The Trick is Not to Take it Personally.

10/10/09 8:35 PM

We servers generally take it for granted, but left without it, we’re up the creek with a paper paddle. The biggest help you can be to making our day run smoothly – at least for a start: Pay your check.   Now, I can understand the motivation behind *eating* the food & then walking out without paying. You’ve gotten something for free. But what was the goal of my table Friday night? A man & a woman came in. The woman was obviously in a horrible mood, but there’s a certain grace period at the beginning of a table’s service during which the customer’s bad attitude won’t rub off on the server. For this limited window of time in the early stages (delivering drinks & getting the order) the server wants genuinely to make the customer...

Murphy's Law

10/3/09 9:52 AM

  First of all, I am not a ‘smoker.’ I have the *occasional* cigarette. And by that, I mean I can nurse a pack for over a year if no one bums. Yesterday, I had four cigarettes.   Ladies & Gentlemen . . . I am now going to *define* for you the word ‘clusterfuck.’ And I actually tell this story less to complain than to share the most unbelievable course of events . . . Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want . . . & when your day goes in such unpredictably horrible directions . . . the first thing a writer thinks is . . . well . . . this post. Feel free to laugh at me. I will . . . um . . . in a while.   Yesterday started about a month & a half ago when I said, “Hey . . . look . . . Elliot, Sean, & Barry...

The College Clunker

9/7/09 9:39 AM

There are two main kinds of college student cars.   1)      I come from money & Daddy loves me. 2)      I reuse disposable stuff & my car’s kinda in that category.   I have the second kind. I JUST got it out of the shop for having the serpentine belt replaced. It had been making a sound like Superman sharpening a machete. A horrible scraping . . . which the mechanic diagnosed, then fixed everything ELSE & returned the car to me. Um . . . it’s still making the sound – did you replace the belt? Oh, no . . . bring it in. WHAT THE HELL? So eventually, I got my car back, all better with something else replaced under the hood. I recently had to get a new battery too.   So I was driving to class...

Welcome Back!!

9/1/09 7:58 PM

The Towson campus is buzzing with life again. To the point where those ramps they put up for construction are actually in the *way.* The stacks of the New York Times are depleting quickly, the book store is restocking (for which I have to wait to obtain a number of my required supplies), & the clean slate feeling is setting in - that point of the year, as Robyn Quick puts it at the beginning of each of her courses, when you haven't started procrastinating yet. It's simply not possible. So welcome back. I've left the blog dead over the summer & intend to bring it back full force for the duration of the school year. So far this semester, I've got wonderful courses, wonderful professors, an audition rapidly approaching, a haunted house I've turned down, & a CD in the mail on its...

Memorial Day

5/27/09 10:00 AM

I’m gonna go ahead & pretend I think people read this & keep it going over the summer. Maybe some facebook advertising can do the trick . . .   It’s been a while . . . I’ve been in the awkward transition from overdrive to stalled going from classes & exams to less than nothing since when you’re in college, your social life goes away when the semester ends because everyone lives in different parts of the country. Not only that, the first week of vacation, I didn’t go to work because I had something pinched in my back that’s been that way for a while & flares up every now & then. I had to miss two days of work. But when I returned, I picked up Monday nights, so my summer should be fairly fruitful. ...