4 valuable lessons I’ve learned from being a waitress

A short insight into a management student’s life as a part-time waitress in a Parisian restaurant and the lesson she has learned.

As a waitress (or waiter), you need a certain number of skills. Knowing how to carry a tray with a lot of bottles and glasses on it or being able to balance at least three plates at once, are only a few of them. But these are more or less easy to learn.

Just notice that I am not talking about high-profile restaurants!

However, there are other skills that you acquire in that working environment, which are extremely important for your professional and personal life.

1. Stress-management

Something I’ve really learned there is how to manage stress efficiently without panicking.

I mean if you are talking to one customer, than another one asks you for a new spoon, than a third one wants to pay his bill and then one of your colleagues shouts from one end of the restaurant to the other, that we ran out of the entrecôte, you might as well just want to scream and run away.

And then normally, some waiter tells you that he screwed up. Or a customer gets unfriendly. Or … I think you get what I mean.

Being a waitress is not easy. You need to function constantly. You need to react. You need to have a system and be in a certain way organized.

Mistakes will cost you valuable time.

However, good stress-management only comes with time.

At the beginning I felt very overwhelmed and thought I’d never handle it but eventually I got used to it!

This skill is essential for time-management and in general to stay more calm in different life situations.

For instance during exams or when you feel like drowning in (school) work. If you are stress-resistant you’ll react much more calmly and start by deciding what to do first in order to get everything (or at least the most important things) done.

2. Be kind (even though you really don’t want to)

For me this was a real challenge.

Some customers are just plainly disrespectful. They feel superior to you — and they show it. No sign of a bad conscience here.

Given that you’re “just a waitress” they have “the right” to treat you like shit.

Normally, they’re just waiting for you to fail or to do minor mistakes. Or invent one if you didn’t make one.

They are also capable of asking you for a fork. Then for bread. Then for some sauce. There’s always something missing. Generally, they never ask for everything at once, but are pissed if the third time you ask if they’re sure that they don’t need something else.

But this is not even the most horrible kind of customer.

The worst are those men that can’t even look you into the eyes just because you’re wearing a tight dress. And you are forced to go back to them a few times, take their orders and ask if everything’s fin… Horror!

Given that you go back there they give themselves the right to flirt with you. I mean I am 20 years old. I’m young. I’m smiling. And I’m talking to them (because I have to… I mean it’s my job).

So these lonely guys, who’ll never have a chance with you in a million years, still try. And insist. That’s just disrespectful and disgusting. However, in their eyes it’s charming — and you have to like it.

If there are only two of them, it’s manageable. However, standing in front of a group of horny single men, is the real nightmare. There’s always one of them who has to make one of these horrible jokes only long-time single men get.

The worst part: You. Have. To. Stay. Friendly. And. Laugh.

Thankfully, no one can hear thoughts…!

So, sometimes you can be as kind as you want, certain people won’t respect you anyway. They think they can treat you as they want to. You’re not a human anymore. You’re this creepy specie called “waitress/waiter.”

Being able to stay calm, still be respectful and do everything the customer desires, is a real challenge. However, you’ll eventually get used to it.

In any kind of company dealing with customers is a fundamental skill. Staying friendly whatever happens, is really hard work, and a skill everyone should have.

The perfect way to learn it: work in a restaurant!

3. Set Priorities

When five things are happening at the same time, you need to set priorities.

This is essential.

Given that you can’t always do everything at the same time or fast enough, you need to decide what is generally more important and what can be done later.

This is a fundamental skill for a lot of stressful jobs. If you have to do a lot of different things you need to know what is urgent and important and what is not.

(Here’s a little theory which helps you to set priorities for your everyday life. I didn’t learn this one in the restaurant of course, but I love to draw the lines between what I learn in school and what I learn in my working place.)

In effective time management there is a theory called the Eisenhower Matrix. It distinguishes between things that are urgent, important, not urgent and not important.

The most of the time we are taking care of things that are urgent but not necessarily important (as for instance reading and answering to every e-mail, going to boring meetings or school lessons that aren’t passionate or in which you don’t learn necessarily something new, etc.).

A lot of our attention goes also to activities which are neither important nor urgent as watching series, being on social media, etc.

According to the famous author Stephen Covey, the author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, an effective person should focus on the quadrant of important things, which are not necessarily urgent.

Those activities have in general long-term goals without immediate reward.

For instance eating healthy food doesn’t give you an instant reward but in the long-term you’ll have a leaner body and a better health.

The same goes for other activities from that category.

In another, smaller dimension, I learned as a waiter how to manage difficult and stressful moments by taking decisions fast and avoiding to panic.

I always try to look at the bigger picture and have a sort of check-list in my head.

In general, I prefer to check on my clients and have a little talk once in a while with them. This will make them much more satisfied. Besides, if they have to wait a little longer, they’re normally not that angry with you, give you more tips and are more likely to come back.

However, priorities change.

Certain people think that me chatting with customers is just a waste of time.

For me it’s a priority.

That leads me to two other points: Always adapt to your working environment and to your superiors!

4. Accept the hierarchy

Working as a waitress isn’t my real profession. However, I have to accept that certain people give me orders, that I have to follow, even though I don’t want to and don’t think they are useful.

I mean I’m mainly a management student and I for sure don’t want to work as a waitress for the rest of my life.

So if someone shouts at me when I don’t come early and are a bit late (never more than 5 minutes though), I have to accept that for them this job represents something completely different than it does for me.

I honestly don’t want to come 10 minutes before the start of my shift, cause I’m not paid for it and I have other things in my life, which I want to focus on and which I care more about.

However, in general, accepting orders from anybody else is never easy.

Especially if you don’t see the logic behind them.

For me that was really difficult to learn given that I have the habit of questioning everything.

I just don’t like doing things I don’t want to and which I think are unnecessary.

However, working as a waitress helpe me a lot in that matter

It’s not the same when you’re in school and your teacher tells you to do something. You still have the choice — if you don’t want to do it, invent excuses. Most of the time it works.

Besides, your teachers are not really implicated in the process. They don’t suffer the consequences from you not doing your homework. You do.

If one of your superiors tells you to do something and you don’t do it, he is immediately involved given that he is in charge. He’ll be punished much as you’ll be.

You have to respect that, and just do what they tell you to. It’s also better for your relationship with them;)

Final thoughts

Working in a restaurant has several negative connotations.

If a waiter forgets a customer’s order he’s immediately considered “lazy”, “incompetent”, or “stupid.”

That we just have a lot of other tasks to accomplish at the same time and that we didn’t do it on purpose, gets often ignored.

It is not an easy work!

And even though one might think that as a waiter you don’t learn anything, you actually acquire many essential life skills.

In my opinion everybody should work at least once at a restaurant just to see how challenging it actually is!

Thanks for reading!

Written by Jo-Anne Wagner