Chicken Balls

As union servers is is our sacred collectively bargained right to complain; it's right up there with two fifteens and a thirty minute break. We come with a preternatural ability to kvetch about any and everything. And when it comes to working in a restaurant there is always plenty to complain about, and usually a few people on the payroll to entertain those complaints. The managers do everything they can to satiate us but there is nothing that will quell the collective whine of a thirty odd food an beverage employees.

I think the complaining comes from a lack of control. In exchange for absolutely no responsibility and exorbitant amounts of untraceable income, we give up all control over the workplace. We have no say in anything and no pull when it comes to the schedule, uniform, or working conditions. And it may seem like a raw deal. Truthfully, most servers have more food and beverage experience and are more capable of running a restaurant than our supervisors. But if you offer any one of us a management position we'd almost definitely turn it down.

Why? Because we make more money. We get overtime. We don't worry. If something goes wrong (even if it is our fault) it's never our fault. When most restaurants may be struggling just to break even with their overhead, there's not a single server who's just "breaking even." We're making bank. This may be why most restaurants fail so quickly, because the discrepancy between employees making tons of money and the company making tons of money. And, as a union employee, I have more job security and better benefits than my managers.

And, again, there's the money. Because we don't make "okay" money. We don't make "good" money. We make sick money. Crazy money. Unreal money. I mean for the average level of education and work experience of a server in Chicago, we probably make double what most entry-level employees make. And the best thing is, it looks like we make nothing.

So you may wonder, when we're bringing home that much MFB, what could there possibly be to complain about? What great injustice could light a fire under us so and cause such relentless guff from the servers? I have two words:

Chicken Balls.

In the year and a half working for the hotel restaurant I have become accustomed to the awful employee food served. I have been plagued by it. You may think that, working in a restaurant, we eat pretty well. It is not so. The dismal state of employee meals in the hotel has led to a melting pot of malady and disease, and a slew of strange new hybrid eating disorders.

Behold: the bacon eater. A vulture-like server who exists merely for those few precious moments when there is an opening on the line to snatch a piece of bacon. This person lives for the bacon, and lives off of the bacon. They will function solely on bacon and diet soda for days at a time.

Then there is the other strange creature that exists in restaurants: the squirrel. Nobody knows who this person is but there is (at least) one in every restaurant. This person picks up scraps of food from all over the kitchen and hides them places for future snack attacks. We will find evidence of their hoarding, fries, onion rings, bagels, muffins, egg white frittatas, bits of baguette, half-consumed $5.00 bottles of water. They will stash them in the most annoying of places: the hostess stand, the second drawer in the manager's desk, the ice bin.

There are the abstainers. These bastions of temperance think that by refusing breaks and meals they are somehow indued with superhuman powers of restraint and badass server cred.

The reason for these bizarre relationships with food stems from (in my opinion) those two words:

Chicken Balls.

Of all the awful food that is served under the guise of edibility there is one that stands ahead of the pack. Worse than the curdled mayonnaise, limp pasta with a pungent sauce that has the unmistakable odor of salmonella, vegetables that taste the way a baby's diaper smells, worse than all of that are the chicken balls. Chicken meat torturously hammered and shaped into a sphere of confusing intention, encompassing a single pat of butter that will melt into a pustule of fat when the ball of chicken meat is breaded and deep fried. This artifact of culinary angst vaguely resembles an egg and behaves in much the same way because if you were to bite into this thing, the butter would spurt forth, freed from it's imprisonment within the chicken-y walls of dismay. This dish, inexplicably served five to six times a month in the employee dining room has no known name or origin, except perhaps from some medieval prison cafeteria. These chicken balls are the bane of our existence, and--I'l say-- reason enough for our incessant complaints.