Surviving Boot Camp: A Waitress' guide

Catering, hospitality, service: whatever you want to call it, working full time in a café, bar or restaurant is all consuming. Not only are the hours spent in a shift exhausting physically, mentally (and sometimes emotionally) due to the immediacy of your tasks but the pattern of work is changeable, erratic and requires weekends, early mornings, late nights or all three. The nature of the work required is a lot more intense than what might be considered “normal” office jobs, and it is not unusual to feel as if your whole life is spent waiting tables.

Not only is working in a busy eating or drinking establishment like multi-tasking boot camp and shuttling around like a discombobulated house fly, but the kind of relationship and interaction you have with your colleagues and managers is very different – a lot more personal. In more corporate or office settings, teamwork tasks are a daily feature, but this teamwork does not involve brushing past and bumping into other sweating coworkers and bellowing over the coffee machine.

While there is no disputing or refuting the fact that waitressing is manual labour, if the right ingredients are there, then working in such an environment is a wonderful and fun alternative to warming a chair and getting mesmerised by computer glare for eight hours a day. These hard to come by gourmet ingredients are:

-       Kind, fun managers who you get on with and who care about you and the business. These are best found in a small, independent establishment, owned by said managers.

-       A place worth visiting as well as worth working in. Environment is extremely important, regardless of your job. Would you want to spend time in this place if you were passing by?

-       Colleagues you get on with, at least during work time. Depending on personality requirements, a small number of employees makes for a working environment you feel at home in and a working environment in which you feel valued.

-      Food and drink provided. There seems a lot of variety in how much or how little free food or drink is provided by different cafes and restaurants. An alcoholic staff drink at the end of the day goes a long, long way and keeps the blues at bay.

-       A place whose products and practice you care about. If you don’t feel connected with what you are selling, motivation plummets. And how will you be able to sell anything if you can’t generate enthusiasm.

-       It sounds insignificant, but being able to wear your own clothes makes a huge difference. It makes you feel more relaxed, not to mention being infinitely more comfortable. Essential when running about like aforementioned discombobulated housefly.

Even if all these are in place (as they are at the wonderful Jacob’s & Field, where I currently reside), a busy brunch shift can at times seem unending and insurmountable. The trick is to build in little things to look forward to and keep morale up. Here are my ways of dealing and getting through:

-       Caffeine. In the form of tea and Diet Coke. Coffee is also an option but due to its psychoactive effects on me, I stick to the first two.

-       Sugar. In the form of fruit juices, cake and bananas. Anything that can be picked at: you won’t have time to enjoy your snack in one sitting.

-       Iced water. Hydrating and cooling.

-       Diet Coke.

-       The Loo break. A moment of calm, quiet and solitude.

-       Keep busy. Time will go faster.

-       Diet Coke.

-       Washing up, polishing glasses. Another moment of relative calm, quiet and solitude, when you need to escape customer interaction for a while.

-       Concentrate on the task in hand. Taking on board everything that needs doing and everything that will be done over a seven to twelve hour shift will only frighten you. However, your memory needs to be well oiled and in operation for all that multi tasking.

-       People watch. Working in a restaurant, bar or café gives you the opportunity to do something endlessly interesting. Entertain yourself by imagining what customers get up to in their spare time and what scandal might surround them. Entertain these thoughts in thought only while they are still within earshot.

-       Smile in the face of rudeness. Anger and aggression melt away to compliance if you are polite and friendly. Nothing throws people off course more than a smile when they were expecting an argument.

Post-shift restoration:

-       Feet up against the wall. Lie on the floor, with your feet up the wall. Make sure your buttocks are as close to the wall as possible. Breathe slowly and deeply for a while. This takes a huge amount of pressure off tired and overused legs. Stay here for anywhere between 5 to 30 minutes. Put on some music of your choice or listen to a sound meditation to take the calm a bit deeper. Spotify has reams of sound meditations to choose from.

-       Yoga. As gentle or as intense as desired. A day of standing and running – and in my case, cycling – stores a lot of tension in the body. Release it.

Marketing Gone Mad

Everything in Britain - and in much of the Western world, the United States especially – comes prepackaged. Everything is consumed after the consumption of one or another marketing gimmick. While this may be stating the obvious (how else will products, made predominantly by large companies, reach the consumer?), marketing’s virulence is now affecting commodities very different from anything that can be produced in a factory and put in a box. Our constitutions have become so used to its effects that it is now almost impossible to think and act independently of it: we need brands and logos and billboards to know what to like and even how to behave.

One such marketing tool is the opinion leader and an apt example of this is the celebrity chef. Jamie Oliver has got a whole generation of males into the kitchen and cooking, which is a marvelous thing. However, said males were only incited to do so after getting the go ahead from Jamie’s books and TV programs, despite probably having witnessed their mothers in the kitchen cooking every day of their lives. It is not just the 20-something male who falls privy to these phenomena: imagine the thousands who haven taken up an interest in cooking or ball room dancing after the success of TV shows such as Come Dine With me and Strictly Come Dancing.

Celebrities spotted in heat! et al., set off a myriad of trends from religions (Kabbalah) to despicable footwear (Ugg boots); from diets (too many to name here) to restaurants (remember the A to Z list-celebrity Wagamama craze of the mid-noughties?). Not only do these demi-gods create desires, but also become commodities and brands themselves: J-Lo, R-Pattz, Brangelina. We are so used to marketing speak from our incessant subjection to the insidious tactics of branded products that our vernacular and that of the media has also become affected. Clever marketing will also have us, not only paying, but happy to pay £20 for flip-flops originally worn by Brazil’s poorest.

The most glaring example of just how much brands and marketing have taken over life-as-we-know it in this country can be seen at mealtimes. The majority of restaurants – be they higher end or simply food-to-go – are chains and to find a continental-style eatery, free of fanfare and façade, is a challenge (i.e. may take a good ten minutes in Central London).

However, when it comes to eating habits, the trend for everything mass-produced may stem from the fact that the English lack a gastronomic identity: food is not as integral to socialising and culture as it is in most other nations around the globe. We borrow cuisine from all over the world and when asked, a Brit may have to think for several seconds when asked what traditional English food consists of. The only thing the English really do well is teatime fare: flapjacks, Lemon Drizzle, Scones, Victoria Sponge and the venerable Trifle. Interestingly, there has yet to emerge any chain tearooms.

Long gone are the days when food was always bought fresh, locally and meals made from scratch ourselves. Walk into any large chain supermarket of your choice and the array of fruit and veg stays constant all year round, the majority of which comes in cellophane wrapping with a sell by date and nutritional breakdown. We feel reassured by these arbitrary numbers and by sight of a well-known name of familiar colour and font on what we are to put in our mouths. Contrast this to Korea where there is a total overhaul of produce from one week to the next when the seasons change, bringing with it a change of both crop and menu.

So used have we grown to consuming only when fed with ready-packaged morsels, that even exercising needs to be done in a designated gym or during a designated exercise class of the latest trend, wearing appropriately branded sportswear. If it doesn’t fall within these parameters, then it is not regarded as “proper” exercise, e.g. walking or cycling everywhere, manual labour, taking the stairs.

The upshot of this marketing manipulation is not necessarily a bad thing. If more boyfriends and husbands end up treating their other halves to home cooked dinners and anyone carrying an extra few loses a stone or two as a result of an adulation for Kate Middleton and the Dukan Diet, so much the better for them and those around them. My only misgiving is that this dependence on marketing may reflect a small-mindedness and lack of initiative at an individual level. Or are we now powerless to overcome the herd-mentality having been drip-fed for the majority of our lives?

The force of a clever marketing machination can potentially be harnessed for tremendous good (see my Corporations With a Conscience post). If the Man can get us spending pounds on superfluous garbage, then maybe he can also persuade us to project pennies to places where it is really needed.

A new breed of summer reading

Writer. Mother. Musician. Lover. Fighter. Thinker. Poet. Gemma Weekes appears all this and more after reading her first novel, Love Me, published in 2009. Do not let the fact that a bright, young, female musician/poet ‘transitioning’ into writing prose, especially that concerning love and romance, fool you into thinking this will be anything short of beautiful or anything other than potent, for this is anything but chick lit.

Chick lit, romance novels, trash (what you will) have received a bad name and for good reason, too. Bridget Jones’ Diary spurred on a generation of literary works continually rehashing the same old theme of disappointing men, remorse at overindulgence and the woes of one’s dreary career. It would be a pity if Love Me were to be associated with this brand of fiction.

The subject of love is indeed where the roots of this story lie but is also the fuel which sets ablaze a gripping story that pulls you into the grey drab of London and then flings you into the sticky hot summer of Brooklyn - occasionally shuttling to and from St Lucia as you live through protagonist Eden’s obsessions, pains and catharsis: battling with an ongoing infatuation with first boyfriend, Zed, and coming to terms with horrors from that first summer with her first love.

Weekes magics up every sight, sound, smell, touch and even taste with her unique way of describing everything, with few words that manage to echo much louder. She has the true nature of a poet and breaks apart conventional ways of using words: sounds waft, light is loud, humid nights overflow. Love is like a drug, with Eden being drawn in “like a crack dealer attracts stinking, wild eyed cats.” The author’s disregard for sugar coating and putting love and romance in comfortable terms and using expected similies puts this book in its own category of novel.

Blown apart are Black stereotypes with characters such as the tee-total, brooding, guitar thrashing Spanish who abstains from herb yet takes magic mushrooms to break apart the walls of reality. And then there is Eden, herself, locked into adulthood yet harbouring all the hallmarks of teenage awkwardness. Through her narrative Weekes offers insights into the constraints imposed on black musicians being expected to conform to a narrow range of music and also alludes to love’s dark, macabre side.

The novel is pure sensory escapism and a sure fire way to ban the blues, with material in there to please both sexes. Whether or not the heterosexual male can bring himself to buy the gloriously technicoloured covered book is a different matter.