Those crappy jobs CEOs couldn’t do to save their lives
by Jennifer Kesler
Last night I watched the presidential debate. One of the questions was (paraphrasing): do you see healthcare as a right, a responsibility or something else I’ve forgotten. McCain said responsibility (of the government to make sure affordable healthcare exists) and Obama said it was a right for people to have healthcare.
I see it differently. I see healthcare as an investment a nation makes in itself. Whether you enable your citizens to get healthy and stay that way through government programs or a regulated free market, we should be appalled that people’s brains and skills are being wasted because they can’t obtain a medicine or therapeutic measure that’s readily available. Who knows what these individuals might accomplish, given the chance? Why do we not want this for our nation?
Because we assume that if they were valuable people, they’d be rich. Pure and simple; that’s what Americans are conditioned to think. Social Darwinism: if you’re worth something, the money gods will shine on you. If the money gods don’t shine on you, you must be mistaken in thinking you have something to contribute.
One that note, I’ve been thinking about those low-paying jobs that most people think a monkey could do until they learn the hard way. The hardest jobs I’ve ever had were waiting tables and being a receptionist at a busy office. These jobs call for true multi-tasking of the sort that studies now recognize the human brain just isn’t capable of: your focus must switch every few seconds, and you need to remember dozens of details at a time. These were the jobs I performed most poorly at, and they were nearly the lowest-paying jobs I ever had. Retail paid even less – while I found it easier than waiting tables and doing reception, that’s only because I never had to do it very long at a stretch. The amount of abuse you put up with from assholes who perceive you as a captive audience to whatever hostility they want to vent is ridiculous for any salary.
Here’s why I say a lot of CEOs couldn’t wait tables to save their lives – an example of what a waiter can go through in just a few minutes of a normal shift:
- You’ve got two new tables at once. You greet the first one, intending to get a drink order and run to the next table. They instead ask you questions about the menu. To which you don’t know the answer. You promise to find out and be right back.
- You greet the next table and get a drink order.
- As you pass one of your other tables, you notice their drinks are running low. Another of your tables stops you and asks for more napkins, a lemon, and another basket of free bread to fill up on so their tab and your tip will be even lower. Another server asks you to check if her order is up when you get back there.
- You go to the kitchen and get everyone’s drinks. You hopefully remember to ask a manager the answer to the menu question, get the napkins, the lemon, the basket of bread, a pitcher to refill the low drinks which you’re pretty sure were regular Coke not diet and check the other server’s order.
- While you’re back there, the manager asks you to restock the salad dressings, and you promise to do that after getting orders from your new tables.
- You come out of the kitchen with a tray loaded with heavy beverages (and the lemon on a little plate, and the napkins) balanced on one arm and a pitcher of cola in the other. You catch the other server’s eye while she’s busy taking an order and shake your head to let her know her order isn’t up yet. You deliver everything…
- …and remember you forgot the bread. You promise to bring it in just a couple of minutes.
- You go to take the first table’s order and they take all the freakin’ day about it. They’ve obviously been chatting the whole time instead of looking at the menu, so now they’re going to peruse the whole damn thing at their leisure while you stand there. If you’re confident you can do it in a friendly way, you let them know it looks like they’re not ready, and you’ll be right back in a minute.
- You take the other table’s order. Fortunately, this goes pretty smoothly.
- On your way back to the first table, you catch another server and ask them to bring bread to the table that wanted it.
- You go back to the first table and they’re ready. It still takes longer than usual because they want to reinvent the menu with all sorts of modifications and substitutions, and ask you diet & nutrition info on 90% of what they’re ordering. But you get through it.
- Another of your tables is ready for its bill now and getting impatient.
- You go to the machine (hopefully a computer, if you’re lucky) and run off the bill for the table that needs it and ask another server to take it to them. You enter the two table orders into the computer next, but get stuck at one point because you don’t know how to enter one of the modifications you’ve never had requested before today and have to find someone who can tell you.
- While looking for someone who can help you, you realize the other server didn’t bring the bread out to the table that wants bread. There goes whatever tip you were likely to get from them. You go fetch the bread while you keep looking for someone to help.
That’s assuming the kitchen is operating perfectly. When it’s not, things can get a whole lot hairier. When your tables are all difficult at the same time, it’s pure and utter hell. What I just described could all happen within 10 minutes or less, easily. I’m not describing the physical impact of the fast walking and heavy carrying that’s involved either.
What are some of the jobs you know of that don’t pay much and are perceived as something “anybody” can do, but actually require skills that a lot of people working at much higher salaries don’t possess?
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Posted in Class on October 8, 2008
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Funny! You should also be writing for the Huffington Post or some place with a larger audience. You have some spot-on insights!
I actually wasn’t even going for funny! That’s exactly what a typical 10 minutes on a normal shift would be like, LOL.
And I just noticed that in the end, I forgot (even typing it out!) to deal with restocking the salad dressings. Now my manager thinks I’m a flake.
Told you this was not a job I did very well at.
dude. administrative assistant. :shakes head in despair:
Oh, yeah, that one can be crazy easy, and generally was in the companies where I did it, but you’re right: some admin assts are glorified slaves.
I enjoy the cafe I’m working at and I think I’m pretty good at it (would rather paid writing work, though) but yeah, that’s about it. I’m *lucky* in the sense that I work in a small, well-staffed cafe and that my boss has very little tolerance for customers who want to screw around with the menu. I think what people who’ve never worked in hospitality don’t get is how maddening the ‘always right’ policy is and how extremely customers can abuse it.
Personally, I’ve always thought everyone should be made to do 6 months in hospitality – would do the world of good to some people’s sense of entitlement, IMHO :p
Yep, 6 months in hospitality and 6 months in basic military service (not killing people or doing anything morally ambiguous) would suit me. Humility, discipline, and a sense of the bigger picture. Oh, and they should actually have to LIVE on the wages paid in both industries (which here in the US are pretty low).
Seriously, something like that – set up and carried out in the right way – could be a real bonding exercise for the whole society.
Yeah, no getting your rich mum and dad to pull strings and get them a cushy position – EVERYONE has to do the work of a private or kitchenhand for the same pay. OK, I’d make allowances for people who lack the physical or mental capacity for it but that’s it – lacking the emotional capacity doens’t count :p I remember when my ex – this was the emotional abuser with the sense of entitlement visible to the naked eye – did a stint as a waiter and even though it was only for a few months, for the next few years that we were together, he was unfailingly polite and considerate to waitstaff. It was like flicking an empathy in his brain (pity it only applied to waitstaff)
I think it would be possible to find jobs for almost anyone’s physical or mental capacity in either the service industry, the military, or something like the Peace Corps. And if it’s not, then it should be.
You get a glimpse of what people are really like when you do something like waiting tables. It’s one thing to think “people are mostly good” when you’re equal to most of the people you know – of course they’re nice to you. But when you’re in the position of being a faceless entity not really empowered to fight a customer, you find out just how many of these “mostly good” people are really abusively inclined when the situation permits or encourages it. Like it’s just this desperate need they carry around, that only finds expression when they feel safe to let it out. They may be wonderful parents and give to charities and never cheat their employees, but if they feel the need to lord it over a server, then you know you’re not dealing with the cream of humanity here.
Well, I was thinking of exceptions to people like quadraplegics or severely retarded people with the intellects of young children, not simply being in poor health or having below-average intelligence – if George Bush can be president, he can wait tables :p
I think it’s easy for some people to take it out on watstaff if they’ve had a bad day because you pretty much have to assault them before they don’t have to serve you, and customers know that so it’s a consequence-free outlet for any aggro. Or maybe it’s a sense of entitlement that you worked so hard for your money, you’re entitled to have someone run around in circles for you. (I actually had a customers today who spoke to me like I was a complete retard because I brought them napkins, not cutlery, for the sandwiches and their lattes came in, OMG, latte glasses instead of the mugs they were expecting. And naturally, it’s always my fault, not the cook or barister’s, when the order is wrong or cold :p) This place in particular I don’t get a lot of crap from customers but I’ve found the most polite, considerate customers are always the one who have worked in the industry and know how much crap you can get for just being there.
At the other place – the one I got let go from, no great loss there – I’ve had food thrown at me and customers get verbally abusive because we won’t do something for them. And not a shift goes by without someone holding me personally responsible for the portions being too small or expensive, even though they knew what they were getting when they handed their money over.
This sounds like I don’t enjoy the work. For the most part, I do, but some of the customers I’ve come across just blow my mind for their complete lack of consideration.