Diane could never be a waitress. She is too much “hands-off”. When she lived in a rented room in San
Francisco, way back in the dark ages, she was desperate for a job. She could get on as an LD operator with the
phone company, but they wouldn’t transfer her seniority from where she lived
and worked before, so she refused to work there. She is much too stubborn for that. Interestingly if she’d been a guy looking for
work on the wires he would have kept his seniority and pay grade. It was
a time of recession all over the country and she was getting desperate –
figuring she could keep the room and not eat or eat and live on the
streets. NOT something young women did
at the time. So, she went to work in a
bar that served food, after all she had eaten in restaurants and knew what a
waitress did. Since she wasn’t of age to
hold such a job they would pay her in cash at a cut rate. She didn’t realize how exhausting it would
be. For a week she went back to her room
after work and fell into bed to sleep as many hours as she could. About
the end of the second week she was getting into her stride and thinking all
would be well. Then one night a customer
gave her a “feel” and she told him off.
The manager told her if she couldn’t take the heat she was out of a
job. She was out of a job that
night. What to do? Her grandfather had recently died and her
grandmother was having a hard time being alone.
After all, she had never lived alone in all her 60+ years – it was
scary. Grandmother called granddaughter
and invited her to move down to Southern California and live with her for a
while. Diane did it because she knew she
would move back to San Francisco some day in the future. She lived with her grandmother for almost two
years and then went off on her own again.
She had a job, a car, a boyfriend and was going to night school. It seemed like a lot to give up to start all
over again in San Francisco. There weren’t
a lot of good memories from her first stay and she never moved back, living in the Los Angeles area all the rest of her years. And she never attempted waitressing
again.
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