“So I go to college in a town that’s one of the only bigger cities in a 150-mile radius. I worked at the only five-star restaurant in that city, so it was very popular with all the locals and people who lived in the rural towns in the surrounding area. We were packed most nights. I was a waiter and not to toot my own horn, but a particularly good one. The training was INTENSE, I had to take a written test on what I learned each night and if I didn’t make at least a 95, I was done. That being said, three weeks after my hiring, I was the top producing waiter. Management staff and the owner would bend over backward for the top-selling people but this didn’t apply to me. The managers loved me and the head chef like me. But, the owner hated me. She took all the good tables and sections away from me and put me in the worst section and robbed me of my tips. Why do you ask?
She didn’t like the way I looked when I walked!
She said I didn’t look urgent enough. See but the thing is, I’m six-foot-eight. I have a much longer stride than most and actually had to slow down because I got too close to knocking other waiters over too often. My managers knew she was being an idiot and just told me to try and cut my stride in half so I looked like I was walking faster. So I did and she thought it looked stupid because it did so she took more tables away from me.
Now comes the worst part. I went from making over fifty dollars an hour to under minimum wage. We were about to have our busiest day of the year, we booked every seat in the restaurant. It was chaos. Nobody knew what their section was, the hosts didn’t know what was going on, it was absolute madness. I asked the host (my best friend) where I was supposed to be and he had no clue. So I asked the owner because she was managing that day so she told me, then immediately changed it without informing me. I realized I wasn’t in the right section, so I asked my buddy again. He again didn’t know, so I asked the owner again. She got angry at me so she took everything away from me and told me I would be working for free that day. I finished my shift to help the other waiters because they work hard and don’t deserve to be effed, told the manager in the back who was a buddy of mine that I just worked my last shift and then quit.
When I went to collect my last paycheck, I told all the waiters my story and one after another after another started quitting. They became horribly understaffed and had to change their hiring process and had to work hard to stay afloat after almost every college-aged waiter quit within a span of a month. (My best friend quit too because they only paid him three dollars an hour.”
