The Waiter Chronicles: Protected or Played Revisited

A week after airing my suspicions about Grandpa's and Son-of-Grandpa's directing tables and tips away from and toward themselves, I have concluded that those suspicions were unfounded. Grandpa shared tips with me (roughly half) every day last week, and Son-of-Grandpa is continuing to do that, even as he sends me to more-and-more tables.

Yesterday I took six tables from beginning-to-end during the lunch rush. I took only one table during dinner, but I waited on four others at one point or another while Son-of-Grandpa attended to a six-person drug rep. dinner.

It was at the end of the night as we were leaving that last week's suspicions were given the lie. Son-of-Grandpa handed me what amounted to a 50/50 split of tips. When I, ahem, protested, "You don't have to do that."

"Yeah," he said, "I do. You're getting it."

That felt good.

But today's another day.

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The Waiter Chronicles: Protected or Played

I feel like I took a step backward in my quest to become an excellent waiter today.

During lunch, Grandpa explained to me that I would be the busser while he and the another waiter (his son) would wait the tables. After taking tables on my own for two nights in a row, this announcement burned me. And the more I thought about it, the worse it got. The more I listened to Grandpa and his son commiserate in Spanish, the worse it got.

Those two weasels are conspiring against me to get all the tips.

Now, Grandpa's explanation is that he doesn't want the owner to get upset at me. My recent table-waiting experience has come in his absence, and, now that he's back in the restaurant, Grandpa fears for what might happen if I try to take a table and screw it up. Grandpa says the owner would yell at him. Son-of-Grandpa says Grandpa just doesn't want the owner to yell at me.

So I'm either being protected or played.

If I'm being protected, then how unhealthy of a situation is this? I said to Son-of-Grandpa that there seems to be a pattern at this restaurant of waiters getting hired and fired; he corrects me that the patters is, instead, waiters getting hired and then quitting because they don't want to take the owner's abuse.

"He's Italian," Son-of-Grandpa explains. "He has those words, you know?" He rattles off a few, just in case I've never been sworn at.

I want to believe this scenario. I want to believe that Grandpa is looking out for me. I want to be the kind of person that assumes the best motive in people.

But there's a nagging lack of trust. That wasn't helped by Grandpa's announcement at the end of the night that he wold "pay" me tomorrow for tonight's tips (I helped with all his tables). Of course, I never got to see the checks from those tables, so I have no way of knowing what the tips actually were.

I won't be surprised if he "forgets" about it completely.

Then what?

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