They told us to expect long lines and slow service this summer and it looks like they were right. In the aftermath of Covid, everyone wants the vacation they couldn’t have last year. Except the hospitality and tourism businesses can’t accommodate everyone who wants a seat – a least not quickly.

Some people are saying it’s because business owners haven’t been able to rehire all their old staff members, even suggesting unemployment benefits and stimulus checks are making people lazy. We don’t want to work.

To that, I would say, I don’t think government checks are making people lazy. We already were lazy. But laziness isn’t always a bad thing. Some of the happiest, most well-adjusted people I know are kind of irresponsible. A little lazy. Think about the people you know and ask yourself, who is more fun to be around – the free spirit who enjoys life and is never in a hurry, or the highly efficient task master who missed his calling as a drill sergeant?

It’s true that you might prefer to have the task master with you in a crisis. It is also true that he is really annoying when he is screaming in your face about how you’re not making pizzas or seating customers fast enough. You know those hell’s kitchen reality shows people watch where celebrity chefs scream at people all day and get away with it? That’s not reality. Because when you act like that, your employees quit. They don’t get paid enough to put up with you, let alone the customers.

I was a pretty terrible waitress. When I was 21, my friend got me a job as a waitress and bartender at a historic inn. The owner liked to breeze in with a group of friends on a Friday night and mess with the staff pretty hardcore. They would ask ridiculous questions and change their minds about what they wanted after ordering. They would order things like “a handful of snack crackers.”

I realized then that it was a game to them, a test, and I wasn’t playing. I didn’t laugh or smile when they quizzed me about some obscure ingredient in the special. The owner told my boss she should fire me because I didn’t have the right personality to put up with people like him and his friends. She refused, probably because if she fired me she would have to hire another girl who would end up quitting and it would be an endless cycle of Haze the New Waitress For The Owner’s Personal Amusement. So my bosses decided that the owner and his buddies would just have to endure my RBF and it was their tough luck. I will say that they always tipped fairly despite my refusal to put on a sarong and do a hula dance upon request.

Thinking back on my experiences as a food service worker before that, I remember giving Burger King a shot. Lasted two weeks.

Not long after that, a friend recruited me to work at Papa Johns with her answering the phones and making pizzas. The manager had told her that if she could find anyone who would work there longer than a month, he would give her $50.

Well, she took that bet, and I don’t think he minded paying up when I stayed a lot longer than a month. It might have been a year or more.

When my students are thinking of getting a job in food service, I tell them that in my experience, fine dining pays the best, but places where you work on some kind of assembly line, where you only have a few products, like pizza and bread sticks or sub sandwiches – those places are the easiest. Sometimes peace of mind is more important than money. Not that you really get what I would call peace of mind working at any kind of restaurant, although learning to make hand-tossed pizza is kind of fun. Spreading the tomato sauce could be meditative if you weren’t worried about answering the phone and taking the next order at the same time.

A lot of businesses have added these kiosks where you can order food, or self-checkout stations where you can ring up your own groceries. As a customer, it’s hard not to feel annoyed when the computer keeps insisting you “replace the item in the bagging area.” Um, don’t I have to remove the bag at some point so I can load it into the cart and start filling the next bag? Meanwhile, the employees are standing there talking about how much they hate their jobs. I’m thinking, yeah, I hate it too, and I’m not even getting paid.

Wouldn’t we all rather be waited on than stand there trying to figure out where they put the bar code on a bag of kumquats?

Actually, no.

There have been plenty of times I’ve been sitting in a restaurant when I would have loved to serve myself, and on a few occasions, I have gone ahead and done it. Like instead of waiting for someone to refill my water glass, I just get up, grab the pitcher, and do it myself. As a former waitress, I know this is appreciated. I am not overstepping my boundaries. And if I am, just call me a Karen. I’ve been called worse.

I’m pretty sure this kiosk stuff is going to continue as we talk about raising the minimum wage. Companies will hire fewer workers and pass the labor on to the customers. What else are they going to do? Stop paying their CEOs like $15 million a year?

I’ve decided to handle my new part-time job in the service industry, for which I will be earning exactly nothing and in fact paying to serve myself, by using the names of famous people when I place my order. Instead of placing an order for “Star,” I will be placing an order for Walt Whitman or Kyle Schwarber. (I’ll need to really mix it up to keep things interesting for myself.)

I follow a Facebook page for local “foodies.” Some of the so-called locals are saying there are no good restaurants in our “small town.” I’m pretty sure those people are not local. As a certified townie, I can tell you that the way not to make friends in a new place is to move there and complain that there isn’t enough to do. Say your last place was so much better and more cultured. When you say that, the townie thinks: Really? If it was so great, why don’t you go back?

Also, I have lived in Winchester, VA, all my life, and people, this is not a small town.

If you want to see a small town, go about 20 miles west to Capon Bridge, WV.

And do not go into the restaurants there expecting the wait staff to be impressed because you are from some place like Indianapolis, where they have the best bagels outside of Brooklyn.

And if you can cook a better meal yourself, at home, then maybe you should. Because there’s a line behind you going right out the door. And they aren’t there to fill out a job application. And that line isn’t getting any shorter.