“Mike, we’re supposed to have a secret shopper in here today, so remember the company’s absolutes,” my boss says, exhaling a septic breeze of halitosis all over my face, and walks—at the speed of a run, but moving awkwardly, because he maintains a walking stride—to the front of the store, muttering “welcome” to a wave of diners. They all come with their families, and a family would not be complete without a dribbling, crying, shitting baby or two, whose mess of discarded Freedom Fries binds me, my knees, and my hands to the floor. It is the secret shopper’s prerogative to have pristine boots while he munches on fried chicken and cheese sticks; therefore, I, an obedient waiter, pick fries off the floor to avoid offending the secret shopper and to keep the district manager off my ass.
So how else do I satisfy secret shoppers, who are the intelligence community and company code enforcement officers, in the realm of food service? How do I keep my incorporated feudal lords from mounting my proverbial backside? I “absolutely” do the following, as my employer desires:
(1) I smile, because neither my boss nor the customer cares if I’m unhappy about serving large bench-breaking customers all day, ones who order $30 worth of chocolate milkshakes, banana splits, and grilled beef, ask for ten refills of Coke and about 20 sides of ranch dressing and leave a penny for a tip.
(2) I try to sell appetizers and the most expensive meals on the menu, because when Sir Glutton gets his big bill, I get paid. There I stand, with a calculator in hand, computing, with a usurer’s precision, the tip I should receive by custom.
(3) I advertise the soups and specials of the day, like an annoying TV ad: “Today we have cream of broccoli soup and if you order the Caribbean Chicken and Shrimp you get a free sundae,” I say, while the customers roll their eyes and groan. “Can I get you something to drink?”
In this manner I toil away my shift, constantly reminded by signs, plastered on every wall in our sweaty kitchen, of the three “absolutes.”
From time to time, if I’m lucky, a regular—a specimen who dines in the same spot, in the same chair, with the same waiter, everyday—stops by to tell me about the latest trades he has arranged in his post-card collecting hobby, orders two coffees and leaves a 27 cent tip. I brewed fresh coffee!
However, small tips are a relatively benign transgression when compared with the sins committed by more malignant regulars. For example, there are the offenses of the religious-fanatic regular, who first gives his number to his waiter with a wink, then two weeks later prints out a personalized pamphlet on the biblical rapture with his waiter’s proper name placed within lines about dark sin and conversion.
In these trying moments, I faithfully and willingly stand by my three absolutes and do not overstep the boundaries that they prescribe. The distance that the absolutes create between me and the customer gives me a cushion of ordained behavior that I place, in the form of absolute (1), between me and the penetrating stare of the malicious regular. During these moments, the sweaty-kitchen, plastered with the company’s code, becomes a cathedral and my boss becomes a priest, and the customer and my instinctual responses to unwelcome customer conduct become abhorred indiscretions that must submit to the almighty corporate command.
So it is by this process that all servers come under the alienation and protection by the absolutes, and learn that the absolutes are the American way.
