving in the middle of a shift.
For so many years I thought that I was missing an element of secret knowledge about how actual jobs worked, and that therefore I would be stuck forever. But now that I do other work, I see it all for what it is: everything is a system. The restaurant is a system, the content management is a system, the computer is a system. Everything is so much simpler than I imagined it was. I thought I was doing an easy job, but everything is an easy job when you know the system. Other professions weren’t magic. They were systems too.
i can't overstate how furious i was when i accidentally slid into sort of a normal office job situation & found out how fake the barrier was. i got trained by an accountant who probably made three or four times as much as me (plus benefits, presumably, which i didn't have bc i was still too food service adjacent) & they didn't know basic stuff about the software i'd figured out just from looking at it. this is, to be clear, not a judgement on them-- they did their job just fine & i probably grew up On Computers much more than they did, but it was such a clear moment of realising that i'd let myself believe that my decade of food service left me unqualified for Professional Life, but actually, those fuckers don't know shit, or at least, the shit those fuckers know is eminently learnable-- if they deign to decide you are teachable
I couldn’t really function when I wasn't at work, so I worked more. I picked up every shift I could, I rarely worked less than a six-day week. I’d work 13 days in a row just because. Most of my weeks were 50 to 60 hours. But I needed it. As the months had gone by, I’d descended into one of the worst panic spirals in my life—disordered eating, excessive drinking, isolation from my friends. The work was the only thing that kept me out of my anxiety. That, and the slim possibility of a future that I didn’t know if I should believe in.Working every day was never going to be a good idea forever, but it was the best thing I could do as a temporary solution. These days, if I pick up a fourth shift in a week, I’m tired for the next three days. Back then, I just kept going.
i got taken advantage of a lot in restaurants & kitchens bc i have a particularly strong form of daddy issue capitalism brainworm that makes it feel super rewarding for me to define myself by overwork. the advantage-taking got worse, in a lot of ways, in an office setting, bc it felt so easy i thought i was doing something wrong & pushed myself to take on more & more until it felt like the same effort i put in at all my serving jobs. eventually, through careful observation of how other people worked, i realised i could slow way, way, way down. & i was incandescently angry all over again, with renewed perspective, at every 9-5 white collar desk job worker who was condescending or smug or pitying about the worth of my labour & personhood. even as i provided a service they obviously wanted & needed
all jobs have their difficulties. that ~office job specifically was in an environment that burned me out so hard i didn't recover mentally for probably six months after i got let go (so they could put one of their friends in my position (that they'd created for me (bc i was so intensely driven in my desire to make that workplace less stressful that i'd already started doing a lot of the work of the sorely-needed administrative role they invented to put me in (which i was so grateful for at the time & even now can recognise as a kind gesture & good management moment (a rare highlight in a never-ending tale of awful management) but ended up being one of the worst decisions of my life)))). i am not at all an "i don't dream of labour" person bc i absolutely do, as a part of a theoretical society & community that values & reciprocates it, but jobs are largely stupid & feel bad & i wouldn't say that all white collar workers have it "easy" or that even the ones that do aren't allowed to have complicated or completely negative feelings abt their jobs. i am just saying that my whole life everyone told me it was harder than being a bartender or maybe bartenders lacked some sort of integral skill that all office workers had & they were lying through their teeth. i let them make me feel bad abt myself for something that wasn't even true.
i missed serving so much. i still miss it. when everything shut down in march 2020, i was a little over a year into a job that was so gentle & relatively stable i'd started working through the industry-standard trauma (after finally recognising that things like "a customer changed their mind about their order & the thought of going to talk to the kitchen about it makes me feel like i'm going to die because of how i have been treated" was actually capital t trauma). i was still of course generally disrespected, but as i grew & healed, i became increasingly confident in my own self-worth, which makes it not matter quite as much. & at least i was doing something. i was feeding people, providing them some measure of comfort & a warm emotional space on a random afternoon or evening, sometimes making peoples' days or weeks. i loved being a server. i thought i'd do it until my knees or my hips gave out & then i wasn't really sure what i'd do, honestly, but i assumed something would work itself out, i guess, or i'd die before it was a problem, which i think is sort of the millennial retirement plan generally
as a sidebar, i always found it difficult to be kind when people who sat at a desk all day would talk about how bad it was for their back, & how they were envious of me for being on my feet all day. it is true that sitting all day is not particularly good for your body. running on concrete floors for six or ten or fourteen hours a day is also not good for your body. being expected to just slap something on a cut or burn & keep working is also not good for your body. i broke my foot in two places & went back to work as soon as i could put weight on it, which is when my coworkers convinced me to go to the hospital, & they said "we're gonna put a walking cast on here but you should use your crutches as much as possible" & i burst into thick snotty tears & said "i'm a server" & the doctor uncomfortably handed me a tissue & i switched to the less-busy less-lucrative lunch shifts until i got the cast off. it was nice that people gave up their seats for me on the street car for those few weeks, even if i wasn't really in any more pain than usual
but anyway. i really thought i'd do it until i couldn't anymore. part of the grief i had over the first two years of the pandemic was the realisation that it was being so mishandled that a future was being built where i never felt safe going back to serving. i still might have to-- i never went to school, i'm 32, i haven't stumbled into anyone else willing to take a chance on me yet. getting paid to create feels really good & all of the necessary promotional trappings around it make me ill. i've had additional grief in my accidental retirement from food service as i've gotten more in touch with my body & begun learning that my chronic pain isn't actually a good excuse to also do work that physically hurts me. my back pain first brought me to a doctor when i was seven years old & so for most of my life it was kind of like, whatever, i'm gonna hurt anyways, so why not just push as hard as possible? & then i got a job where i was allowed to sit down & it gave me back like fifty or more hours of my week because, surprise, the recovery period actually isn't as bad when you don't push as hard, even if you still need more recovery than people without your specific conditions, & i was like, fuck, i don't want to know that things could be easier if my situation were different, i might have to do something with that knowledge if i have it
Writers have been bemoaning the death of digital media for a long time, and for the most part, I wept with them: of course I believe in the importance of journalism and the news and free speech. But I see hundreds of tweets stating the number of journalism jobs lost, and I don’t see very many people talking about what happened to service workers during the height of the pandemic. In 2019, it’s estimated that 5,000 people in media and journalism lost their jobs. There isn’t an official statistic for the number of restaurant jobs lost in the pandemic, but I’ve seen a range from 2 million to 6 million. According to Tasting Table, employment in the food service industry is still down by 7% from pre-pandemic levels, and server jobs have been slower to come back than cook ones.
as pandemic financial relief ended in canada (which i understand i was immensely lucky to receive & wasn't the case in a lot of places, which obviously shouldn't be true; i also understand that the ~bare minimum of money they'd decided to hand out was more money than i'd ever made at any job in my entire life), i picked up a couple jobs. one of them was a cashier job that would, circuitously, eventually lead to that office job i talked about. the other one was a serving job at a new franchise of some garbage chain restaurant. it was october 2020; vaccines weren't available yet. we sat scattered through the building for training. during the section on covid safety, they were going through all the mandatory santising & PPE. i raised my hand & asked about air circulation & the HVAC system, as i was beginning to understand that was being considered to be more important, & guests would obviously not be masked. the trainer gestured awkwardly at the plexi-glass separating the back to back booths & said "that's covid safe" & i said a non-committal "hm". i wore two masks & a face shield & i began writing a ttrpg called "THIS BELONGS TO YOU", a narrative game about finding parts of the mech that was stolen from you & weaponised & discarded; a game abt reclaiming your body from the war machine. this is in the original document:
i started writing this game while working as a server at a shitty chain restaurant during the pandemic. i stood there waiting to take orders from people who derisively said they "can't even see [me] under all that stuff", gesturing to the plastic and fabric on my face i had to rely on as a boundary between my lungs & theirs. i would see the open, uncovered mouths of the guests as black holes whose gravity was slowly stripping off parts of me. when i put plates down on tables, i had distinct visions that the overdone steak in front of them had been cut off of my own body. sometimes, of course, this is just what it feels like to work customer service. physical & emotional labour are not distinct categories: you hold your screaming spine straight, you instruct the muscles in your face to smile, you ignore every nerve ending telling you letgoletGOLETGODANGERDANGER when a plate is burning your hands because everyone at the table denies that they ordered what they did & they're squabbling & because working here is hell the kitchen has insane turn-over so everyone is always new & they never quite have the timing right so this dish has been dying under the heat lamp for ten minutes the way that a microwave can turn a bowl into lava but leave the food cold & you're just hoping that they're too hungry to send it back & that someone will just let you put it down please let me pry my bright red fingers off of this ceramic & maybe one day i'll be given the "blessing" of actually losing all feeling in them so i don't even have to care i don't have to care anymore. setting the mood is not just about how you are feeling or pretending to feel or how you are talking to someone: it is the way you move your body through the room. it is a careful, trained effortlessness. it is asserting your control over the situation with your posture & your tone so that everyone else can relax. you get thicker & thicker insoles & try not to wonder too hard what happens when years of untreated concrete finally grind your hips out of use. but it doesn't have to be this way. i believe there is room to feed & care & spread joy & make space for people to unburden themselves without exploitation. i believe that there is a world where i can use my body the way i want to use it & forge a more honest relationship with it while still making people happy. i believe that my body can belong to me. i believe in every possibility of our bodies & the outputs of our bodies belonging to us. i believe that we can belong to ourselves. this belongs to you.
all of that is true. & i still miss it. i think i'll always miss it.
