Server Nightmares

 By server nightmares, I mean the actual bad dreams that one has at night. Bad, bad dreams about work. I'm sure other people in other jobs have nightmares, but server nightmares are special.
  The theme is always the same. You are incredibly weeded. In your dream your restaurant has morphed into some hideously large version of itself. Your section is gigantic; you have tables in the bar, tables at the back of the restaurant, and tables outside and down the street. Of course you are sat all at once, because we all know that hostesses suck, and of course everyone is needy. Everything that happens in real life is completely blown out of proportion in a server nightmare. People aren't just slightly rude, they scream at you. They want you to cut up their food and feed it to them. You can't get the wine open, the bar is taking FOREVER, and all of the food is WRONG! All this while you have a fifty table section that spans two blocks.
  My first bartending job was at a restaurant that had a scale model of a skipjack as it's bar. In case you don't know what a skipjack is; it's a boat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skipjack_(boat) . The only way in or out of this bar was to jump up on one side and swing over. As you could imagine, this could be a tricky maneuver if the bar was full. At any rate, it was a Saturday night, the bar was full and the restaurant was busy. Of course I was a bit overwhelmed, but the night was just busy, not bad. There is a difference between busy and bad, you know.
 Even though it wasn't a bad night, I still managed to go home and have an interesting dream about my evening at work. I was in the boat, of course the restaurant had grown to huge, server nightmare proportions, and of course everyone was particularly needy. Except in my dream the needy patrons were pirates and they were swinging from the sails trying to get at me. It was awful. I was surrounded by pirates who needed the strangest concoctions, and of course they wouldn't move so I could get out of the bar, (because they were pirates, and pirates are notoriously rude), and I was terribly, terribly weeded out of my gourd.
  While this was my first server nightmare, it certainly wasn't my last. The absolute worst part about these bad work dreams is that you wake up stressed. This is not a cool feeling on your day off. But it's ok, after you've shaken off the cobwebs and realized that it was just an awful dream, and not how your night actually went, you can laugh about it. Sometimes : ) Faites de beaux reves  mes amies!!!