Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA by Barbara Ehrenreich Read Free Book Online

mode,
you know, because everything has to move so fast.” [4]
    I mumble thanks for the advice, feeling like I've just been stripped naked by the crazed enforcer of some ancient sumptuary law: No chatting for you, girl. No fancy service ethic allowed for the serfs. Chatting with customers is for the goodlooking young college-educated servers in the downtown carpaccio and ceviche joints, the kids who can make $70-$100 a night. What had I been thinking? My job is to move orders from tables to kitchen and then trays from kitchen to tables. Customers are in fact the major obstacle to the smooth transformation of information into food and food into money—they are, in short, the enemy. And the painful thing is that I'm beginning to see it this way myself. There are the traditional asshole types—frat boys who down multiple Buds and then make a fuss because the steaks are so emaciated and the fries so sparse—as well as the variously impaired—due to age, diabetes, or literacy issues—who require patient nutritional counseling. The worst, for some reason, are the Visible Christians—like the ten-person table, all jolly and sanctified after Sunday night service, who run me mercilessly and then leave me $1 on a $92 bill. Or the guy with the crucifixion T-shirt (SOMEONE TO LOOK UP TO) who complains that his baked potato is too hard and his iced tea too icy (I cheerfully fix both) and leaves no tip at all. As a general rule, people wearing crosses or WWJD? (“What Would Jesus Do?”) buttons look at us disapprovingly no matter what we do, as if they were confusing waitressing with Mary Magdalene's original profession.
    I make friends, over time, with the other “girls” who work my shift: Nita,
the tattooed twenty-something who taunts us by going around saying brightly,
“Have we started making money yet?” Ellen, whose teenage son cooks on the graveyard
shift and who once managed a restaurant in Massachusetts but won't try out for
management here because she prefers being a “common worker” and not “ordering
people around.” Easygoing fiftyish Lucy, with the raucous laugh, who limps toward
the end of the shift because of something that has gone wrong with her leg,
the exact nature of which cannot be determined without health insurance. We
talk about the usual girl things—men, children, and the sinister allure of
Jerry's chocolate peanut-butter cream pie—though no one, I notice, ever brings
up anything potentially expensive, like shopping or movies. As at the Hearthside,
the only recreation ever referred to is partying, which requires little more
than some beer, a joint, and a few close friends. Still, no one is homeless,
or cops to it anyway, thanks usually to a working husband or boyfriend. All
in all, we form a reliable mutual-support group: if one of us is feeling sick
or overwhelmed, another one will “bev” a table or even carry trays for her.
If one of us is off sneaking a cigarette or a pee, the others will do their
best to conceal her absence from the enforcers of corporate rationality. [5]
    But my saving human connection—my oxytocin receptor, as it were—is George, the nineteen-year-old Czech dishwasher who has been in this country exactly one week. We get talking when he asks me, tortuously, how much cigarettes cost at Jerry's. I do my best to explain that they cost over a dollar more here than at a regular store and suggest that he just take one from the half-filled packs that are always lying around on the break table. But that would be unthinkable. Except for the one tiny earring signaling his allegiance to some vaguely alternative point of view, George is a perfect straight arrow-crew-cut, hardworking, and hungry for eye contact. “Czech Republic,” I ask, “or Slovakia?” and he seems delighted that I know the difference. “Vaclav Havel,” I try, “Velvet Revolution, Frank Zappa?” “Yes, yes, 1989,” he says, and I realize that for him this is already history.
    My