[HN Gopher] Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
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Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 78 points
Date : 2023-06-09 19:54 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dirt.fyi)
(TXT) w3m dump (dirt.fyi)
| cafard wrote:
| I don't know. I never graduated to waiter, but I worked as a
| busboy a few times. I have much sympathy for wait staff. My
| recollection is that the waitresses were always decent to me.
|
| Still I don't buy, "I suspect it's easier to teach a waitress to
| be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." One of my other
| low-paying jobs was as a copy editor, and I have seen how
| commonly schools have failed to teach PhDs to be good writers--I
| don't see why the randomly selected waitress should be better. I
| should say that the demands of the two jobs are quite different,
| anyway: the waitress has to be able constantly switch attention
| to multiple people and multiple tasks, the writer (or programmer)
| has to be able to focus on one thing for relatively long times.
| projektfu wrote:
| I'm not sure that schools teach the PhD track to be writers.
| They must write, but they are not really expected to write
| well. An MFA in creative writing, sure, but that's a different
| sort.
|
| I think of the modern or contemporary "intellectuals" I have
| read and many are mediocre writers. For every William James
| there's a Pearse or a Lewis who is hard to read.
|
| But I think that the author has a different idea in mind, that
| of the novelist, story writer or journalist. A lack of life
| experience and appreciation for dialog can lead to poor writing
| in these domains, and perhaps a waiter would have a leg up.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| School actively teaches people to be bad writers.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| How so?
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Still I don't buy, "I suspect it's easier to teach a waitress
| to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter."
|
| Yeah, I don't buy that either.
|
| I know that the best software engineering work I've done in my
| entire life happened when I was working as a hotel housekeeper,
| before I was programming professionally.
|
| It was because cleaning hotel rooms is a purely physical, and
| highly repetitive job. Every day at work, I was mentally
| "checked out", working on difficult programming problems in my
| head while my body just robotically did the work.
|
| Once I was programming professionally, I no longer had the
| luxury of spending so much time deeply thinking about
| programming problems.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Is that an example of you:
|
| A) being a waitress learning to be a writer?
|
| B) an intellectual learning to be a waiter?
|
| I would have thought A, but you imply it's B.
|
| That's interesting to me, because when I was a waiter, I
| certainly didn't feel B. My high school classmate who went to
| Cornell and I spent an hour or two a day with senior year
| pretended they didn't remember me. Customers constantly
| talked down to me.
|
| I built an app to replace the restaurant computer,
| occasionally people would ask why I was taking orders on an
| iPod and when I'd explain, it made things _worse_: there was
| more than a handful of times they'd argue about rounding and
| the local tax rate.
|
| I think the author meant its _much_ harder to take the
| abusive management, extremely physical work, and occassional
| abusive customer when you think of yourself as an
| intellectual working a sidejob, as opposed to it being your
| job where the programming is a side passion.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I meant it as "A", but on second thought, you're right,
| it's more like "B".
|
| I suppose that my real, underlying point is that you can't
| reliably tell what a person's skillset is by what they do
| for a living.
| waiseristy wrote:
| Lemme modify the writers words for you to more accurately
| describe the phenomena : "I suspect it's easier to teach a good
| waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a good
| waiter."
|
| Being excellent at balancing a stressful, fast paced, work
| environment applies to many jobs. But being excellent at being
| an "intellectual" whatever the hell that even means (writers?
| Programmers?), does not really apply to very many jobs.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I believe the point is not that it's easy to teach people to
| write well but that it's easier than teaching people to work
| hard.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Everyone learns to write in school. A waiting job most can pick
| up but not all. I couldn't get past serving training. Carrying
| four plates and keeping them straight takes without spilling is
| for others.
| cafard wrote:
| Everyone writes in school, I assume. Not everyone learns to
| write well, in fact I suspect that most do not.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Everyone learns to carry plates while growing up. There's a
| lot more to being a good waiter than just writing down orders
| and carrying plates. And there's a lot more to being a good
| writer than just knowing how to write sentences.
| steve_gh wrote:
| Great writing. Love it
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Beautiful & original blog design!
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| This was a great read, thanks for sharing the link!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That was excellent!
|
| _> The life of the American worker is inherently undignified_
|
| This is true, and even goes for highly-paid, high-status gigs. In
| fact, I think that sometimes, companies consider high pay, a
| license to humiliate.
| M3L0NM4N wrote:
| Many people are willing to sell their dignity for the right
| price, however. Me included.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I once got a below average performance review paired with an
| above average raise, to which I told my boss that he could
| call me ugly if it came with money like that. I will say that
| it helped a lot that I really liked him and he wasn't all
| that thrilled with the company review process either and was
| apologetic about it.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I used to.
|
| However, since being forced into retirement (a _highly_
| undignified and humiliating process), I have found that I
| never want to go back to that again. I work at my own pace
| (about triple what I did, when getting paid), and don 't take
| one ounce of crap, from anyone.
|
| When I was a manager, I always strove to treat my team with
| extreme dignity. My managers were not as willing to do that,
| for me, however.
| M3L0NM4N wrote:
| I think when I am at that point in my life I will agree.
| But I am early on in my career.
| thih9 wrote:
| How long though? I.e. when you have more money, don't you
| start valuing your time and dignity more?
| M3L0NM4N wrote:
| Yes eventually, but I don't have money right now.
| emodendroket wrote:
| > In fact, I think that sometimes, companies consider high pay,
| a license to humiliate.
|
| This is easier to think if you haven't had or don't remember
| low-wage work.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I used to work for Roy Rogers, when we had to call the
| customers "Pardner."
| emodendroket wrote:
| I got reprimanded for going to urinate at unscheduled
| times.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I gave up on this article about 1/3 of the way through. I could
| fill dozens of pages with my aimless years after I quit college,
| but I wouldn't think to bore people with it.
| rcoveson wrote:
| I'm just glad you saw fit to let us read your insightful
| critique. Let me know if you ever do decide to get those pages
| out; you've got a fan in me!
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| I read the whole thing in one sitting. I found it interesting
| in a slice-of-life way. Basically a journey to maturity and
| self-discovery.
|
| You might jot down your aimless years after college, for your
| own future reminiscences if nothing else.
|
| But everyone, I believe, has a story to tell, something of
| value. We tend not to tell our stories anymore, because we're
| too busy and overstimulated and no longer need to fill up the
| hours around the cooking fire.
| projektfu wrote:
| It reminded me a bit of the oral history in Studs Terkel's
| "Working". The interview with the stewardess (as she called
| herself) was interesting like this.
| draw_down wrote:
| [dead]
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