Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
dirt.fyi
Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
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Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
#2I don't know. I never graduated to waiter, but I worked as a busboy a few times. I have much sympathy for wait staff. My recollection is that the waitresses were always decent to me.
Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." One of my other low-paying jobs was as a copy editor, and I have seen how commonly schools have failed to teach PhDs to be good writers--I don't see why the randomly selected waitress should be better. I should say that the demands of the two jobs are quite different, anyway: the waitress has to be able constantly switch attention to multiple people and multiple tasks, the writer (or programmer) has to be able to focus on one thing for relatively long times.
Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
#3I don't know. I never graduated to waiter, but I worked as a busboy a few times. I have much sympathy for wait staff. My recollection is that the waitresses were always decent to me. Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." One of my other low-paying jobs was as a copy editor, and I have seen how commonly schools have failed to teach PhDs to be…
School actively teaches people to be bad writers.
Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
#4This was a great read, thanks for sharing the link!
Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
#5I don't know. I never graduated to waiter, but I worked as a busboy a few times. I have much sympathy for wait staff. My recollection is that the waitresses were always decent to me. Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." One of my other low-paying jobs was as a copy editor, and I have seen how commonly schools have failed to teach PhDs to be…
> Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter."
Yeah, I don't buy that either.
I know that the best software engineering work I've done in my entire life happened when I was working as a hotel housekeeper, before I was programming professionally.
It was because cleaning hotel rooms is a purely physical, and highly repetitive job. Every day at work, I was mentally "checked out", working on difficult programming problems in my head while my body just robotically did the work.
Once I was programming professionally, I no longer had the luxury of spending so much time deeply thinking about programming problems.
Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
#6I don't know. I never graduated to waiter, but I worked as a busboy a few times. I have much sympathy for wait staff. My recollection is that the waitresses were always decent to me. Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." One of my other low-paying jobs was as a copy editor, and I have seen how commonly schools have failed to teach PhDs to be…
School actively teaches people to be bad writers.
How so?
Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
#7That was excellent!
> The life of the American worker is inherently undignified
This is true, and even goes for highly-paid, high-status gigs. In fact, I think that sometimes, companies consider high pay, a license to humiliate.
Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
#8I gave up on this article about 1/3 of the way through. I could fill dozens of pages with my aimless years after I quit college, but I wouldn’t think to bore people with it.
Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
#9I don't know. I never graduated to waiter, but I worked as a busboy a few times. I have much sympathy for wait staff. My recollection is that the waitresses were always decent to me. Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." One of my other low-paying jobs was as a copy editor, and I have seen how commonly schools have failed to teach PhDs to be…
I believe the point is not that it's easy to teach people to write well but that it's easier than teaching people to work hard.
Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet
#10I don't know. I never graduated to waiter, but I worked as a busboy a few times. I have much sympathy for wait staff. My recollection is that the waitresses were always decent to me. Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." One of my other low-paying jobs was as a copy editor, and I have seen how commonly schools have failed to teach PhDs to be…
Everyone learns to write in school. A waiting job most can pick up but not all. I couldn't get past serving training. Carrying four plates and keeping them straight takes without spilling is for others.