Dubecki - Prick with a fork : the worlds worst waitress spills the beans

No woman is an island and clearly no book is either. A multitude of people aided and abetted the writing of this memoir, from helping dust off long-buried memories to giving the author a kick up the bum when she most needed it.

Firstly, to my beloved Ben, without whom none of this would have been possiblethanks, dude. Words fail me, but I reckon you know.

To Jenny Dubecki, a tower of strength, capability and justified eye rolling. Without you our entire domestic set-up would collapse into rubble. You deserve not only a gold medal but silver and bronze, too (and Mum, Im really sorry about Chapter 12).

My agent Michael Lynch, without whom I couldnt say the words my agent, and Jane Palfreyman and Sarah Baker from Allen & Unwin, who were so kind to this little manuscript I almost fell over in shock.

Michael Harden, Hilary McNevin and Roslyn Grundyyou rock. As do you, Janne Apelgren and Nina Rousseau.

Thanks for the moral support and encouragement to Nina Dubecki, Olivia Hill-Douglas and Marcus Sharp, Toby Hemming and Lara Johnston and my girls Sally Jeremiah, Emma Pullen, Chrisi Shorland and Susie Staples.

To Matt Wilkinson and Sharlee Gibb: theres no one Id rather be on the runaway hospitality train with than you guys. (Sharlee, if they decide to open another cafe we have to kill them, okay?)

Additional thanks for the generous sharing of wisdom and anecdotes goes to Roger Fowler, Erez Gordon, Chris Lucas, Myffy Rigby, Stuart Neil, Jeff Salt, Rosanne Hyland, Paul McGough, Angie Giannakodakis, Kate Foster, Matteo Pignatelli, Harry Gill, Kathi Jennings, Tony Eldred and Andrea Murphy. If theres anyone Ive forgotten I apologise. I love youse all.

Consider the pizza. A cold and lonely slice orphaned on a clunky white plate, surrounded by the detritus of gluttonymasticated olive pits, half-eaten crusts, a limp crescent of over-marinated capsicum. Its destined for the bin, you would think, a sign of another satiated customer who crumpled their napkin and performed the internationally recognised hand gesture of an imaginary pen on paper that means bring me the bill.

However. Consider youre a waiter. Youve just spent the past four hours serving food to thankless idiots after pulling a double shift the previous day with vodka-based refreshments to follow. You woke late, with only enough time to do the minimal gesture to social civility of the dry showera quick spritz of deodorant over yesterdays clothesbefore fronting up to work again. The gnaw in your stomach has gone from insistent to hostile. Blood sugar levels have plummeted to dangerous lows yet to be fully understood by medical science.

Youre bottoming out. The law of diminishing returns means the odd cigarette break, snatched in the rear laneway on an upended milk crate, is no longer enough to quell the pangs of hunger. Its still two-and-a-bit hours until staff meals will be ready. Anyway, the kitchen has been going through a phase where they let the first-year apprentice experiment with his avant-garde food ideas as a sick joke on the waiters, regarded in this particular establishment (and in many others) as a sub-class of humans not unlike the Morlocks in H.G. Wellss The Time Machine. Unbeknown to table six, lingering innocently over their tiramisu, there is a very real danger of this turning into a hostage situation.

And theres that pizza, abandoned on a table, ready to be collected and thrown in the bin without a seconds thought where it will fester among a decaying food gravy of scraps and offcuts and eventually make its way to a stinking landfill. Would you eat it?

You spy your chance. The chefs are preoccupied by a spirited intellectual discussion (Britneys hot; Christinas a dog, man), the floor manager has disappeared to places unknown, and theres a blind spot near the dish pig where youd be able to squeeze into a corner, between the bin and the ice machine, and stuff that bad boy down.

Lets call it Il Crappo Italiano. One of those Lygon Street restaurants doing for the reputation of Italian food what the captain of the Costa Concordia did for cruise liners. Forget the nations proud regionalism, its produce obsession, its Denominazione di Origine Protetta swagger. Il Crappo is a swamp, a veritable red-sauce sea of shoddy ingredients with red and white checked tablecloths and, for that extra frisson of Latin authenticity, candles jammed into Chianti bottles. You might have been there. If you havent, youve likely been to one of the thousands upon thousands of places exactly like it dotted across the world. You know them: theres a spruiker out the front, bellowing about the REAL, OAR-THEN-TIC ITALIAN FOOD and screaming CIAO BELLA! in the face of every female under the age of ninety on the assumption that women need only be told theyre beautiful by a glib arsehole in a waistcoat to think Goodness, I really feel like lasagne.

You dont need experience to work at Il Crappo. Who sold you that idea? Sure, they advertised the job like this: Fun, Energetic, Vibrant, Proactive, Experienced Waiter/Waitress Wanted for Quality Italian restaurant. (Hey, thats me! thinks the morose, lazy, dull, reactive dolt in desperate need of some quick coin to pay this months rent. How do I convince them Im their man?) But heres the thing you will quickly realise. Il Crappo is bullshitting just as much as you are. Working here is the hospitality equivalent of going down the salt mines. They churn through staff here like a logger going at a Tasmanian old-growth forest. Six months is considered a damned good innings. Youll either be fired orbetter stillmuster the self-respect to walk out and never return.

Il Crappo doesnt really need to see a CV when you front up for what passes for an interview, although it will expect you to bullshit up a several-page litany of half-truths and outright lies. No ones going to be calling your references. It doesnt need to see a pathetic little certificate in hospitality (Bar, Coffee and Floor) from trade school, a gold rosette stamped pompously on the masthead.

Anyone can become a waiter at Il Crappo. That means you. Yes, you. And me.

And why, you may be asking yourself, did I desire to work at Il Crappo when it was so clearly, so patently, awful? Simple. Cool people were waiters. And I was neither. This abject story opens on a gormless nineteen-year-old working casual shifts in a Well-Known Australian Fashion Store. A retail assistant. A fashion adviser. Basically I was being paid for my ability to lie to middle-aged women that a sequined bomber jacket is a fabulous investment piece that can be dressed up or down.

Waitressing has its downsides, certainly, but fashion retail is a living death. Far nobler to operate a checkout in a supermarket, calling for a price check on cat food. Better to work on a production line screwing smaller bolts onto bigger bolts for eight hours a day, willing the rhythm of the action to dull the acuteness of time. Selling clothes is nothing more than a grand illusion that involves projecting the appearance of busyness while waiting for the next victimknown in the trade as a customerto wander into the web of well-dressed despair. There are no positives to speak ofapart from, in my case, a sweet little scam that involved buying clothes with the 50 per cent staff discount and returning them to a Large, Well-Known Department Store for a full-priced refund. Until they twigged and started demanding receipts it really boosted the discretionary spending fund, but thats pretty much all I have to recommend for three years worth of telling people their bum didnt look big in that.