I Will Never Be A Waitress

     Today I ruled out a possible career option.

This was the best photo I could find and it's not representative
at all of how beautiful the tea party was. OR HOW CROWDED. 

     So me and some other girls from my church were asked to waitress a tea party that was being held in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the local mission, The Hope Church, which some older ladies from my church are very involved in. I wasn't given explicit instructions about this event, but I knew it started at noon, and that I should be there early. I figured I'd get there an hour early in case I needed to be given instructions on how to serve things and what not. Then this morning, I was at my grandma's house with my brother when I get a call from my mother saying she got a call saying I was supposed to be at the tea party at nine thirty in the morning! And it was already after nine thirty when I received this information! So I had to run home, skip a shower, throw on a white blouse and black skirt (that was our uniform), and drive to the tea party. I got there a little after 10AM, and luckily I hadn't missed too much. We set things up and got instructions (serve from the right, do not touch anything but the rims of the plates and the bottoms of silverware, take the glass away from the table to fill it with water, hold goblets by the stem, do not say "you're welcome", say "it was my pleasure". Who knew there were so many stipulations???!!!) and that was all fine but then the tea actually started and it was chaos!!!! The tables were really close together, and I literally could not squeeze through most of them to get to the next table. The ladies, most of which are good little church ladies, were actually quite rude sometimes! When we asked if they were finished with there plates, we were usually met with either no reply at all, or rude "No. I'm still eating." even though they hadn't touched their plates in minutes!! One table said "We haven't had a new tea pot in quite some time" really rudely! Ugh, and I had to pretend to be nice to all of them. Pretending to be nice is not one of my special skills. It was stifling hot, and all of us waitresses were dripping with sweat, but the ladies at the tea were complaining about how cold it was in the room so they turned the AC down even further!!!! The kitchen was down a set of stairs, and we had to go up and down them a million times until our feet were so sore and tired. Plus, this weird thing got stuck to the bottom of my shoe halfway through the tea (I think it was one of those things you put on the bottom of a chair to help it slide back and forth) and I couldn't get it off for the life of me! So my shoe was really slippery for the rest of the time. Also, my yellowjacket sting was really itchy and because it was so hot and cramped all day in my shoe, my foot is now swollen and irritated and super uncomfortable.

Here's a picture of it from the outside. I wish they'd kept more
of the original barn look. Oh well. 

     It was just not a fun day at all, and I have decided definitively that I could never ever be a waitress, at least not at a fancy restaurant. I'm telling you, I was this close to either a melt down, or a rude encounter with some stuffy old lady.
      All the horrors of waitressing aside, the venue was beautiful. All the tables were decorated with different themes, such as Christmas, fall, patriotic, flowers, Asia, etc. My favorite table was the Asian table, and after the tea when we were cleaning up, I told the hostess of the table that I'd liked hers best, and she seemed really touched! She was like "Thank you! I really appreciate that, it means a lot!" I was kind of taken aback by how happy I made her just by saying her table was my favorite. I guess ladies take this whole tea party thing really seriously. So the verdict is that I would love to be one of the cushy ladies who gets to sit at a table and not lift a finger while sweaty teenage girls serve all my food and take it all away. But I will never again be the sweaty teenage girl. Waitressing does not become me. My pasted on smile was drooping to the floor by the end of the afternoon and my pit stains were the size of the saucers under the tea cups. It was awful.

-VaughnDL