by Katherine Barrington

Created on: January 19, 2009

Serving in the Land of the Smiling Burger[1]
(Become a Waitress in Four Easy Steps)

Anyone who has ever been a waitress knows that it isn't easy. You must be willing to work for atrocious pay trying to make annoying people happy. You must also be ready to enter into a sort of secret club; an organization ripe with rules and hierarchies where, at any moment, you could find yourself the target of an angry customer, or worse, manager. After working on and off as a waitress for three years, I am confident in my ability to declare what I don't want to do for the rest of my life. Being a waitress is certainly not be the most satisfying job and may not even pay the bills, but it is an opportunity to witness how silly people will be for the sake of making a buck. In my experience, restaurants abound in strange rituals and re-namings of things in attempts to make them sound more appealing when all they really need to do is speak the plain truth: a burger is a burger, no matter how many fancy adjectives you add to it.

When I first set foot inside a brand new Red Robin Gourmet Burgers restaurant to apply for a seasonal job, I had no idea what sort of adventures were in store for me. I embarked on the journey of my first real job readily equipped with a fashionable robin-red polo tee, a pair of non-slip shoes with matching belt, and a spotless black apron tied around the waist of a new pair of blue jeans. Before I was able to step onto the floor as a waitress, server, or whatever you want to call it (the politically correct and not-as-clever-as-they-think-they-are managers of the Red Robin corporation labeled us members of the "sales team"), I had to endure two weeks of mental torture training. After making flash cards of all twenty-seven gourmet burgers and countless alcoholic drinks whose ingredients I couldn't even pronounce, I would enter the restaurant for my POS[2] training (Workbook 73). Sweat would drip slowly down my back as I navigated my way through the computerized ordering system, filling checks with the most random combination of oddly-abbreviated items the designers of the training manual could come up with. I might be required to ring up one Freckled Lemonade[3] (Freckld Lemnde), one Sand in Your Shorts[4] (Sand In), and one kid's strawberry milkshake plus an arbitrary listing of food items all on one check, sending the order to the kitchen (firing) in the right combination so that each item would reach the table in the correct number of minutes after they

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