Always Open
For a few years I worked as a waiter at a well-known chain restaurant in North America. Its main money maker is breakfast, but our location did a brisk business at night as we were up the street from some famous and large cowboy bars.

The saddest day I ever worked there was Christmas. I volunteered to work the counters instead of a sections of tables. As we were one of the only restaurants open, we were incredibly busy with every seat taken, even at the counters. It seemed that every 55ish single male with no family or friends who wanted to have a Christmas meal came to sit at my counters that day. Of course, I was too busy to chat, let alone spend time listenening to some old crank complain. But the sad part is that we all knew there was nothing wrong with the service given the class of restaurant. The issue was really that these guys needed a reason to force someone to talk to them, and I was to busy to help.

But mostly, I worked on the graveyard shift 11 to 7, mainly dealing with drunks trying to sober up before driving through the police stop-checks, and the "coffee bums" who spent every night of their lives in the restaurant nursing a bottomless cup of horrible coffee for 70 cents a day.

Of course, it was hard and chaotic, but there was a warm sense of brothers-in-arms about the staff, which is really what I want to talk about.

When you wake up at 9 pm, and go to sleep at noon, you're on a different wavelength than other people. When they're just waking up, you're just getting off shift ready to go home and relax. I'd stop at the gas station on the way home to buy smokes, and the attendant and other customers would look at me like I'm from another planet, but they wouldn't know why they felt that way.

My fondest memories of that time are the poker games Sunday morning 8 o'clock after work. We'd crank the heavy metal music, drink and smoke hash and cigarettes, gambling the waiters tip money while the neighbours went to church. The level of play wasn't that sophisticated, so I always made money.

Sorry for the lack of sabotaged food stories. We took pride in our jobs, even as we laughed at them. Twenty years later, I still have vivid memories of those days.
(DeepBlue, Mon 24 Jul 2006, 4:41, Reply)