Are You Being Served?

Man, I hate Denny's. I hate the lack of service there, I hate the fact that their pre-packaged reheat and serve food takes so long to make, but you wanna know what I hate most of all? The fact that it's practically the only restaurant in the area. I mean, there's a Brewsters six blocks down, but tacked on to the 13 blocks I have to walk to get to the theatre... nah, I ain't walkin' that far. Of course, as I'm bitching about this I just remembered the nearby Red Robin... well then!

I've always had conflicted feelings bitching about service, especially in the job climate here. Because everything's so on fire, most of the service-oriented places are having a hard time finding staff. It's so bad that some places are being forced to cut the amount of hours that they're open. Naturally, this has put a lot of people out of sorts.

My one hope from all of this is that people would start to examine their own perceptions of the service industry and hopefully start to remedy them. After all, nobody has to work in the service industry now unless they want to. And why would they want to, really? Why work a low-paying job that's universally looked down on?

I hate to keep bringing this up, but look at dear ol' Dane's situation. He left his sports editor gig to go work kitchen in Calgary, his old stomping ground. The most interesting wrinkle of all this is that working kitchen pays $3 more an hour than covering sports, and that's not even considering the tip-out. However, just examine your own early reaction to finding out Dane's new choice of job. Even though it does make financial sense, did it make any other sense to you? Sports editor is a job you can feel proud introducing yourself as doing at a party. I really don't think it works as well for being kitchen staff.

So ideally, people would have recognized this and thought, "Wow! Waitresses and clerks and other help staff do make our lives easier! Maybe we should start treating them as proud members of the workforce instead of as stupid peons who aren't good enough to find REAL jobs." Do you think this has happened? Well, of course not. The most common reaction I hear is "Why are people so lazy? There's all these jobs open and nobody wants to work them! Tsk tsk, such a sad state, the youth of today..." So then they expect that people from other provinces are going to come to fill in the gaps. I'm sorry, but if I was going to uproot myself and say goodbye to my friends and family, I'd be doing it for a lot more than a job at fucking McDonalds.

Now who wants ice cream?