Bad waitress: Dying on your feet

Of course. What can people do about it though? If you don't have enough leverage, you'll have to swallow it when a bunch of managers start shitting on you because you went to the bathroom.

That leverage can come from many sources. Maybe you have enough money that you don't actually need to be there. Maybe you're unionized and if they screw with you the union can screw them back. It doesn't matter what it is, you need some power to be able to get them to treat you with respect. Corporations are constantly trying to minimize our power, we should maximize it at all costs.

Amassing enough money to become financially independent is the only surefire way to obtain that power. Everything else depends on others. Unions are rife with politicking and corruption, for example. They can also be busted down or coopted.

If anything, a PhD program teaches you how to write faster while maintaining an acceptable quality: Journal papers, conference presentations, and funding agency reports are all long-form writing projects that come up quite frequently and distract from the research (the fun part). Most of the value from this writing comes from it being accepted; improving quality beyond this level has rapidly diminshing returns.

The next time you eat in a restaurant, and you're feeling snarly cos you had a bad day, and you can't be bothered to be nice to people just doing their jobs, keep this article in mind.

> For so many years I thought that I was missing an element of secret knowledge about how actual jobs worked, and that therefore I would be stuck forever. But now that I do other work, I see it all for what it is: everything is a system. The restaurant is a system, the content management is a system, the computer is a system. Everything is so much simpler than I imagined it was. I thought I was doing an easy job, but everything is an easy job when you know the system. Other professions weren’t magic. They were systems too.

Reading this article made me wonder if I could hack it as a waiter. I’ve never really done any manual labor in my life - just a few part time jobs as a student that made me realize I am bad at it compared to some of my friends for whom it came so naturally. Driving a truck, building things, interacting with customers, etc. Programming, on the other hand, has always just come so naturally to me that it’s hard to imagine myself doing anything else.

I agree with the author that with most careers there is a system, and once you learn the ropes it makes things dramatically easier. And sometimes the only thing holding someone back is that first opportunity to get in the door and start learning the system. I think writers especially must struggle with this as the career path is not as well-defined as other trades.

> Why don’t websites hire service people to write about food? How do ‘restaurant journalists’ exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.

But I don’t really agree with this premise that anyone can be a writer. I struggle to write - every paragraph is agonizing for me. I think I could definitely get better with practice, but if it were my career it would fill me with so much anxiety and self doubt that I wouldn’t be able to function. Same as if I were to be a waiter (assuming I didn’t just get fired in my first week).

I think that the author is underestimating the value of her journalism degree, and her natural inclination that made her want to study journalism in the first place, to her eventual success in that career once given an opportunity.

I think we should also ask what sort of writers do schools train PhDs and students to be? The writing for thesis or scientific articles is different from most other writing. Just as is legal writing for example. They really are not there to teach them poetry... Just to efficiently and in way that passes review to communicated inside the community.