Serving in 2020

First of all, I don't want anything about this to become controversial. 2020 has effected all of us differently, we've lost loved ones, we've had massive disagreements on what's right and how to achieve safety, and I know that all comes into play when we read things. This isn't meant to be a justification for a viewpoint, it's just about my experience and the experience of my friends and co-workers trying to navigate working in a restaurant with all of the things that have gone on this past year.

For those that don't know me, my main source of income at the moment is serving/bartending in a restaurant. As you may know, this has been more challenging in the past year than in most. Between shutdowns, quarantines, fear of eating out, fear of anti-maskers, irritation at having to wear masks, etc. it's been the most confusing and frustrating year of work in my life. I didn't love serving before all of this happened, but it allows me to interact with people and leave some small impact on their lives, and that matters to me. I care about people, and while I'm fallible, don't always do the best thing and can be a bit of an ass at times, I generally do my best to leave people better than when I found them.

In the first two months of 2020, there was nothing exceptional going on for us. It was business as usual: seat people, serve them, love some of them, get frustrated at poor tippers, celebrate with those that are doing well, and go home. Then March happened. I've never hated a month before, but I do officially hate March of 2020. At the beginning of March, there was talk of shutdowns, of months-long quarantines, of closing the restaurant either temporarily or permanently, and none of us knew what was going to happen. On March 16th, I took one table, got a $50 tip from a man that was either an angel or a psychic, and stopped serving for the night because we found out in the middle of a shift that statewide shutdowns were happening in Utah. The servers that stayed on the floor made as much in the next four hours as I made in that one table, and that was it, we closed the doors and went home with no idea of what was going to happen.

The next week, all of us got called in. We're a close-knit group, we have to be it's kind of a small restaurant, so it was good to see each other but there was an undertone of confusion, of sadness, of what the hell is this year. We were informed that we were all essentially being terminated, allowing some of us to get unemployment, but we were told there was no knowing when/if we would reopen or what was going to happen. The only people that were staying on the payroll were the managers, and that was the end of it all. Our general manager and our front of house manager stayed on to run to-go orders on a restricted menu, but that was it.

Over the following two months I went in to help out with to-go orders, mainly out of boredom because we weren't making enough money for me to get paid. It was always shocking to see a place that was full of people just… empty. It was like leaving a big city and ending up in farm country for the first time, just silence when you're used to the white noise of busy lives being lived around you. We would, on a busy day during this time, have an overall sales of $600 a day which is so different from the $3,000-$4,000 a day we would normally do. Our GM, who usually keeps himself distanced from the front of house staff for professional reasons, was excited whenever one of us would drop by.

We reopened in the middle of May, and it was rough. We didn't know how much staff we needed, we had to figure out how to keep everyone properly distanced, we were doing a job that left you sweaty normally in gloves and masks and probably went through enough gloves in a week to create our own landfill. On top of that, the business was slow, slower than it ever is during our down season. We'd have nights where there were four servers on the floor and only one of them would get a table. 

A lot of our staff was okay because they could collect unemployment as long as they worked under a certain amount of hours and made less than $600 dollars that week which wasn't a challenge for anyone, the only downside at the beginning was for the three or four of us that didn't qualify because we had no recourse but to hope we had a good night. Then came the $600 extra per week for people getting unemployment and a whole new host of problems came up. We had workers claiming they got exposed and couldn't come in, only to post pictures on social media of them at bars, people refusing to work shifts where we needed them because it would put them over their 30 hours and that meant no check from the government, and people putting other people's livelihood at risk because they didn't need to work with the money they were getting. As one of the three people in the restaurant that didn't qualify for the benefits, I was both grateful to not have to deal with it and frustrated because I was trying to live off of $300/week if I was lucky. 

The business did eventually get back to normal, we got to a point where only having two servers a night wasn't enough and where the restaurant could actually turn a profit. Now came a set of problems no one was equipped for: mask mandates, anti-maskers, and people that don't seem to understand that we don't control the pandemic or the guidelines. As we got busier, we'd end up having to go on waits because we only have half of our seating available but people couldn't handle it. We had people yelling at our hosts because tables were open but they couldn't be seated, we had people yelling at hosts/servers/whoever they could if they were asked to wear masks, we had people refusing to tip because they had to wear a mask, and we had people that told us that if we really cared about our business we wouldn't follow the mandates. We had some people on the other end of the spectrum too, people that needed to watch us thoroughly sanitize their table before they would sit (a few of whom had no problem touching other people's tables or ignoring social distancing while making a scene), we had people that demanded we list out every regulation that we follow and demanding that people wear masks at their table, and we had people that just shouldn't be going out because they were worried that everything could get them sick. Honestly, I don't know which side was worse to deal with because we were caught in the middle of a feud we had no control over and it was our livelihoods that were taking the hit.

We all had to watch as 2020 took what was our livelihood, our work, and to some of us our second home and tear it apart. We had to watch as our coworkers and friends were maligned for asking people to follow state mandates. I had to comfort more than one of my friends as they were crying because the treatment they received for things outside of their control was beyond rude and was frankly unacceptable. A lot of us are looking to leave an industry that's supported us for something new, something we may not be good at because the general public cannot be expected to respond to stressors without punishing us in retaliation. If you have problems with my use of the word retaliation, when you refuse to tip someone that's making $2.13/hour because you were asked to behave like an adult in the middle of a pandemic and tell them you hope they get covid as you walk out the door, I don't know what to tell you other than you're wrong. 

It wasn't a good year for most people, but if you know anyone that has been working in the service industry it's been particularly hard for them. We work a job where we're interacting closely with people every day, in close proximity and yet we're told it's not a high-risk job for getting sick. Most of us will go out of our way to make your dinner, your date, your anniversary better, and get treated poorly because our life circumstances have us waiting tables instead of working a traditional career. The next time you go out to eat, just be nice to your server, you don't have to tip them $100 but treating them like a person goes a long way to making their struggles feel worth it. For those of you that do go out of your way to take care of us, especially those that have never worked in the industry, thank you so much; we were all grateful for how you took care of us before but this year just being treated like we matter has made a lot of the frustrations feel better.