Being a waitress

 

After finishing the depressing STPM (it really depressed me as I even studied until I cried), I went for several job interviews, looking up for a part time job in order to fully utilize my time before the STPM result is released. I went to interview as runner, sales and waitress. Finally I ended up as a waitress, working at a café, few steps away from my house.

On the first day of my work, I was extremely exhausted. There were a lot of customers during lunch time because the pricing of the food in the café is not expensive for the set lunch. I was assigned to serve coffee, tea and dessert. Besides that, I have to clear the empty plates and bowls whenever the customers have done with their food, clean up the tables and do the settings. It was a whole day of walking and standing. When I return to my home, I barely can walk as my calves and feet were too sore, every movement of the muscles made me feel pain.

It was the café’s 5th year anniversary, at few days after I started to work. To celebrate the event, the owner of the café treated all her employees with mcD and bowling. This is the first time I play bowling and it is free. My bowling balls kept rolling into the ‘drains’ which are on the both sides of the bowling alleys. Finally, because of my teammates kept scoring, we managed to walk out with a bronze medal. There was an activity of exchanging Christmas gifts among the employees, I did not prepare any gift because I was only got informed that we were going to have an anniversary celebration in that afternoon after the café is closed. They exchanged the gifts by drawing the numbers and matching them with the numbers pasted on the gifts. Someone just ask me to draw and I got a gift too. That was a lucky day, or I shall say I am very lucky to be started working around that period of time, right before the anniversary.

I love working at the café as I was entitled to order the food except for drinks at the staff price. I have the chance to taste the food in order to know how the food tasted, so that I can explain to customers. This is the benefit of working as a waitress. Haha.

Working as a waitress has trained my way of communicating with people and controlling emotions. I have to be patient to customers' demands, be polite, keep my face smiling, bare with the customers’ behaviour until some extend and etc. Some customers are easy to please and some are very finicky. All I can do is to fulfil their demands as I do not want to be accused of delivering bad services. It trained me to speak more English as I have to communicate with customers, manager and the chef with English. My Hokkien dialect is improved too because there are two staffs where are English educated, could not understand mandarin.

After 6 months of working at the café, I resigned to continue my studies in USMKK, Kelantan, where it marks the beginning of my life staying independently.