Sometimes tension is a good thing. In stringed instruments, tension is necessary to create music. However, sometimes tension causes things to break. The trick in life is to make music without snapping. I'm not in the business of making music, I'm in the business of making money. Taking home three hundos on a monday night is music to my ears. So, I should have been ecstatic that my sales have been through the roof while NRA (restaurants, not rifles) was in town.
Talk about MFB, I've been bringing it home five days straight and I'm exhausted. Yes, it's nice to make my rent in one week of work. It's nice to put money into savings, it's nice to be able to afford my lobster cobb salads at Benny's. It's all nice, except when on my day off all I seem to be able to to is lie on my back.
The thing about making crazy money like this is it makes you crazy. But it also gives you blisters and back problems and headaches and arm pain. So why do we do it? Is the MFB that good? Or is bringing home the mother fucking bacon just giving us mother fucking blisters? And at what point does the tension that holds everything together for us become too much and just snap.
Ever since I had an arm injury and damaged a tendon the idea of snapping has been looming over me. At any moment the supposedly superficial tendon in my right arm can just snap like a piano cord and fly back into my arm. But in a less physical way haven't I just been through the same amount of emotional trauma? I wonder if there are the signs that I might be getting pulled a little too taut.
Snapping is common in restaurants. You may not see it dining in one, but in the back of the house everyone has a moment of losing it. Each person has their own trigger: splitting checks fourteen ways, people spilling drinks on us, triple sat when we're already in the weeds. Sometimes we can take a breath stay focused and just do it but sometimes we just need a moment to break down and yell at someone. And usually it's not a person-speciffic type of anger and the next person to cross us gets it all at once.
I feel as though we all sort of understand this and yet I feel bad because yes, our bartenders are slow sometimes and the bussers forget and leave things on the table but this is a night's worth of anger coming out for something silly like a knife left on the table. I've always wanted to be one of those effortless people that glide through life and it seems like nothing ever gets to them.
But I doubt that person exists. A manager who I thought was infallible when it comes to guest rudeness lost it the other day over some foodies that sent a dish back for small portion size. I couldn't believe it. These guys hassled me over everything from the linen to the mar-teeny pours and I just took it and was all the more friendly to compensate. And then what I thought was the master of water-off-a-ducks-back-don't-sweat-it mentality lost it.
Maybe snapping isn't always a matter of strain for some people and it's more about time. In due time everyone will have a breakdown. Every guitar string will break eventually, and it's how you go on, how you repair, and how you recover that really matters in the break. Eventually my tendon will snap. Or, it might never. It's out of my control, which isn't easy to accept given that it's my own body (and also that I'm a control freak). All I can do is hope it doesn't break when I'm carrying a tray of martinis.
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