D-Day

As server there are several days a year that are known as D-Days.  These are the days where there will be more people than the restaurant can handle, everyone will be stressed and screaming... the weak will cry.

Working in this job it is inevitable that you will have to serve your time on one of these D-Days.  They include:

1.  Christmas Eve

2. Thanksgiving (If your establishment is open)

3.  Easter

4. Father's Day

5.  Mother's Day (by far the most horrible of them all)

and

6.  New Year's Eve.

The optimistic will dream up ways of how to escape work on these days including diarrhea, constipation, vomiting, flat tires or all-out car accident that involves the jaws of life.  The realists, the veterans, will accept their fate calmly, knowing that by tomorrow it will be over, and hopefully they will still have their sanity and their jobs.

The owner will be there, causing unnecessary stress and micro-managing the smallest, most unimportant details.  We will run out of menu items, but no one will be told resulting in a huge backup on tickets.  Plates, spoons, knives, glasses will all miraculously disappear leading into large stampedes looking all over the restaurant.  People will linger at the door because there is no one to seat them, since the hostesses have been commanded to run food.  Servers will steal each other's food in order to complete their tickets first, there will be squabbles and fights.  I have seen one waiter grab another by the throat for taking a salad that wasn't his.

It's a cutthroat business, and it's every man for himself.

I'm sitting in a restaurant right now, and I can smell the impatience of the people at the door.  The busser is getting nervous and dropping water glasses.  In one hour his hell will be over whereas in two, mine will be starting.

Happy New Year everybody.  My only resolution is to never work another New Year's Eve D-Day again.