Rough Hours

I currently am enrolled in 18 credit hours at Purdue and work approxiamately 30 hours a week. I'm going to be honest it is not the easiest thing in the world but I am paying for my education by myself and it feels great. Most of the hours I work are on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, this not only sucks for getting necessary studying and homework done, but also I have a very limited social life. I admit that we do socialize alot during work, but its usually not with people we would normally choose to hang out with.

Education

This blog is in response to an article that was written in the Purdue Exponent in the opinion column, which I am trying to add a link to. The author of the article commented that for a job that doesn't require much education, that person has pretty much power over what they can do to someone's food. I was APPALLED by this article. Every single server that I work with is currently an enrolled student. Personally, I work at this restaurant to pay my way through college and a majority of my coworkers are doing the same. My interpretation of the article was that all servers are uneducated, stupid people, that cannot get a job that requires an education. A majority of servers work at restaurants because the pay (tips) is excellent and they have a family to feed or they are working their way through college or grad school. I don't have much else to say about the article besides I was horrified by this authors opinions of servers. To Be Continued....

Tipping Out

For those of you that do not know what tipping out is...at the end of the night the servers are reasonable for giving a percentage of their tips or sales to certain people that work at the restaurant and help make the place go round, examples include; bartenders, bussers, cooks,hosts, etc... At the restaurant that I work at we currently tip out the bartender 6% of all of our cocktail, wine, and beer sales and we also tip out $5 for every Friday or Saturday we work to people that scrub the floors at the end of the night. Tipping out is the least favorite part of every servers night, after you calculate the tips you made and then have to give a big chunk of it to some else, its not really an amazing feeling but part of the job. The only problem that I see with tipping out is the fact that, a majority of the people we tip out make more than minimum wage whereas we make minimum wage FOR SERVERS. This means we make 2.13 an hour for running around all night for hours on end and then give money we made to those who are making around 3 times what we are hourly. Just one of the disadvantages of the job!

Tipping

Of course every server likes to go home at the end of the night with a big wad of cash but, on more than one situation that is not the case. In other countries around the world it is not standard to tip waiters for their service to you. In my opinion, I hustle around all night trying to make my customers happy so, in return they should make me happy by giving me a good and sufficient tip. I once had a large table with about 10 guests and I served drinks to them all night and had good conversation with they as well. Then when it came to paying the bill the customers left me a 9 cent tip on a $100 + bill . Of course I was really upset about it, so I told the owner while I was passing by him and he went to the table and told them to never come back to his restaurant and told them about how ashamed their fathers would have been of them. Okay, this may not have been the correct way to handle a situation but, I think sometimes it is necessary to get a point across. On the other hand, it is also very annoying when a customer tells you oh if you do this for me i'll give you a really big tip, and while we may make accomodations to the customer, within reasonable standards, making a unreasonable requests that is without of our reach should not affect our tip. Im not sure how other servers feel about receiving tips, but I do know that everyone likes to go home with money.