The Waiter’s Weekend
October 28, 2008
Everybody’s heard the phrase, “This is my Friday.” A waiter’s Friday is usually Saturday or Sunday. The quintessential waiter weekend day is Monday. That’s why enterprising restaurants have “Industry Night” on Mondays, sometimes Tuesdays. Industry nights typically (around here at least) 50% off for employees of any restaurant – just bring your pay stub. Sometimes the deals involve drinks and a late-night happy hour.
In a lot of respects, Mondays are a pretty crappy day to have a weekend. For the rest of the world, Monday is viewed as a great opportunity to close up shop on the slowest day of the week. It’s a little like roaming a ghost town when you’re out and about on a Monday, expecting to get stuff done, or simply have fun. If places aren’t closed entirely, hours are often shortened. It’s a regular occurrence to be stymied in an errand or two and dinner plans when I’m trying to do stuff on Monday.
Also, your ‘regular job’ friends are out of your loop and you’re out of theirs. Whenever I want to do something, I plan it for Monday-Tuesday – they’re working and have to get up early. When they plan something, it’s Friday-Sunday – I’m working.
On the other hand, never being available weekend nights is an incredible money-saver. When I was younger, especially, my friends used to do a lot of partying, going to clubs in L.A. and such. They’d spend a couple hundred a night just drinking and eating Taco Bell when they struck out. I’ve probably saved $50,000 by not going out on weekends.
And that ghost town vibe can also be pretty cool. Traffic is light. If you do find an open restaurant, there’s plenty of free tables; you get great service (usually) because it’s not too busy. If a regular weekend day is mellow, it’s waaay more mellow to have it on Monday.
So today I slept in till noon (I was up till about 3:30 last night fussing on the computer and playing guitar). I paid a bill at the bank, went to Starbuck’s and read the paper while listening to John Prine and Jeff Beck, respectively, on the iPod.
Home again, more aimless fiddling on the computer with email and fave blogs to read. Checking my Fantasy Basketball teams to make sure the lineups are straight before tomorrow’s season openers. Changed strings (finally!) on acoustic guitar, sang a Bob Dylan song to the now shimmering sound. Finally settled down and wrote more outline revisions on the script for over an hour. And now here we are.
Later I’ll probably shake up a martini and dick around more on the computer. I have Forgetting Sarah Marshall on DVD, so I might watch that. Last potential activity: using some ‘trade-out’ gift certificates I have for a local restaurant. (Trade-outs are when one restaurant owner/manager trades certificates with another, typically to give away to employees as ‘thank you’s’ or as sales contest prizes.)
Don’t worry. This will get entertaining soon. What do you expect, anyway? It was a day off. How am I supposed to get new stories away from the restaurant?
— 1 of 110 stories in Waiter Notes