Don't Mess With Your Waiter

Ray (Gonzo) Gonzales and I served as waiters in Duncan Dining Hall our pisshead and sergebutt years. I learned a lesson from that experience that has guided me through my lifetime -don't mess with your waiter.

You have no idea what goes on behind the kitchen door. That time he/she is hidden from view gives your waiter plenty of time to exact retribution, and the sweetest thing about it is that you probably will never know so you cannot retaliate.

Here are some examples:

During our days at A&M we ate family style at Duncan. Everyone had pre-assigned seating at pre-assigned tables. Fish always ate with pissheads and sergebutts so the upperclassmen could instruct the fish in Aggie etiquette. This left the zips themselves as they just wanted to eat and leave and to not be bothered by disciplining fish.

As a waiter my pisshead year I was assigned to wait on a table of zips. For the most part they were little trouble, and since many of them often missed the evening meal, it was easy duty.

The Corps had a Thanksgiving tradition for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Prior to the vacation for those holidays, Duncan served a more sumptuous meal than normal, usually consisting of turkey and the trimmings. Custom also dictated that each member at each table would contribute to a "tip" for their waiter. If you were a particularly good waiter you could receive a quite generous gift from your three tables to which you were assigned. In return, the waiters purchased cigars and passed them out to each person at the table.

Such was the tradition. My table of zips, however, could not be bothered. They gave me nothing in return for my cigars. I vowed to exact revenge and it got it in several ways.

One way was to make sure they received the sorriest meat available. Duncan served family style in those days and we waiters brought the different food items to the table in containers. We passed by a line of servers in the kitchen area and had them fill the containers with the food items and returned the filled containers to the tables. I instructed the severs to save the fattest, sorriest looking slices of the meat for me and I made sure it went to my table of seniors. The roast beef often had purple letters in the outside of it and Duncan was the only place I have ever seen that. I'm pretty sure that it meant that the government had condemned it as "not fit for human consumption".

Imagine meat that has been sliced with great gobs of fat and gristle inside and purple ink on the outside and you can begin to imagine how unappetizing it must have appeared. This is what the table of zips got the rest of the semester that I was assigned to them.

The second major source of revenge was through their milk. The A&M dairy produced prodigious quantities of milk and much of it went to the campus. It was packaged in small 8-10 oz bottles that resembled the much larger milk bottles available for home delivery. Every place at each table received a bottle of milk and generally every one of those bottles was consumed by someone during the meal.

The had a paper cover to keep the lips of the bottle clean. A heavier cardboard plug inside the neck of the bottle kept the contents inside. It was possible, and quite easy, to carefully remove both of the barriers and expose the open bottle. I did this to each bottle at the zip table and poured in anything I could find, generally copious quantities of salt. Then I carefully resealed the bottle so that it was not obvious it had been tampered with.

I still today enjoy thinking about the satisfaction of vengeance I felt as I watched a senior downing his milk.

My advice to you is to always be sure to treat your waiter with respect because you never know what lurks behind the kitchen door. And, if you frequent a particular restaurant and you are a lousy tipper, you should be extremely leery about sitting in the area served by your waiter from a previous visit.

Tom (TE) Schoolcraft