Black is the New Orange: 10 Ways Working In a Restaurant Is Like a Jail Sentence

Welcome back to the blog formally known as Conscious Residue (TBKACR for all you hip cats). If you've seen one episode of MSNBC's Locked Up, you've seen them all. Each prison has the same cast of characters and cliques. It's a bunch of individuals confined to a large secure building, forced into a "family" with people who, under normal circumstances, they would probably never intermingle with. Most prisons force their prisoners to wear identical uniforms. Every inmate has an idea of how long they should be there, but not actually sure what their actual release date is. Blah, blah, blah...I could go on, but then this would just turn into a post about a shitty repetitive reality TV series.

My point? I worked a shift at my second job (a restaurant) last night. As I looked into the security camera and buzzed in for entrance into the back door, walked past the vatos in the kitchen, into a sea of people wearing similar variations of the same color outfit as me discussing the time they were scheduled to leave compared to the time they thought they would actually leave, I thought "holy Shawshank, Batman, this is a f*cking prison!" I started to feel less like I had just entered the back of the house of a dining room, and more like I entered Em City from HBO's Oz.

At first I thought this was merely exaggeration born through the fact that I was giving up prime Saturday relaxation time, I mean I do have the option of leaving at my own will, I'm not stuck here. The more I thought about it, the more correlations I found between prison and my hospitality based work place, with the people and attitudes within the environment. Here are the 10 most prevalent.

Just Sayin':10 Eating Out Commandments

Three weeks in to my (so far) triumphant full time return to the restaurant game, and from what I see nothing much has changed from the guest side of things.  If it weren't for dealing with incompetent management, lazy-ass co-workers, and dumb guests on a daily basis, this job would be cake.

Since I already hit you all with some of my pet peeves concerning restaurant managers, this edition I decided to make a top ten list of "don'ts" for being guests at a restaurant, we'll get to the lazy-ass co-workers at a later date.  For some reason, people go out to eat and forget all basic etiquette and house training.  You throw video games in the mix, and it becomes a complete system overload for some people.

Don't get me wrong, not all guests are dickheads, but it is the dickheads that make the lasting impressions.  For the readers that have never worked in "the industry", please take heed of what I say.  These 10 situations are the most annoying things for any server to experience.  I numbered them, but they are all number one.  Well, number one is actually number one, so I guess the other nine are all number two.  

I've also included Biggie's Ten Crack Commandments instrumental to play as you read. Consider it a mood setter.  Let us begin, shall we.