Fresh out of university, I got a short-term job with a
touring theatre company. The terms were ridiculous: $300 for a month’s work
away from home, to be paid at the end of that month. Only one meal a day would
be provided; for the rest, we were on our own.
We depended on cheap food from convenience stores that could
be stored and prepared in a hotel room. Did you know that you can cook maggi
mee in a coffeepot? I also learned that you can eat sardine in the can without cooking
them and that you can live on cream crackers.
The first of our venues was a lovely, sprawling resort. I
don’t know what had happened between the staff and the previous theater
company, but we could sense the bad feeling when we arrived. The wait staff
despised us from the start.
They withheld utensils from us at dinner, while our
one-meal-for-the-day cooled. The owner invited our company to eat dinner in the
restaurant because we were far from home, but the staff refused to let us in.
It was ugly.
When we arrived at the second venue, our first order of
business was to re-block the show for the new stage. While we practiced, I saw
in my peripheral vision a table being set. I panicked. It was midday—which meant
that they were serving us lunch. Sandwiches were better than maggi mee and
cream crackers, but getting lunch would mean no hot dinner. We really counted
on that being our hot meal of the day.
We were called over to eat. The table was beautifully set,
with a linen cloth and origami-folded napkins. The sandwiches were elaborate
and generous, along with heaps of potato chips and pitchers of cold drinks. It
was so nicely done. How could we complain in the face of it? Afterward, I took
the headwaiter aside and expressed our preference for our one meal to be
dinner.
Our dinner would be at six, he told me. He added that the
“one meal a day” clause in our contract was nonsense and that for the entire
run of the show, the venue would be giving us lunch and dinner daily.
We returned at six, grateful and nervous because this still
seemed too good to be true. Our table was downstairs, away from the audience
but set as beautifully as an audience table. We sat down to table linens and
folded napkins again, and because it was dinner, we had multiple forks for
courses and side plates for salad.
We were served by a cheerful waiter who sang to us. He
refilled our water glasses, took orders for coffee, and even brought us
dessert. At the end, we tried to bus our plates to the kitchen. We felt that it
was only fair—after all, we were staff too.
But that caused a minor scuffle. The wait staff said that we
didn’t have to do that; we insisted that we must. We relented when the
headwaiter explained, “This is enjoyable for us only if you let us do it
right.”
That was more than 20 years ago, and I still get teary over
the memory. We were so hungry and tired and so tense from the meanness of the
staff at the first venue. The new waiters were joyful, and they took such pride
and pleasure in their work.
Since then, I’ve tried to live like them: Enjoy work by
doing it right. Be generous. Fold those metaphorical napkins into pretty birds;
sing while you serve, and treat those who have nothing to give you as well as
you would treat a paying customer.
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