AJnet Archives: Being a Busboy Ain’t Easy

We’re starting over with the AJnet Archives by going all the way back to the beginning.

Before scheduled articles, before AJnet tried to act like a real publication, before WordPress, there was just me, a keyboard, and a shitty minimum wage job.

While I’d already been writing on the internet for a few years, “Being A Busboy Ain’t Easy” was the very first article I ever wrote for this site. Like most first attempts, it’s… rough.

And by “rough,” I mean it’s certified garbage.

A long time ago, at a place called Moe’s Deli (not to be confused with Moe’s Southwest Grill), I worked as a busboy.

Moe’s was a Jewish deli and restaurant that also did catering. The place had been around forever, and was a neighborhood staple that was known for its potato salad.

I didn’t even start out front. I was a dishwasher until management decided that wasn’t working out (I was never clear on why). As I later found out, they were actually planning on firing me before one of the managers stepped in and suggested they try moving me out to the floor instead. That decision is the only reason this article exists.

Back then, I tried to dress the job up a bit by saying, “Think of me as more of a ‘server’s assistant’.” What that really meant was I was a busboy who also had to deal with customers. This is actually pretty common in the industry, but because my previous busboy job had kept me washing dishes in the back of the house, I assumed it wasn’t normal.

The place let people seat themselves. I even wrote, “This idea is about as brilliant as our presi-dunce,”. The fact that I felt the need to insert a dig at George W. Bush, and chose “presi-dunce” as that dig, tells you everything you need to know about where my writing style was at in 2007.

The article’s crudely-drawn diagram shows what the store’s layout looked like in 2007:

The layout itself was simple, but I spelled it out like it was some kind of elaborate breakdown: “As you can see, we have five booths, four regular tables, and a small table.” Everything seated roughly the same number of people, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the booths. I wrote, “95% of the time, the customer wants to sit at a booth,” and while that number was exaggerated, the behavior absolutely wasn’t.

I told a story about a couple refusing to sit anywhere else, saying they were waiting for a booth, then watching them charge toward it the second it opened, “like German tanks rolling towards Paris in 1940.” That’s obviously me being dramatic, but the underlying behavior was real. I watched people ignore perfectly open tables all the time just to stand there and wait, like sitting at a booth was going to fundamentally change their meal. I won’t pretend that I don’t find a booth more comfortable than a chair, but I saw people wait upwards of 20 minutes just to get a booth. That’s nuts.

Then we get to the part that still holds up a little too well. I wrote, “I saw one of the most disgusting and grody things I had ever seen in my entire two years in the food industry.” What followed was a customer casually picking at leftover fries from someone else’s plate.

At the time, I treated it like this outrageous, once-in-a-lifetime event. It wasn’t. Over the years I saw people do this more than once. I’m not sure what goes through a person’s mind when they do such a thing. It’s disgusting. You don’t know who was eating off of that plate before you.

What I didn’t mention back then is that customers weren’t the only grody ones. I routinely watched the owner’s wife take uneaten pickles off cleared plates and reuse them. I’m honestly surprised that I didn’t include this in the article. This sort of thing is more common in the industry than you’d think. If people knew even a fraction of what went on behind the scenes at some of their favorite restaurants, a lot of them would stop eating out entirely.

I also casually dropped the line about going back to “flirting with the hot waitress,” which sounds great until you know the actual reality.

Katie, the waitress in question, wasn’t hot by any stretch. She was just batshit crazy. She used to sell me Xanax, two pills for ten bucks, and helped me get alcohol before I turned 21. In a weird way, she probably contributed more to the site’s early content than anything else, because she made sure I had access to the exact things that fueled it. I never succeeded in hooking up with her, which is probably one of my most successful failures.

Then we’ve got “Gruntilda,” which somehow became one of the most memorable parts of the article. Everyone always assumes that I was making a reference to Banjo-Kazooie, but it actually came from me mishearing one of the waitresses call her Broom-Hilda (the cartoon witch). Looking back, a Banjo-Kazooie reference might have actually hit harder.

The real customer wasn’t nearly as bad as I made her out to be. She just had a low tolerance for mistakes, especially from new people. In the article, though, I turned her into a full-blown demon from Hell, complete with lines like “GIVE ME HOT TEA!” and “WHERE IS MY SWEET AND LOW?!” There was originally a picture of a demon, drawn by some artist I found on Google, but our lawyers have advised me to remove it since it violates copyright laws. Going legit is such a drag sometimes.

That whole section spiraled into childish madness, where I’m basically performing an exorcism on a customer and yelling, “The power of Christ compels you, bitch!” There’s no deeper meaning there. I don’t know what I was thinking. If I had to guess, it was probably my attempt at that mid-2000s “random equals funny” style that was everywhere at the time. The earlier line, “POW! SHAZAM! I AM THE GREAT ARCHIBALD!”, is another example of this. We should have called it “ran-dumb”, because that’s exactly what it was.

Reading this now, the part that really stands out is how hard I went after people for being fat. I was sitting at around 250 pounds when I wrote this, eating hoagies, cheesesteaks, and fried food on a daily basis, then washing them down with sodas while still dropping lines like “I didn’t want their fat asses breaking a perfectly good chair.” There’s something impressively stupid about 2007 AJ’s lack of self-awareness. At the same time, there was a certain type of customer we got that matched exactly what I was describing, and that’s probably where that frustration came from. I guess I (incorrectly) figured that, while I may have been fat, at least I wasn’t dumb too.

Even the throwaway jokes had some truth behind them. I wrote that my boss went back to his office to “blast Black Sabbath while whacking off to lesbian porn.” That wasn’t completely made up. He did blast Black Sabbath in his office all the time, and one day I walked in and actually caught him looking at lesbian porn. Thankfully, that’s all he was doing, but still, not exactly something you forget.

Looking back, this article is exactly what you’d expect from a first post on a 2000s rant site. It’s a messy pile of shit written by an angry jerk.

At the same time though, it’s honest in a way that’s hard to fake. There’s no filter or structure, and no real concern about how it comes across. It’s basically a snapshot of where I was at the time, working a menial job that drove me insane and trying to put that insanity into words.

Moe’s Deli ended up getting sold around 2010. Last I heard, it’s owned by Asians now and focuses more on selling beer than anything else. The original owner moved down to Florida. I haven’t seen him since, but I hope he’s doing well.

This article set the tone for my future articles, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. The bluntness, the exaggeration, and the willingness to say things most people wouldn’t say out loud all started here. The difference now is that it’s a little more refined and controlled.

Back then, I ended the article with “I’ve bored you enough now, get lost.” I guess it’s only fitting to end this one a little differently.

Stick around.

…

Eh, it sounded better in my head.

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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