So Tired

Servers anywhere will tell you that Friday night and Saturday night are, barring some really weird occurrence, the best nights of the week to make money because so many people are out having fun on the weekend.  Last night was no exception.  I arrived at the restaurant to find it absolutely slammed -- at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.  There were about three or four of us who were supposed to start work at 4 pm so when we did that eased things up for a little while.  But then, starting around 5:30 the people just came pouring in...


There was no relief.  My section (my group of tables) was completely full for the entire night until about 10 minutes before we closed.  Has anybody every power walked for 7 and a half hours before?  If you haven't, I suggest not doing it without a little training first.  Wow, my feet were so sore.

Highlights include: several low-maintenance tables that still gave me a good tip, serving a person that I could not tell whether he/she was a man or a woman until she ordered a drink and had to show me her license, waiting on the owner of the restaurant without knowing it until nearly 3/4 of the way through his meal, getting a 30% tip from the owner, and sitting down at 11:15 to do some post shift work that waiters always have to do (at least at Red Robin). 

Lowlights: my feet -- they are still slightly sore this morning, forgetting to bring one of the kids at the owner's table his drink for at least 10 or 15 minutes, and of course, several under-tippers (think 8% or 9%) and two that didn't tip me AT ALL.  Oh yeah, and one of the tables that stiffed me took my pen.  That's a cardinal sin.  Don't ever take a waiter's pen.

On that note.  I know most of you that read this blog are young-ish and most don't have kids yet.  So there is still time:

Please, please, please, don't send your kids out into the world to hang out with their friends without impressing on them the importance of tipping their waiter.  Waiters HATE to see groups of kids come walking into the restaurant because they usually don't order a lot of food, sit around at the tables for a long time, ask for all kinds of weird things that aren't on the menu, and then DON'T TIP.  Both of my non-tip tables were high school age kids.  One of the low tips was a table full of older boys that sat around for about an hour and a half, drank a glass of water a minute and ordered about a zillion french fry refills.  And then left me 4 bucks on a $48 meal.  I think (at least I hope) that most of them don't know the rules for tipping, and that is a consolation some of the time...but still.  Waiters hate seeing groups of kids walk into a restaurant.  Maybe our kids can change that? 

In other news, Melissa and I are going to the Sunday morning service at one of the countless churches within a 8 block radius of our apartment.  We've enjoyed going to church with my family out in Baytown, but we want to be connected to our neighborhood too, and going to a church nearby is one way to do that.  If we do stop going to Alliance, I'm going to miss attending church with my family and I'm going to miss Pastor Jim Black's preaching.  He loves God and loves his congregation, and his sermons always challenge me to earnestly evaluate my life as a Christ follower.  I'll have to listen to his sermons online whenever I can.

Also, I don't work Monday or Tuesday, so hopefully I can finish the love-seat, which has been sitting assembled in my living room just waiting for me to put the skin on it.  I was gonna wait til I was completely done to show pictures of it, but I'm doing it in such a piecemeal fashion that it has taken a lot longer than I expected.  So I'll end this post with a few pictures of what I've done so far:

All the pieces laid out before assembly

Assembly

Finished assembly