The first rule about FOH club is...

Thank god there's no HR department is all I have to say sometimes. We are filthy, all the men women and teenagers that work in the business. We have the mouths of sailors, the libidos of 13 year old boys, the humor of the depraved, and the livers of very very very old men. 

We try to keep it down when we see a guest spilling out of her dress, or one too drunk to stand, but when you hear someone laugh to a coworker in a restaurant and say "Oh, 24 seat 3 right?" know we are making fun. maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but it's not because we are judging you as a person, just that those are our "water-cooler" stories. We don't have funny copier tales, no one pulls pranks on each others cubicle. we don't have "moral boosting exercises."  Instead we have jokes, yelling, teasing, and alcohol during work hours. 

We come up with games like : "If you were to have sex anywhere in the restaurant where would you least likely be caught?" And before you think about that, don't say walk-in or elevator, the 2 most used rooms in the place, say something like, that one storage space that we run to when we've run out of ALL forks in the building.

Or everyone's favorite "If there were no consequences to your actions how would you quit?" Break all the glasses? go under random people's number and fire all their next courses for them? Order things that are complicated to make for the wrong tables? Make rollups with 2 knives and no forks (this one I have witnessed) so that when you're gone you make your co-workers work that much harder?

We need to do something to stop the madness from slowly creeping in, and sometimes that is be the worst kind of person you can be. Tell sexist jokes, no not like: "Q.What do you do when the dishwasher stops working? A: Yell at her." I mean "Q. What do you call that useless flap of skin around a vagina? A. A woman." If you chuckled when you read this either you've heard it and still think it's kind of funny or you may have worked in restaurants.

 Look, we see all kinds, we see the people who declare "a life-threatening allergy to gluten" but order fries, as if it's not cooked in the same fry-alator as the calamari, which is breaded. 

We see the people "who ask for steaks very very lean with no salt and dressing on the side and then ask for BONE MARROW to accompany it. It takes all kinds.

We're simply looking for something to amuse us, something to make light of the fact that there are too many people who come in to eat, but don't come in and CARE. People who don't listen when we announce the specials and then ask us to repeat it,  the people that say they wouldn't like anything when we offer beverages at a table and when we come back to bring the rest suddenly ask at that INOPPORTUNE time for a beverage they suddenly realized they wanted.

So we joke. We flirt at work to pass the time, we see awkward dates, and people making out like no one notices them (which we most certainly do), we laugh, we jab, we poke fun, we use laughter as medicine, or alcohol, or both. At the end of the day we know there's the one guy to go to for jokes, the one girl to go to for some inappropriate phrase, that one chef who whips towels hard enough to leave a welt, and that we get it. 

Sometimes you have to be a little fucked up to fit in.