Rolling silverware into napkins in mere seconds and carrying entirely too many cups in one trip to the kitchen were not skills I imagined myself acquiring by the end of summer 2023, but if I’ve learned one thing this summer, it’s that working in the service industry is anything but predictable.
I’ve been working as a hostess at The Beachead, a super laid-back but delicious restaurant located in New Shoreham, Rhode Island, for a few weeks now. My uniform consists of black shorts and a black shirt that has the Beachead’s logo on the back and its catchphrase “Think Beach” on the front in teal blue – needless to say, countless amounts of Ken ‘doing beach’ jokes are thrown around on the daily.
When first sending out my resume to a few restaurants in the area, my aim was to obtain the job of a server. However, I soon learned that one has to be eighteen to serve alcohol, so my chances at becoming a server plummeted as I’m a few months shy of that requirement – although, I still am extremely confused about this law because it’s not as if I could be legally consuming that said alcohol at eighteen anyways… but I digress. All that is to say, that’s how I landed my position as hostess.
My job mainly consists of standing at the front desk, directing people to tables and informing the server in that section of the new customers, or on the other hand creating wait lists and rearranging tables to accommodate diversely sized parties. I also answer phone calls a lot; my “Hi, thank you for calling the Beachead!” continues to get better and better every day, and my “No, we actually don’t take reservations” continues to make up about ninety percent of my responses. But, since there are constant lulls in customers arriving, I also help out in the kitchen or bus tables.
While it has been fun earning a lot of cash tips, my exact salary is definitely only a ballpark number as it mainly relies on college kids counting wet single dollar bills from the checkbooks at 10:30 pm every night.
After a hard day’s work (which actually is quite tiring because a shift is hours and hours of being on my feet without a break), I punch out and stroll out of the restaurant in my “Think Beach” swag that is now slightly dampened with a mixture of liquids and dirty food scraps from the day. I then get on my bike and head home. On my first few commutes home, I often found myself blinking for a very long time, only to realize that my eyelids were actually closed for fifteen-second chunks of time. So, as an attempt to aid my biking narcolepsy habits, I shoved some earplugs in, and I now blast hype music to my lethargic, post-six-hour shift self to get myself home safely.
While, yes, I do kid. This has actually been an amazing experience this summer. I’ve learned a lot of life skills that school would have never taught me, and I’ve also met some super interesting people. One of my coworkers is a social worker that’s simultaneously studying for the bar and never takes a day off (I don’t know when she sleeps), another server is a highly skilled wildlife photographer on the side, and one of the food runners even lives on a boat full-time. My horizons have definitely expanded for what the ‘norm’ is for life paths.
I don’t think that I will be going into the service industry full-time in the future at any point. But, I will definitely return next summer when I’m eighteen and can legally serve some alcoholic beverages!
