Saturday Stories - Waitressing 06-04-16

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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