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Stress Dreams of the Restaurant Industry

I’m sitting in a high-backed burgundy restaurant booth, working on my laptop. In front of me is a half-eaten sandwich and cup of coffee that’s gone cold. I’m a little stressed; my boss is in Tokyo and I’m trying to finish some emails before she wakes up.

“How are we doing over here?” says a voice I recognize. I look up and it’s Andrzej, the Assistant Manager of a restaurant in New York where I worked when I was 23.

Andrzej looks the same: neat hair, grey suit, pink tie. He’s smiling at me, then he says, “We could really use you on the floor, if you’re done.” Without another word, he takes my laptop and walks away with it. I stand up, surprised, and then I look down. I’m wearing my old uniform, stupid little vest and everything. A waitress in a plaid skirt comes over.

“Are you clocked in yet?” she asks. “I need a bottle of Glubelt on table 11,” she shoves a ticket at me and walks away. I’m a wine runner again; sort of an apprentice sommelier, and I can’t remember what Glubelt is. Austrian, maybe, I think as I head for the kitchen. I go to the wine fridge and it occurs to me that they’ve likely changed the combination for the keypad lock in the five-plus years since I’ve been gone. I pull on the handle anyway, and find that it’s open. Andrzej’s going to be mad no one locked this, I think as I grab a bottle conveniently marked “Glubelt” and head back to the dining room.

I swing open the kitchen door and yell, “Corner!” but now I’m looking at the little restaurant where I used to waitress in college instead. The leather booths are gone, in their place are white cafeteria-style tables and bucket chairs. There are two guests sitting at a table in the corner, so I go over and present the Glubelt to them.

“I thought you didn’t serve wine here,” says a woman with bleach-blonde hair and a French manicure. She’s right of course- this restaurant doesn’t have a liquor license.

I head back to the kitchen to put the wine away, but by now my conscious brain is fighting back, because I know where this is going next. I really don’t want to come back out here to find myself in the shopping mall chain restaurant where I was a hostess in high school, or worse, making waffle cones at my first job at Cold Stone Creamery. I look down at my vest, then at the bottle of wine in my hand and say, “Glubelt is not a real grape. Wake up.” And I do.

Not too long ago, I was at a dinner party with some other service industry ex-pats. Someone brought up “restaurant stress dreams” and we all laughed and nodded. One woman told a version of the dream where she’s searching for something in the wine cellar, but none of the bottles have labels. Another said she often dreamt she was eating at a nice restaurant with her husband, but the staff kept asking her to pitch in, having her pour water, drop checks and run food for them, until she was completely weeded and her husband was sitting at the table in a huff. In another variation on my dream, I’ve made a mistake while ringing in the order of the most popular girl at my middle school, and I am searching desperately through a ribbon of tickets to find it before the chef sends her the wrong food (this, I realize, touches on a whole other set of issues).

I often wonder if people who worked other hourly jobs in their youth have this same kind of sleeping PTSD. Do people who worked at the Gap have bad dreams about folding clothes? Are ex grocery cashiers faced with un-scannable barcodes all night long? I never have dreams about my current job, or the one that came between, even though both were considerably more stressful than my stint as a wine runner.

Lately I’ve been hung up on the idea of progress, specifically whether I’m really making any. I like goals that I can see; finish lines work well for me, stopwatches do too. It’s the goals that are formulated between my ears that I seem to have problems with. In my waking life, my boss actually is in Tokyo, and there’s a very real typhoon coming, which is going to throw a wrench in our plans to say the least. There’s also a flash flood warning in Charlottesville, where my other big project is happening tomorrow. Here in Los Angeles, where I moved last year, we’re in an historic draught, but all I can talk about is rising water. It takes a special kind of crazy to work yourself up over weather spanning 16 time zones, but that’s me. I never have dreams about the weather.

“It’s about your fear of regression,” says my vastly more successful friend on the phone. “You’re afraid of having to go backwards, and in your dreams these people you remember keep forcing you to.” This is true, but I think it’s also pretty low-hanging psychological fruit. It took me two full years after leaving restaurant work to throw out my old kitchen shoes.

The irony is, I often really enjoyed it. I was a good waitress; my people skills probably could’ve used some work, but the rapid ticking off of an endless mental checklist works well for me. My career since then has been somewhat trial and error, and admittedly indecisive. One time, at a Lean In type career workshop, I was told to visualize my ambition taking off like a rocket. I pictured my career being loaded onto a launch pad and fired, only to explode in twenty-five different directions like a faulty science fair project. I laughed so hard I had to excuse myself.

In my current job, I spend a lot of time working remotely from restaurants and coffee shops; a perk of working for a small, agile company whose other employees travel most of the year. I joined a co-working space when I first moved to LA, but after a few months I gravitated back to restaurants; somehow I just focus better with glass racks crashing in the background and someone screaming “pick up!” every two minutes.

This time, I’ve made myself comfortable on the outdoor patio of a little restaurant down the street from my house. I’m typing away when one of the waitresses brings me a flute of champagne, which I didn’t order. She points to the bar and it’s my old boss, the beverage director of the restaurant in New York. He looks the same too; broad shouldered, intense, but bearing a wide smile that betrays his good nature. He raises his glass to me and I wave. The champagne is 1976 Dom Pérignon Oenothèque, which I once got to taste in real life, thanks to a really unfortunate accident. Weeded and in a rush, one of the floor managers went to the wine fridge to grab a bottle of your every day, garden variety Dom Pérignon, but popped the cork on a four thousand dollar reserve bottle instead. Mortified, he brought the open bottle down to the wine office and made a profuse apology. There was nothing to be done. My boss solemnly thanked him for owning up to the mistake and told him he would take care of it. He asked me to close the door to the office, then shook his head and said, “Well, we might as well drink it.”

Back at the bar of my dreams, the boss comes over to say hello. He asks what I’m working on, and I show him my spreadsheet.

He nods and says, “So did you figure out what you want to do with your life?”

“Not really,” I reply, and he laughs a big, booming laugh.

“Yeah, me neither,” he says. He clinks his glass to mine and vanishes.

Unfazed, the waitress comes over with a smile and asks if I need anything else. I wait for the other shoe to drop, but she doesn’t ask me to run some drinks or even just watch her tables for a minute. I look down just to double check- no vest. I take a sip of my champagne and say, “You know, I think I’m actually okay.”

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