Rolling Silverware Really Bites

Anyone who has worked in a restaurant knows what a roll-up is and I ain't talking about the fruit kind. I'm talking about the silverware that gets "rolled up" into a napkin and placed lovingly on the table in your station. This is only a facet of your job if you work in a high class establishment that uses linen napkins and not some skanky cheap ass bitch place that uses paper napkins, also known as most of the places I have worked. Doing your roll-ups usually is a part of your sidework at the end of the day. I personally never minded doing them because you got to sit at a table in order to do it and what other sidework is there that lets you sit? It's probably the last thing you do at the end of your shift and you just want that shit done so you can go home. I can't tell you how many times I have looked at a rack of sliver and figured that it was clean enough and rolled those bitches up into a napkin. Depending on the place, you have to roll a certain number of them to be considered finished. At Houlihan's we had to do fifty. We had to roll them up and lay them in a row of five and then stack five more on top of that until we had a big stack of semi-clean silver ready for the dinner rush. Since we all hated doing it at the end of the day, we started getting into the habit of doing our fifty before the shift started and then hiding them somewhere so at the end of your shift all you had to do was pull the stack from the hiding place, show it to the shift manager and call it a day. This eventually turned into a problem. When we had six servers who all wanted to do their roll-ups in the morning and then hide them, it meant that we were short 300 roll-ups to put on the tables for lunch. Now I don't know about your restaurant, but most of the time utensils are moderately important. So of course, that practice was put to a halt. Another thing we did to avoid the nuisance of rolling silver was to share the same stack. For instance, Jane, Randie, Corrine and I would together roll fifty. Jane would then take the stack to the manager to show him that she had rolled her necessary amount and he would give her the all clear. She would then bring the stack to Randie who would then go to a shift leader and show the same stack of fifty and also get the all clear. Then Corrinne would show the stack to a manager and then I would show it to the shift leader and then bolt the hell out of there because it would only be a matter of time before someone working the dinner shift would notice that instead of 200 roll-ups, there were only 50. That only worked for a few times before they caught on, but I think it was pretty fucking genius of us. Not to mention lazy.

The answer to this issue is clear. We should all use paper napkins and plastic utensils. Not only is it much easier for the servers, it is also cost efficient for the restaurant and also good for the environment. Okay, so maybe it's a bit more expensive for the restaurant, but all they have to do is add twenty cents to the cost of a soda and it will blanace itself out. And maybe it's not all that great for Planet Earth, but hey, we are talking about making life easier for servers and I think Mother Nature would want it that way.