Working at a restaurant: an absurdist tragicomedy

Two months after I came to the Netherlands, I started working at a restaurant chain in Utrecht. I had no previous experience in the service industry, but after thoroughly fabricating some things in my CV and thanks to the extreme shortage of workers at the restaurant, I was hired without too many questions. 

Now, after a year of repeatedly telling all my friends "I've had enough, I’m going to find a new job!" and then deciding to stay for a different reason each time, I believe I have a good grasp on how absurd and draining the experience of hospitality work can be.

Usually, unless it is very busy, we work only with one other person. And because it’s not too busy, you have a lot of time to get to know each other – for better or for worse. When I say you meet the strangest people at work, everyone thinks I mean the customers, but I am often talking about the people I am behind the counter with. You sometimes spend a 5-hour shift with someone you are fundamentally different to in every possible measure imaginable. What do you converse with them about? Politics? God, no! Their personal life? Do I really wanna know that? Music? They solely listen to Eminem’s last album on repeat and think all other music is objectively bad. 

I use the word “strange” without any negative connotations, more so as an honest acknowledgement of the absurdity of the situations that arise. It is the perfect comedic set-up: a bunch of completely unrelated and dissimilar people put into an insanely high-stress environment. Imagine this: in a stuffy fast food restaurant, a 27-year-old Dutch woman who barely speaks English and a 19-year-old Turkish woman who barely speaks Dutch are trying to entertain each other for four hours. The older woman sometimes gets drunk after her shift and comes to tell the younger woman she loves working with her in an overly affectionate manner. You can imagine how this woman quickly became one of my favourite people ever. 

The rush hours are some of the most viscerally stressful experiences of my life. Working a real low income comes with the grim realisation that there is no more being babied. If I’m too stressed with school work, I can talk to teachers; if my personal life becomes too much, I can take some time off; but at work, it won’t matter if I have a full-on nervous breakdown while preparing an order. I have no more excuses, no one to take pity on me. I just have to keep going. With the cheap labour force that 16-year-olds provide in the Netherlands, I have many young coworkers who are already chain smoking every chance they get due to the high stress of hospitality work. It would almost be a funny sight to see them act as such old and weary adults if it wasn’t so tragic. 

Stay tuned for Part 2!