four yellow sweaters

Amendments to my previous post

I got two responses to my survey, both made me rethink the way I had written my last post. My personal experience is that the clear majority of the folks I know in the service industry are in college or have a BA or higher. I kept mulling this point over in my head, and it bothered me that our degrees and student loans were supposed to mean something but instead we are still treated like high schoolers.

However, I think I was too focused on my personal agenda that I wrote a biased post. I touched on the fact that formal education doesn’t equate to real knowledge, but I do want to emphasize it now. College can be a place of overcoming personal challenges and changing oneself so that one can better serve the world, or it can be a place in which one’s biases harden and congeal when disguised by the credibility of manipulative academics.

The point remains: I believe servers tend to be just as smart as everyone else, if not more so. 

Survey for Urban Restaurant Staff: How Educated are You?

For people above the age of 21: If you are a server or host in an urban bar or restaurant, what is your level of education? If you have worked front-of-house in the past, and you were over 21 at the time, what was your level of education then?

I’m just curious and wanted to do my own unscientific survey. I couldn’t find an answer for what the average education level was  using a cursory Google search, and I would like to know.

Please choose one of the following answers*:

a) No degree

b) High school graduate

c) First year or second year in college

d) Associate’s degree or other two-year program completed

e) Third or fourth year in college

f) Fifth or above year as an undergraduate

g) Bachelor’s degree

h) Advanced degree student (other than PhD)

i) Advanced degree (other than PhD)

j) PhD candidate

k) Doctorate

In your response, please include the city in which you work or worked.

You can respond to this post, or email me at fouryellowsweaters@live.com

I just had a hunch, based on personal experience, that urban servers are as educated as their customers, if not more so, on average. I have two jobs right now, at a bar and a restaurant, and I am in a graduate program. My places of employment are both independently owned, vegetarian and play music that meets my minimal standard for quality, so we attract above-average customers. They ain’t the crowds you see at chain places with 1000-calorie side dishes, but they’re still customers, and customers can act a fool.

What I’m getting at is I often wonder whether customers would treat me and my coworkers with such disregard or disdain if they knew we were smarter than them. It’s gotten to the point of being kind of a fun game to find ways to let the air out of the stereotype that as a waitress, I’m clueless. That said, part of the fun is that little moment when a customer in high heels and a pencil skirt or a suit and tie, finds common ground with their server and on their face is plainly apparent the complex interplay of various forms of curiosity and a little surprise.

*I’m sort of implying that education level is a valid measure of intelligence, which I know is not true. Your level of education proves you are literate and can impress those professors you happened to have, as well as your parent’s income level, your connections, your extroversion, your ability to shake off failure and not internalize it, your ability to concentrate on one subject to the exclusion of others, that you did the amount of work necessary depending on the prior factors (the more privilege you were born with the less work you had to do to achieve a certain level) and other factors. But having statistical data requires measurable categorization, and I don’t see any other means to measure intelligence than education level, for these purposes.

Replacing my ID: Ways to Ease the Process

My purse was stolen twice, so I have an expired passport of my twelve-year-old dorky face and lots of mail and tax forms, but that’s all by way of proving I’m a real person. No birth certificate, no social security card. Yeah, I’m disorganized.

Here are some things that would make it easier to get my ID, but the cost benefit analysis should be considered at length:

1. Be over 100 years old. Then your birth certificate is public record.

2. Have a criminal record. All those court documents are acceptable. If I had a file of subpoenas, probation and discharge papers, I’d have lots of proof of who I am (although I might not like myself as much).

3. Be a guy. Then I’d be in the selective service and I’d have a card. Speaking of which, I’ve never even seen one and I never hear people talk about them. Do they still exist or what? 

4. Be my own family member and have me make a notarized statement allowing me to get my (the other me’s) birth certificate.