As I reached for the cold but yet (hopefully) untouched egg roll on my bus tray, I knew with a sinking in my chest that I had stooped there. Hungry on a fourteen hour shift, I scarfed it in three bites before another server could enter the dish pit. The egg roll had come still on its plate from table 41, a couple. They had looked clean enough. No sneezing, no double dipping. The woman had even wiped her hands with a sanitary cloth before eating. I kept justifying the act as I swallowed the last bit of spring vegetable mix, shredded pork and egg that stuck in my throat.

Breakfast hadn’t been an option. The night before I had worked a double at the restaurant (two shifts in one day) and gotten home at 2am. In bed by 2:30 with no dinner. Too tired to cook of course. I woke up as late as possible and even dilly-dallied with the alarm for thirty minutes. My fault, I know. Coffee and out the door, with a piece of untoasted bread. Work at 10:30 am. It’s a double again, straight through, no break, until 12am. During the weekend grind I run on fumes, smiling all the time with “yes, sir” and “yes, ma’am.” I spout recipes, cooking methods, bar pours, and wine pairings like a second language. I chug a to-go cup of water between my sixth round of tables and then take my apron off and snap my bar tools into my belt for the bar night shift. I do a training class for new food runners while tending bar. Another glass of water. A handful of goldfish and a piece of fried chicken from my cook friend “Ponchie” (or ponchito, as I love to call him when I ask for favors in Spanish). I collect my tips from the manager at the end of the night and smoke a cigarette in the parking lot with Tyron, the dishwasher. My eyes burn as I count my money. A bill (100$) for the whole day. Slim pickings for a weekend double. We have entered the post-holiday slow season. I think about the day I have ahead. One more double. Rent due after that (800$), and I’ve barely made half the whole month. Tyron suggests I pick up a shift. Silly, I say, I have class.

Enter stage left, school costs.

I am not one to complain. I am absolutely in love with being a server/bartender/trainer at my current job. However, living off tips working full time, and going to school full time is the tough part. I’ve been called crazy, or simply “young” before. “You can do that because you’re young,” they say. I tense my eyebrows at that, thinking. I think about my back pain from carrying heavy trays. I think about my lack of sleep and responsiveness to my friends. I think about smoking more and more. I think about eating mostly fried foods from where I work. Fancy Chinese is my diet. Cigarettes and the 3am mojito are my church. I measure my exhaustion week by week, and finally, when I am forced to take a sick day for my own sanity (or a test), I worry all the hours away about how much I could be making; how much I need for groceries that I likely will hardly use.

Grocery list:
Energy bars
Cereal
Milk
Oatmeal
Mac-and-Cheese

It was not until I began to read the book Nickel and Dimed, on (not) getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreigh that I felt utterly jipped by “the industry.” Hospitality that is. Barbara Ehrenreigh temporarily ditched her life and spent nearly a year working minimum wage jobs, starting over in cities with no home and little food.

 I had been taught that hard work for anything was normal. Nothing is free. My grandparents immigrated from Mexico. My father is an engineer. My mother didn’t graduate high school and encouraged me to go much farther than her (now she is currently a Master’s student). So working hard at 2.13$/hour for pennies didn’t get me down at first. I started training to become a server when I was 18, making checks for extra cash and movie money. Now I serve professionally and train others to do so.  I can host, serve, expo, and bartend. I still make 2.13$ (plus tips)* According to the Fair Labor Standards Act, as Ehrenreigh mentions, this is considered “fair” for tipped employees.

Barbara (I will call her by her first name as I do other servers), explored serving in her first chapter. I laughed through the entire chapter. I related to it on such a deep level. I could smell the all-day food-soak in her clothes, and feel her grimace at the thought of unruly guests.  It’s true hospitality can be rewarding and even fun around your work-family. But there are far too many instances in which it is degrading. Just as Barbara demonstrated in her first chapter, I announce myself as Lauren when I greet a bar guest, but am too often called “honey”, “baby”, “girl”, “sweetie”, or god forbid “kid“. I accept these names instead of protesting, worried that my tip will suffer. In Barbara’s case, she works for tips and ends up getting another job; a routine she fails to maintain physically and emotionally. In 1996, she cites, 7.8 million people held two or more jobs. I too tried the two-job method, and then tried even harder to add full time school to my mixture. It failed with a sleep-deprived breakdown in the bathroom of the retail store that served as my second hell.

During my two job and school stint, I watched silent films instead of sleeping, seeking distraction. I bathed myself in the black and white comedies of Chaplin.

In the Chaplin film Modern Times, The Tramp is fired from a secure and monotonous factory job and sent out into the streets. He works several jobs including, waiter, singer, and security guard. All of which fail to keep his genuine interest and support him financially. Entertainment-wise, it is a love story between two city dwellers in poverty. Chaplin loved to entertain, but he was also an intelligent and insightful artist who used his films to portray social issues. Modern Times hit theatres in 1936, during the Great Depression in America. Today, following what some call the Great Recession, the Tramp’s antics still echo some of our most sensitive issues. I’m not talking about the poverty that seems unfathomable to us, but the kind closer to home. The grocery bagger, the aging server, the college student, the hotel maid.

In the film, even middle class status is hopelessly out of reach. To facilitate a happy ending, Chaplin and his love interest run away. This is not a reality for the majority. Barbara pointed out that the struggle damages of poverty are cumulative, no acute. People are resilient. A bad job-less week might not put us completely down. Neither will a couple of back-grinding weeks as a maid. It’s the months and years people spend trying to eat three meals a day that wears them down. A paycheck to paycheck lifestyle is usually all they can muster, and advancing on the mythical economic ladder becomes an impossible dream. The American Dream is my father’s favorite philosophy. Anyone can make it if they work hard enough. Now, as a social work major, I cringe at the Dream. Hard work is a great utility. However, as Barbara showed, many times it isn’t enough. Hard work scrubbing floors in the morning and serving at night doesn’t change the systems in place that smother you in the first place. Yes, people must be willing to work hard and sacrifice in order to “make it”. However, flawed systems like minimum wage (no longer a living wage) do not help this endeavor.

I do not claim to have any solutions. Minimum wage and other issues like it come wrapped in red tape and sociopolitical issues that complicate them beyond a blog post. The empty slogans of corporations and the politics of management and workplace favoritism are only a few. I could like a thousand others from personal experience, most of which Barbara encountered in her study. While Barbara’s study was not all encompassing or perfect in a scientific sense, I believe she reached her point. She touched me personally as Chaplin did.  Chaplin pokes fun at the miseries of poverty. After all, comedy is pain. And we laugh because we’ve all been a Tramp falling our way through the grind.

 

*[A note on tips: Tips are fickle and stressful to live by. Depending on the star rating of the restaurant for which you are employed, tips can be low because price point is low. In my current job I can make anywhere from 200$-600$ a week. For consistent bills, this range is risky. A lot of luck and self-marketing for regulars is required to make it in a restaurant with a fluctuating volume of customers.]