Sometimes when it feels like the world is out to get you, it really is.

I am much older than the majority of people reading this. Not every person, but most.

I graduated High School in 1990.

Western Kentucky University was the choice for me. A few years later I was left with a huge debt, a really bad hangover and no degree to show for it.

I didn’t foresee a huge problem, college just wasn’t for me. Well, finding time to put the beer down was the real problem. Besides, I could always go back and finish up any time I wanted. I am not going to bore you with the story from then to now, suffice to say I have done things I am very proud of, some things I am not very proud of and some things just to pay the bills.

What finally got me back in school was a job that averaged about 85 hours a week for a little better than minimum wage with no chance for advancement without a degree. So I quit that job, enrolled at IU Southeast and took a job as a waiter.

Waiting tables is a necessary evil in life that I tell myself every five years as long as I am not still doing it, my life will be going in the right direction. I have been saying that since I was 20 and I am going on 40. Something has always come up to crush my dreams of never waiting on another table.

Let me tell you, I am generally not a nice and jovial type of person. I have two emotions: angry and not angry. But I put on my fake attitude every night I work and actually pretend like I give a crap whether people enjoy their meals. This job really makes me hate people.

Just as a side for the 99 percent of you that should be forced to wait tables for at least one month before you are ever allowed to eat at a restaurant, if you can’t tip 20 percent, stay freaking home. It’s not my fault you had to wait an hour and a half to get a table. The line flowing out the door should have given you an indication that the establishment was crowded. 

It is not my fault your steak was over or under-cooked. As much as I would like to take your order and cook your food, management has decided that is not the best use of my time.

Waiters are not your servants. They are people who are trying to pay their bills or work their way through college or working a second job to keep up. So when you are out with your family or friends and drop $100 in my restaurant and find it difficult to leave me at least $20, well, I hope I don’t see you again.

For those of you who don’t know, waiters only get paid the tips they receive. There are a lot of idiots out there who claim they are cheap tippers because waiters are getting paid to do this job. We get paid $2.13 an hour. That is not enough to cover our taxes each week. There is no paycheck for us at the end of the week.

It amazes me how rude and cheap some of you are with the people who are handling and delivering your food. If you have not seen the movie “Waiting” I highly recommend it.

I tell myself that this job is temporary because when I get done with school I will have a degree to break down doors for myself. That is if I can ever finish.

I don’t expect anything to be handed to me, but some of the rules on transferring classes and what classes are required in your major, second concentration and, my personal favorite, for Social Science students, the requirement of four semesters of a foreign language are ridiculous.

I am going to finally be allowed to get my degree with about 145 credit hours. I understand the value of learning a foreign language to broaden your horizons, but four semesters of anything outside your major is stupid. We live in America!

I promise I will never have occasion to utter a Spanish word after I leave this university. I had a professor tell me that Spanish is important to learn because so many people are and will be speaking it that we will have to learn Spanish just to know what they are saying about us. I don’t give a crap what people are saying about me in English, let alone Spanish.

This is a ridiculous requirement. If I were moving to a Spanish-speaking country I would see its usefulness. But I happen to want to stay in the country where English is the official language. How about we make them learn English? 

So here I am, ready to graduate in May, and I will walk out with my degree into the worst recession since the Great Depression. I probably won’t get the job I want, or even just a better job. No, I will get to be bumped up to full-time at the restaurant I’m at now. Yeah! Maybe the world is out to get me.

Greg Dassell
Editor
gdassell@ius.edu