“Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers” by Tony Mirabelli is about how waiters and waitresses communicate during their job. According to Mirabelli many people overlook the difficulties waiters and waitresses have to face. This is strange to him because so many people have held food service industry jobs. Waiters and waitresses have their own unique way of using language and literacy. Mirabelli re-evaluates how we understand literacy by looking at patterns of thought and behavior in the restaurant Lou’s, where he previously worked. There is more that goes into being a waiter or waitress than most might think. They have to be both knowledgeable workers and skilled in interactive services. Mirabelli shows how …show more content…
The most obvious being that the server must be friendly. Mirabelli explains how the servers must be able to do this on the unconscious level. Also Mirabelli states, knowing what the customer wants is an example of a good waiter or waitress. Emotional labor is also a huge part of being a waiter/waitress, being able to connect with the customer is a must in this line of work. Emotional labor is defined as, “Requiring one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (Mirabelli 204). This means that waiters and waitresses have to be able to hide bad emotions and always have a friendly face in order to keep customers happy. Building respect and recognition for service workers is very important to Mirabelli. He shows pathos in this piece having emotion for the workers in the food service industry. In “Learning to Serve” Mirabelli shows the many different ways waiters/waitresses use language and literacy in their line of work, but often these workers are still not respected. Many people still look at the service industry as servants, treating them as lesser than equals. As shown, being in the service industry is tough work and they must be both knowledgeable and skilled in interactive
There are more little jobs that the catering associates must perform. They must know all the diets, do their cleaning jobs within the kitchen, and ensure that all their patients are happy.
Setting the scene with including where he grew up, Mike Rose introduces where his mother works in Los Angeles in the 1950s (Rose, 2017 p.272), thus, creating an image in the reader’s head to picture how the economy was at that time. Sometimes people had to work in areas they did not want to work in order to provide for their families. Diving into the everyday life of his mother, Rose emphasized the skills she needed to be successful as a waitress. Waitressing “acquires knowledge and intuition about the ways and rhythms of the restaurant business” (Rose, 2017, p.274). His mother had to devise memory strategies in order to wait on multiple tables with multiple people.
As I mentioned before his mother was a waitress. Although a waitress doesn’t sound like the most pleasing job, she still gained a lot of knowledge. Rose notes “The restaurant became the place where she studied human behavior, puzzling over the problems of her regular customers and refining her ability to deal with people in a difficult world.” In which she learned and adapted to things like human conduct and problem solving. His mother’s job required both the mind and the body, where she had to understand the different ways the restaurant business worked and then apply it. For example, being able to carry plates with one arm and cups in the other, while memorizing who ordered what and when they ordered it. Of course Rose shares “...there were the customers who entered the restaurant with all sorts of needs, from physiological ones, including the emotions that accompany hunger, to a sometimes complicated desire for human contact.” This provokes sympathy. As a customer myself, there has been times where I was impatient or I would get fustrated with my food service. Now, understanding what waitresses go through gives a perspective on what they deal with. In which, Rose sparks his readers with a feeling of understanding for what blue-collar workers go through and
Rose helps the audience gather a mental image of what he experienced occasionally on a day to day basis; it was the 1950s in a Los Angeles family restaurant. Mrs. Mergalio would do more than just waitress, she could handle working the register and the counter with little to no help (Rose, 2017, p. 272). Sitting behind a desk all day, white-collar employees have little to no face time with the outside world or their colleagues. As a waitress,
Tony Mirabelli, in his article, “Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers”, discusses how members of the food service community, whether it be the consumer or the worker, interact and mediate activity through language and texts (298). He talks about the everyday literacies of a diner and how the threshold concept is used on a daily basis. The threshold concept is very straight-forward; texts and language mediate activity and interactions.
Have you ever tried listening to everything going on at the same time at a fast food restaurant during the lunch time rush hour? Well, I did and I am going to share the results of my whirlwind encounter last week. Within my observation, I will go over the layout of the establishment in which my observation was conducted, as well as who came to the establishment, the conversations and the interactions that took place. I hope you enjoy my observation and respect my findings from this visit.
After finding a temporary residence in an efficiency apartment within a forty-five minute drive from the prospective employment options in Key West, Florida, Ehrenreich attempts to find a low-paying job that could defray her living expenses. She applies for multiple jobs and waits a couple of days until she is hired as a waitress at a restaurant attached to a hotel that she calls “Hearthside.” During the first few weeks as a waitress, Ehrenreich is concerned with being an effective worker and providing a convivial atmosphere for the customers. She soon discovers that the onerous demands of waitressing can only be alleviated by desensitising herself to the quality of her work. Upon doing so,
The space given to the bartenders is secluded to only them and is only, rarely, invaded with his approval. Whereas, the space provided for the waitress’s is often invaded by both the costumers and the bartenders. Even though the space given to the customers is also where the waitress must work it is often hard for the waitress to move through customers due to their carelessness of her presence. When the waitress’s space is invaded or when they are held back from doing their job they must always remain passive.
In the essay written by Joey Franklin, the author exposes his own internal conflict, as well as the existing prejudice against fast food restaurant workers. The work is well developed, with the use of witty diction and tone, in addition to the appeals to rhetorical devices.
I chose to research this subculture because I was so curious about it. I have some friends that wait tables, but I hadn’t really thought about how being a waitress involves so many things aside from serving food. Waitressing is more about handling all different types of people, and learning to multitask successfully than just serving food. When I go out to eat, I usually only notice if the waitress or waiter is nice to me and my party. I make sure that all of the food and drinks come out the way we ordered them, and I also pay attention to how the food tastes. When I started my research and observation for this ethnography, I started to pay more attention the server when I was eating at restaurants. I started to notice how many tables the server waited on, I noticed how many times he or she had to take food back to the kitchen because someone thought it was wrong or not cooked right, and I also noticed how unhappy he or she was when they left a certain table. I have also
Also, when a waiter has all this cash in their pocket after work and home is twenty minutes away, it is very convenient to not have to go all the way home to change completely before going out for the evening.Working at a restaurant is also a very laid-back occupation. Not very many jobs enables an employee to interact with so many different people.
They expect me to be patient, clear with orders, not demanding, and aware of what is going on. I must know what food they just told me was done and where to take it, but first I need to pay attention to hear when my name is called. There is usually more tension between the kitchen and waiters than there is with any other workers. The roles are so different. The kitchen staff usually looks at servers as just wanting to get a good tip, and that we do not care the extremities the kitchen has to go to for us. It is important that servers respect the kitchen staff; they are in charge of the food we will be serving. “Servers, as mediators, need their food when their customers demand it: sometimes this is before the food is ready; at other times after. If servers demand food too early, cooks are stressed; but if they don’t pick up the food on time, the food is poor and the cook seems incompetent.” (Fine 105). This is the most true on Friday and Saturday nights. Everything seems to be more chaotic on these nights, since most people decide to go out. This is good because it brings in more business for the restaurant, but then there are always more unhappy customers on these nights as well. Overall, positive interaction with the kitchen staff can make amazing things happen.
The fast food industry treats their workers unfairly. The employees in the fast food industry work long, hard hours and get paid minimum wage, in which many cases is not enough to support themselves and their families. Some of the employees put their lives at risk working in the fast food industry. Many workers are greatly affected by their long hours and their salaries. Due to the long hours and salaries they aren’t able to support their families with the essentials. Also many risk their lives to support themselves and their families.
Good management skills - Commitment to personally manage the day-to-day operations of the restaurant business.
It has been one year since I started to be a banquet server. The experience of working as a banquet server has helped me to appreciate people hard work around the tables serving their clients without complaining their exhaustion. According to Christa Titus, the author of “The Definition of a Banquet Server,” “A banquet server is a person who serves food and beverages to guests at an event.” The servers work at many special events such as graduation ceremony or wedding feast. Some of their duties are serving the ordered dishes, cleaning up the leftovers and assisting guests with their menu items. From my observation, this career is a low class job which pays a little amount of money for the life expenses alone. The workers are paid by hour but the wages in each country are varied.