1-day jobs

My best friend and I moved to a new state and had to find new jobs, so we applied for every cocktail waitressing job we saw in the paper. After all, the money was great in New Orleans.

We quickly interviewed and got positions with a big function hall/nightclub, bought our required tuxedo shirts and bowties (I'm forever buying tuxedo shirts and bowties and throwing them away, praying I'll NEVER need them again), and began our first shift on singles night. Or as we refer to it, Old Person Meat Market. OPMM featured disco lights, easy listening and disco light music, and an enormous and nearly empty dance floor. Even better, it was overrun by vain bearded men in mock turtlenecks, blazers and gold jewelry (they took the admonition to "dress to impress" very seriously) drinking gingerales. By the way, gingerale = no tip and no refill. Best friend and I took our collective $9 in tips home and never went back.

But the specter of OPMM haunts my nightmares still.

That's Just Mean!

Yet another way to take advantage of job seekers' desperation: offer to send their resume to the top of employer searches for a fee (with the darkly implied corollary of sending resumes to the bottom if job seekers don't pay the extortion...uh, fee). Saw this kind of thing on a bunch of career posting sites:

Upgrade Your Resume

Having trouble getting noticed? Wish you had some way to make your resume stand out among a sea of competitors? Well, now you can! Purchasing one of the upgrade options highlights your resume, increasing your visibility to employers.

Resume Upgrade - Preferred Status for 30 Days $30.00 30 days
Purchase the upgrade for extra exposure for your resume! Your resume will be marked as "HOT" and pushed to the top of the resume bank!

Denny's Waitress

My first waitressing job was at Denny's in a suburb of New Orleans.

Denny's waitresses are a hard-core group. They work grueling 8+ hour shifts that don't ease up for ten seconds. They manage coffee pots, condiments and heavy diner plates with machine-like precision. They make time to prepare complicated sundaes in the middle of juggling way more tables than you would think possible, in absurdly short time frames. They earn respectable livings off 15% tips on $4 entrees, and they don't complain. They do it all while not appearing to rush and calling their patrons "babe" and "darling." Most of them do it into their 70's. I was not one of them.

And they knew it. I trained on the hellish breakfast shift, where not one of the wait staff was less than 65 years of age. Very few of the patrons were, either. Denny's offers discounted meals (less than the normal high of $4 per entree) to seniors, who heavily took advantage of it. Being the most junior waitress, I "inherited" one of the most annoying patrons. Every day, he ordered the Senior Slam breakfast with an off-menu request for poached eggs. Every day he demanded that the eggs be carefully prepared and dried with a paper towel, so they wouldn't be wet. Every day he sent them back to be re-dried. Every day he left me 10% on his $2.70 breakfast.

I never conquered the breakfast shift. Every day was a whirlwind of grueling work, confusion, and pain. It was like trying to survive a tornado...for eight hours at at time. My elderly co-workers relished it.

Luckily, once trained, I worked the overnight 11 to 7 shift, with the teenagers and the drunks. This shift was actually pretty awesome, as far as diner waitressing goes. The kids were way more fun to wait on than the adults, especially since I was barely older than they were. The drunk people on their way home from partying were the best tippers and easiest to deal with. Always entertaining, invariably in good moods, and not picky at all. In fact, the drunks rarely remembered what they ordered; as long as you placed some kind of greasy sustenance in front of them, they ate it. On a few occasions, they also fell asleep in it. They certainly didn't send food back to the kitchen. And because they never felt much like doing math, they always overtipped.

But then I was assigned to the swing shift, 3 to 11pm. Ahhh, dinner time for vacationing families on a budget. This shift lacked the absurd volume of the breakfast shift, and the overtipping of the overnight period. Instead, there was a short but insane dinner rush that mostly involved fixing special kid-proof drinks, fetching crayons, and cleaning the mashed food and trash kids liked to throw under the tables. It also involved dodging said children, who were often allowed to roam free in the restaurant, tripping tray-laden waitresses and screaming like wild animals. We were just killing time during the rest of the hours.

People always mention racism at Denny's, and perhaps it did exist. But not at my restaurant, which was managed by a patient, fair black woman who never would have tolerated racist or otherwise prejudiced behavior. Even towards the large Sunday afternoon crowds of Baptists, who ran us around with special orders and demands, and often actually left advice cards or religious materials in place of tips. Ageism, on the other hand, might've been a different case. Only, in this instance, it was ageism against the younger waitstaff, who routinely took the worst shifts and tables. Perhaps it was because of our lack of commitment: we were never going to put in the 20 or 30 years you needed to before you were accepted as a Denny's insider.

An incident that stands out in my mind: the young daughters of one of my co-workers visited the restaurant with their dad. Their mother, an intelligent, model-beautiful woman who possessed enviable blond hair, blue eyes and chiseled features, had been working at the restaurant all of her adult life (she was maybe 40). Her mother - now in her late 60's - had worked the vicious breakfast shift for many years. So when the waitresses gathered round to coo over the pretty young girls, I guess it made sense to label them "future Denny's waitresses," which is what one of my co-workers did, without a trace of despair. That's the kind of commitment I just didn't sign up for. I left Denny's after a few months to work on Bourbon Street, New Orleans.

Pros:Half-price Grand Slam breakfasts...Denny's french toast and over-easy eggs, you are the breakfast of my dreams. I miss you. Love, Lisa

The look of shock on someone's face when I announce that I used to wait tables at Denny's

Cons:Where to begin?

Photo: Flickr/Thomas Hawk

A Reprieve

Sometimes a temp assignment is a gift. Right now I’m working in the interactive online department of a top-tier political mar-com firm. In a really short time, I’ve learned a good deal about how to use, optimize and analyze Google AdWords, create sophisticated and useable metrics for online campaigns, a thing or two about Salsa Labs’ progressive online organizing platform…okay, I know I sound like a total geek. But it really is exciting and educational to be here if things like metrics, data and politics float your boat (they do mine).

And, drumroll please: I got to write a marketing proposal for my favorite senator. Score!

Sadly, this assignment ended today. So sad. Please let me stay here forever! Don’t send me back to endless story pitching, boring admin, or the bureaucratic hell of non-profits.

101 Jobs I've Held #4: Coffee Shop Girl

Youth and Beauty

I say "coffee shop girl" because the small chain I worked for only hired females of college age or younger. Little did I realize this would be the first in a long line of jobs that would exploit my youth and, well, fairly mild cuteness. Mostly my youth. I was so naive that I worked the whole summer and never noticed. It's pretty obvious now...the attendants now wear little pink tank tops and look like the coffee version of Hooter's waitresses. But I swear it was more subtle when I was there.

Click this link if you want to be seriously disturbed.

Over-Eager Elders

Mornings at the coffee shop were hell. While applying for the job, I was told that I might have to work an occasional early morning shift, but somehow ended up having to wake up at 4:30am to work early shifts every day. Just what every 19-year-old wants to do on summer vacation. At least my shift ended in the early afternoon and the shop was close to the beach...but then it rained almost every day.

From 5:30 to 6am I had to make 28 pots of coffee (don't ask) on three coffee brewers. While juggling pots in a nearly-impossible time-frame, I had to accept the doughnut delivery and count the papers, ready the register and perform a host of other minor tasks. It was a complicated dance but if you were really on the ball (aren't we all at 5:30 in the morning?) you could just about squeak through.

Unless there were interruptions. And there were always interruptions, in the form of over-eager elders banging on the door like caffeine-crazed zombies and begging me to open early. These regulars knew we opened at 6am but could never wait. Because 6:00 in the freakin' morning is just not early enough. In my first brush with "the customer is always right, even when he's an idiot" school of thought, management insisted I let the zombies in early for their coffee. Despite the fact that it meant I would never be ready for the morning rush.

Fun in the AM!

Ahhh, morning rush. The shop was directly on a major commuter route into Boston, so between 6 and 8, I faced an endless litany of pre-coffee commuters. Cheerful bunch.

Dance!

Coffee shops, especially in the pre-Starbucks caveman era, didn't really pay well. I think I made about $6 an hour (including the few small tips we received). However, the shop offered the occasional opportunity to earn some real money. For $20 an hour, you could don a giant pink cup costume - essentially a cup with legs - and stand in front of the store and wave. Maybe dance a little. However, my stepdad forbade it, which seemed really unfair at the time. Looking back...thank God for parental judgment.

Coffee Drinks

While pretending to take coffee seriously, the chain served a slew of flavored brews and a wide and profitable variety of unhealthy sugar/coffee/whipped cream/flavor shot concoctions. We also served espresso drinks but were only given about a minute's training on the machine. On the rare occasion someone ordered a cappuccino I panicked and made any kind of random drink using water and coffee and the machine. If you ever ordered an espresso drink on my shift, I apologize: it may have looked right but I'm pretty sure it wasn't what you were expecting. In the sense of tasting like actual coffee.
--------------
Pros
All the free coffee I could drink

Cons
It turns that drinking lots of coffee makes me very jittery
Pre-coffee morning people
An early introduction to sexual harassment
Early mornings = no social life

Illegal Internships

I'm NOT crazy: the recent preponderance of internships advertised that clearly should be paid jobs is a) getting worse and b) illegal. Thank you for always reading my mind, New York Times. And thank you, Obama Administration, for trying to turn back the labor abuses that have multiplied since the last guy took office and gutted enforcement.

“If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” said Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the department’s wage and hour division.

Ms. Leppink said many employers failed to pay even though their internships did not comply with the six federal legal criteria that must be satisfied for internships to be unpaid. Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer “derives no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities — in other words, it’s largely a benevolent contribution to the intern.

I've seen unpaid internships for jobs that were clearly data entry or worse. I've also witnessed employers fluffing up descriptions to recruit interns who would then be obligated to pitch stories to reporters for most of the week - the PR equivalent of telemarketing.

On the other end, I've also seen unpaid internships demanding skills in complicated software platforms, extensive writing and research experience, HTML expertise and a host of other things that those internships are supposedly there to nurture. Employers seem to have decided that since a lot of college kids learn pretty great computer skills, they don't really need to pay for them. But since this is obviously displacing work that would normally be paid, it's illegal.

Ms. Leppink said many employers failed to pay even though their internships did not comply with the six federal legal criteria that must be satisfied for internships to be unpaid. Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer “derives no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities — in other words, it’s largely a benevolent contribution to the intern.

In addition to being unfair to the interns who do perform drudge work for no money, unpaid internships tend to depress class mobility in this country. Workers need them to make connections and gain the experience employers seek, but generally only wealthier kids - who count on the financial support of their parents -are able to take them. I appreciate that the NY Times addresses this fairness issue.

While many colleges are accepting more moderate- and low-income students to increase economic mobility, many students and administrators complain that the
growth in unpaid internships undercuts that effort by favoring well-to-do and well-connected students, speeding their climb up the career ladder.