Waitering

Let’s Have a Moment of Silence...

“Bless this food we are about to receive and the hands that prepared it. Waiters today are the last two to the table.”

Right before lunch, I run towards the dining hall in fear of the sentence above being spoken by the head. After all, nobody wants to carry the food in and out of the kitchen, clear the table and tray, wipe, and set, especially when this time is being taken out of your rare opportunities to relax and eat. But after hearing the head of lunch announce two random numbers, one of them being MY number, I feel exhausted and stupid for my futile efforts. (Although, the other option is always to “wait in the bathroom until [you] hear the bell,” as Athena ‘18 suggests.)

Why do we, the students, have to wait tables? I often ask this question to myself; after all, we don’t get paid or even complimented for bussing, and other than for part-time jobs at restaurants, learning how to bring in food and clear tables is not a very valuable life skill. In fact, I’m looking forward to going to high school even more since you don’t have to wait on tables during meals. But, thinking the situation through makes the reason very clear; eating food at the table is much more efficient than everyone lining up in the kitchen, and there are too many tables for the kitchen staff to wait the tables themselves.

Nevertheless, the logistics don’t make me or every other student happy to take on the job - what does it do for us?

These reasons may sound like a stretch, and they may indeed just be thoughts that I came up with only after continuous efforts to see the bright side of such a tedious task. Firstly, you get your food served first, and get to go to the hot bar first if there is a popular dish or soup there. Also, especially if you had been assigned to a table without any of your friends, you could continuously leave without having to awkwardly socialize with others on the table.

But more than the superficial and temporary benefits, waiting helps us develop personal characteristics that will be useful later in life. Most simply, they teach us how to complete seemingly unfair tasks within a strict time limit; the nine other people on the table don’t have to eat more quickly and clean. I mean, there aren’t REALLY that many differences between being waiter and being exclusively assigned an excessively difficult project to complete within a very short time limit.

There is one main difference, however: for the project, you get graded. You have an incentive to put in the effort since you know that working harder will produce better results. In contrast, for waitering, even though random people are forced to go through the extra hassle, they are not rewarded or graded.

In other words, it’s not only the boring work and the time taken away from eating and socializing that makes waiting tables a uniquely unappealing aspect of Fay’s student life; it’s that everyone else takes the fact that students have to wait on tables for granted. But looking at it in a different perspective, this teaches us how much we take what others do for us for granted; although we usually forget, being a student at Fay is an incredible privilege, and there are so many people working, including teachers, facilities, staff, and even – yes – Sage. And without having to wait tables, we would probably appreciate the adults who are working for us even less than we already do.

So next time, when the dining hall head asks for a moment of silence, rather than dreading the possibility of being waiter, why don’t we all really “bless the hands that prepared” our meal, our school day, and our privileges?

Erin ‘18