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Archive for June, 2010

How you think affects how organized you are- and how organized you will become. Try reprogramming yourself for once in a while for you to become more organized by meditating for a few minutes dailt, taking time for your self to think just for a while. While you think for a while try thinking of positive things like, thinking that you are too smart to create a mess. There fore, I put things where they belong immediately after using them. Think that you are too smart to let kids make a mess. And therefore you spend time and energy to train them to keep things orderly and organized. A simple thing that when you taught them they will always do it without your command and they will be practising it until it become the way they move. Think that you are too smart to do everything myself. Therefore I create a team of family, friends and hired help to call on when I need assistance.

Try thinking these things and let see what would you feel about it.

Work is what one should do and must do regularly, grimly and purposely. Man is judged by his work and what he must do deserve his leisure and play. Work is serious adult business that enables one to get ahead and make a contribution to society. Work is viewed as a means of attaining whatever one desires and it is best that one has a great achievement motivation.

Work is a fundamental dimension of human existence. It is a physical or an intellectual effort directed towards a desired end.

Play is different. It is fun, an outlet from work, without serious purpose except to make us happier, more efficient, more relaxed and longer lasting working human machines.

It is the man equipped with proper skills and positive attitude towards work and vaues that can help recover a tattered economy and transform a nation. There is something though that puzzles the mind- f work is indispensable to man and the worker is inseparable to business and industry why is the world having problems with workers and about work. Perhaps we could gain greater insight into the problem of work by looking at the different view on work. A man’ view on work shapes his attitudes and influences his behavior. Attitudes are therefore, deemed an important variable as well as an indicator of behavior in nearly all walks of life- religious, governmental, administrative, economic, commercial, industrial and many more.

Few would deny that attitudes are one of the major influences on behavior. Attitudes are formed in the interst of one’s goal and objectives. Therefore a brief review of attitude is a good prelude to the study of work.

The interview for the day is completed; I turn off the tape recorder and gather up my notes. My mother rearranges a few things— paper napkins, salt and pepper shakers, some letters_—on the cluttered table. “You know,” she muses, folding the napkins, “you learn a lot as a waitress. You work like hell. But you learn a lot.” There’s a small television set to the side, by the wall, propped up for her by my stepfather. She reaches over and turns it on, clicking through the channels: a rerun of The Beverly Hillbillies, a basketball game (“blah”), a base-thumping Ironman competition (“Boy, I couldn’t do that”), a PBS documentary on the building of some huge suspension bridge. Is it the Brooklyn Bridge She stops at this. There are historical photographs of workers—excavating, welding, a remarkable shot of four men sitting in a net of cables high in the air. The men look southern European, possibly Greek or Italian, like so many of the men in the old photographs I have of Altoona. “This is interesting,” she says, “they should show more things like this.” She keeps watching, and we talk over the images about work and those immigrants of my grandfather’s generation.
Her work in the restaurant business—and physical work in general—meant many things to my mother, and even though she is now infirm, work continues to shape her memory and desire, influence her values and identity.
Many of our depictions of physical and service work—popular accounts but more than a few scholarly treatments as well—tend toward the one-dimensional. Work is seen as ennobling or dehumanizing; it is the occasion for opportunity or exploitation; it functions as an arena for identity development or class consciousness. Work is considered in terms of organizational structure or production systems; or of statistical indicators of occupational and employment trends. To be sure, each focus can have its analytical benefit. But one of the things the writing of this book has made dear to me is how difficult it is—given our standard “story lines” for work and the constraints of our disciplinary lenses—to capture the complex meaning work has in the lives of people like Rose Emily Rose. Let me try to tease out the layers of significance restaurant work had for her. They are interrelated, at times contradictory, of a piece in her experience of waitressing.
Through waitressing, my mother generated income, supported a family, kept poverty at bay. The income was low and variable, but, as she saw it, given her limited education and her early work history; she couldn’t make better money elsewhere. Also, her income was somewhat under her control: by the hours she was willing to work and the effort she put forth, she could increase her tips.
Though economically dependent on the generosity of others, she had developed, and could continue to develop, the physical, mental, and social skills to influence that generosity;
My mother’s work was physically punishing, particularly over the long haul. She pushed herself to exhaustion; her feet were a wreck; her legs increasingly varicose; her fingers and spine, in later years, arthritic.
The work required that she tolerate rude behavior and insult, smile when hurt or angry; Though she did not see herself as aservant, she was economically beholden to others, and, in some ways—particularly in public display—had to be emotionally subservient. Yet, although she certainly could feel the sting of insult, my mother also saw “meanness” and “ignorance” as part of the work, and that provided for her a degree of emotional distance. The rude or demanding customer could be observed, interpreted, described to peers, quietly cursed—and could be manipulated to financial advantage. Explaining how she would be nice to a troublesome customer, she adds: “And, then, what happens is he becomes your customer! Even though there are other tables that are empty; he’ll wait for your booth.”
Work for my mother was a highly individualistic enterprise, to be coveted and protected. She would coordinate effort in the moment with busboys and waitresses in adjoining sections. And she made several good friends at work; they would visit our house and provided a sympathetic ear for restaurant complaints. But much of my mother’s interaction with other waitresses—both by my recollection and by her interviews—was competitive. Though she considered Norm’s “a good restaurant,” I can’t recall any expression of attachment to the company; and though much of the time she worked in Los Angeles was a period of union activity, my mother was barely involved in her local. I realize now how isolated she must have felt: thousands of miles from family; responsible for a
sick husband and a child; vigilant for incursions, even treachery, from coworkers; not connected to a union or to any civic, social, or church group. And, given her coming-of-age in the Depression and the later waning of the Pennsylvania Railroad, she was always worried about the security of her employment. My mother possessed a strong, if desperate, sense of self-reliance and an in-her- bones belief in the value of hard work that mixed inextricably with a fear that work would disappear.

The social dynamics of the service encounter affect the tip, a critical economic consideration, given that the base pay in most restaurants is terribly low. The wage structure forces a reliance on gratuity, so the successful waitress soon learns how to play the dynamics to maximize her income. There is actually a fair-sized social-psychological literature on the factors that influence tipping. The shrewd waitress, for example, suggests items—appetizers, desserts, more drinks—that will increase the bill, and thus the size of her potential tip. She can also increase her tip by smiling, by touching the customer on the hand or shoulder, or by squatting or kneeling to get closer to eye level. This literature parses out the social skills and gestures learned in the context of restaurant work, the devices that can increase the amount of money customers leave on the table.
The reward is an economic one, but it is also one fraught with symbolism—at the least, a reminder of servant status—so the
reward structure indudes emotional factors as well. Customers, Lin Rolens observes, “tip in every spirit imaginable,” from a display of status, to an expression of gratitude, to an overture of friendship, to a sexualized gesture. My mother and the waitresses I interviewed and read about express a wide range of feeling about tipping. There’s eager anticipation (“You’re thinking, ‘Oh boy, I’m gonna hurry up and clear that table off… because that’s a good tipper’“) and satisfaction (“It’s fun to have a good night. . . all that cash in your pocket . . . it’s a very immediate reward”). There’s anger: “Something that really pisses me off is when people stiff the waitress because something happened in the kitthen.” And there’s a sense of injustice leading to action. Anthropologist Greta Pauff Paules writes of a waitress who “followed two male customers out of a restaurant calling, ‘Excuse me! You forgot this!’ and holding up the coins they had left as a tip.”
Though this field of customer-waitress emotion is shaped by the historical residue of servitude and by stereotyped gender roles, the waitress attempts to control it to her economic and emotional advantage. She does this by the way she defines the situation, by her manipulation of role and routine (“[P]lay the people and the tips will follow,” says one waitress interviewed by Lin Rolens), and by judgments that enable her to attribute a low tip to a customer’s personal situation, character, or ignorance. These judgments and attributions are part of the restaurant’s folk wisdom, played out continually in the talk among waitresses that customers don’t hear.
The service encounter provides the tips that enable the waitress to make a living, but in concert with the financial need, other needs of hers, depending on the waitress, can be met as well. Some waitresses gain satisfaction from contributing to a customer’s enjoyment: “You supply nurturing and sustenance, the things that make life pleasurable.” Some respond to the hustle and stimulation of a
busy restaurant, the sense of being in the middle of things. (This was a big one for my mother, and its loss has been difficult for her.) Some like the attention (“the spotlight’s on you”) and the safe flirtation. Some comment on the pleasure of the brief human interaction: “Though we’ll never get to know each other, there’s a really nice feeling that goes back and forth.” Some waitresses comment on the feeling of independence the job affords; anthropologist Paules characterizes the waitress as a private entrepreneur. And some gain satisfaction from the display of their skill (“I get to show off my memory”) and, as we saw, gain a feeling of competence by performing the job well.
Though perhaps obvious, it is worth stating that this array of feeling—like the cognitive processes detailed earlier—is situated in the restaurant; the various feelings are legitimized and shaped by the waitress-customer association. My mother developed a number of friendly relations with her regular clientele. But when I asked her to perform a thought experiment and imagine how those relationships might have changed if tipping were outlawed, she gave sharp expression to the situational nature of the restaurant friendship. “If you know they’re gonna tip you, well, then you talk about your flowers, or you have a son, or you have a daughter, or whatever. But if you know they’re not gonna tip, you’d be disinterested.” My mother got to know some of her regulars pretty well, would talk about their problems at home, worry over them, yet, at heart, the connection to their lives was restaurant-based, for everyone involved.
Waitress-customer interaction, then, is shaped by history and gender. it involves a good deal of economically motivated emotion management and interpersonal manipulation, all centered around the tip, which, itself, is laden with symbolism and feeling. The waitress-customer encounter also provides the occasion for the
fulfillment of other needs that are not directly economic, though that fulfillment is embedded in an economic context and defined and bounded by life in the restaurant.
As I talk to my mother and to other waitresses, I’m struck by the way cognitive processes and emotional dynamics are interwoven. Memory; for example, draws on emotional material to aid in storage and recall. Customs of service and social display incorporate the cognitive, certainly in one’s reading of people, one’s social savvy and one’s folk knowledge of the ways of the restaurant, but also in the very particulars of routine that create the experience of service. One waitress comments on her ability to recall little details about her regulars’ typical orders—that they don’t like pepper or they like extra horseradish_and, as well, comments on her vigilance: “Attention to detail . -. keeping water glasses full, keeping extra stuff off the table, just the little things that make it a more pleasant sensory experience … that’s why I like it so much that I’m a contributing factor in somebody having a good meal.” Memory, attention, the creation of service, and a waitress’s persorial satisfaction are all of a piece in the busy restaurant.

Remembering orders, being vigilante and regulating the flow of work all play out in an emotional field. “Eating is the most intimate act,” writes Lin Rolens, “we are encouraged to perform in public.” And Dorothy Sue Cobble, who has studied waitress unions, observes that waitresses “are responding to hungers of many kinds.” This emotional field has economic consequences. The very meaning of service is defined within it. To understand and appreciate more fully the thought behind waitressing, therefore, we need to ponder the many layers of what “service” means in the waitress- customer encounter.
To begin with, this encounter calls forth historically shaped conventions for the serving of food that are associated with the house servant. In Frances Donovan’s 1920 account of waitressing, The Woman Who Waits, published during the first stage of the feminization of food service, there is explicit treatment of the association of maid and waitress—and of the waitress’s desire to distinguish her work from that of a housemaid. But the association remained (my mother’s uniforms, down to the modified caps, resembled stereotyped maid’s apparel) and is reflected in a number of routines of service: from modes of address, to the sequence of questions about the order, to customs for serving and clearing food. (“[Djishes are placed on the table without noise,” notes a 1932 educational tract on waitressing, “. .. the hand must be trained to slip dishes into place very close to the table rather than bring them down directly from a height.”) Conventions and symbols change over time, and vary by the type of restaurant, but waitressing continues to involve the acquisition of customs of service—and one’s accommodation
to them. The residue of the servant’s role rankles the women I spoke with, and they resist it in a number of ways: from covert criticism and ridicule of haughty behavior (my mother’s typical response) to direct rebuke and declaration of status, letting customers know when they’ve crossed the line. One means by which the waitress expresses agency is through her use of skill and strategy to regulate the flow of work. “The customer has the illusion that they’re in charge,” observes one of the waitresses I interviewed, “but they’re not.” It’s the waitress who must “get command of her tables,” who is “the commander in chief of her section.” This waitress still performs the customs of service, but within routines of practice that she controls.
The encounter between customer and waitress potentially gives rise to a further range of emotions and social scripts, in addition to that of server and served. On any given shift, a stream of customers enters with needs that vary from the physiological—and the emotions that attend hunger—to the desire for public intimacy. And the waitress, depending on the type of restaurant, her reading of the situation, and her own history and motives, may fulfill, modulate, or limit those needs and desires. There has been a fair amount of sociological study of the emotional dimension of waitressing and similar occupations, and this research tends toward two broad-scale findings.
The first is that providing service requires “emotion management” or what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has termed “emotional labor.” Regardless of what the waitress actually feels, the interaction with the customer requires that she display emotion that is dictated by the social and economic demands of the restaurant. My mother illustrates such emotional labor through her account of a churlish regular, a man who was always sending his steak back to the cook: “You’ve got to make an effort to try and please him, even though you can just kill him.” Generalizing to all
difficult customers, she advises: “Just try the best you can to be nice to them. Even if they’re rude to you, you still smile and just go on, because that’s your living.”
The second finding is that the roles afforded to the waitress in her encounter with the customer play out within stereotypic gender scripts: the waitress becomes servant, mother, daughter, friend, or sexual object. The house uniform and policy, customs of service, and other restaurant traditions contribute to this construction of gender-in-the-moment as do broader expectations from the culture at large. Though I surely wouldn’t have understood her behavior in these terms, I recall the sense I had watching my mother work that she smiled and laughed more than when at home, a quick, not-quite-true laugh, flirtatious, with a touch on the arm or shoulder, a focused vivacity. As she summed it all up while we were sitting at her table, “You’ve got to be damned good, damned fast, and you’ve got to make people like you.”