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LIFE HACK
How To Save Your Waiter From Existential Despair
Being a server in a restaurant is a hard job. I did it for several years to pay my way through college, and I burned out hard.
Billionaires may think they work harder than everyone else to justify their obscene salaries, but they would cry having to wait tables for six consecutive weekend shifts from Friday morning to Sunday evening depending on the generosity of their restaurant customers for their income beyond an hourly rate less than half the national minimum wage that is eaten up entirely by taxes.
Because serving is a service job, servers must put up with customers no matter what they do or say if they want to not starve. This, naturally, is unfortunate because many people go to restaurants grumpy, angry, uncomfortably creepy, and high-maintenance in ways they’d never behave anywhere else.
Many diners likely have little idea what a nuisance they are for their servers, so here are some guidelines to contemplate in order to ensure that you never push your server into existential despair:
— If you are going to miss or skip a reservation, call the restaurant to cancel. Restaurants lose money by holding tables for you unnecessarily, and your absenteeism makes other guests wait longer to get tables of their own. Also, the server who would have…
