Nickel and Dimed Pg.20 by Barbra Ehrenreich Lyrics
I remember the poster decorating one of the apartments I looked at, which said, "If you seek happiness for yourself you will never find it. Only when you seek happiness for others will it come to you," or other to that effect - an odd sentiment, it seemed to me at the time, to find in the dank one room basementapartment of a bellhop at the Best Western. At Hearthside, we
utilize whatever bits of autonomy we have to ply our customers with the illicit calories
that signal our love. It is our job as servers to assemble the salads and desserts, pour the
dressings, and squirt the whipped cream. We also control the number of butter pats our
customers get and the amount of sour cream on their baked potatoes. So if you wonder
why Americans are so obese, consider the fact that waitresses both express their
humanity and earn their tips through the covert distribution of fats.
Ten days into it, this is beginning to look like a livable lifestyle. I like Gail, who is
"looking at fifty," agewise, but moves so fast she can alight in one place and then another
without apparently being anywhere between. I clown around with Lionel, the teenage
Haitian busboy, though we don't have much vocabulary in common, and loiter near the
main sink to listen to the older Haitian dishwashers' musical Creole, which sounds, in
their rich bass voices, like French on testosterone. I bond with Timmy, the fourteen-yearold
white kid who buses at night, by telling him I don't like people putting their baby
seats right on the tables: it makes the baby look too much like a side dish. He snickers
delightedly and in return, on a slow night, starts telling me the plots of all the jaws
movies (which are perennial favorites in the shark-ridden Keys): "She looks around, and
the water-skier isn't there anymore, then SNAP! The whole boat goes . . ."
utilize whatever bits of autonomy we have to ply our customers with the illicit calories
that signal our love. It is our job as servers to assemble the salads and desserts, pour the
dressings, and squirt the whipped cream. We also control the number of butter pats our
customers get and the amount of sour cream on their baked potatoes. So if you wonder
why Americans are so obese, consider the fact that waitresses both express their
humanity and earn their tips through the covert distribution of fats.
Ten days into it, this is beginning to look like a livable lifestyle. I like Gail, who is
"looking at fifty," agewise, but moves so fast she can alight in one place and then another
without apparently being anywhere between. I clown around with Lionel, the teenage
Haitian busboy, though we don't have much vocabulary in common, and loiter near the
main sink to listen to the older Haitian dishwashers' musical Creole, which sounds, in
their rich bass voices, like French on testosterone. I bond with Timmy, the fourteen-yearold
white kid who buses at night, by telling him I don't like people putting their baby
seats right on the tables: it makes the baby look too much like a side dish. He snickers
delightedly and in return, on a slow night, starts telling me the plots of all the jaws
movies (which are perennial favorites in the shark-ridden Keys): "She looks around, and
the water-skier isn't there anymore, then SNAP! The whole boat goes . . ."