My girlfriend and I had spent three rough months trying to figure out how to date each other. Nothing was working. We were awkward and poor communicators and just generally not a good fit. We were going to a coffee shop to break up but figured we would see too many people we knew.
Break ups are emotional. So we escaped. To Waffle House.
I don't remember what either of us ordered, probably hashbrowns smothered and covered. It's not really my usual haunt. But the coterie of drunk waiters, more-drunk truckers, and government cheese served as the backdrop to one of the toughest conversations of our lives.
At the end of the conversation, we decided to give it one more shot. 7 years later, we're happily married.
I don't care what anyone says...Waffle House is magical.
My girlfriend and I were talking about a similar concept a few minutes ago. Our theory is this:
When you meet someone who's similar to you, or doesn't have much overlap, you tend to get along easily, because it's a frictionless surface. When you meet someone who compliments you, it takes time for the gears to lock into place. You're going to miss the connections a few times, but once they click, they're rock solid.
Any time you initially don't get along with someone, but generally think they're level with you in most ways, it's probably best to give it some time and see how it goes. They might compliment you a lot better than someone who's agreeable immediately.
Sounds like you really got to know each other and made an eyes wide open decision to stay together. To me this sounds a wise way to make that decision.
I love the place (smoother & covered & country, pecan waffles, side sausage, and black coffee). I make it my mission to dine their with every friend I have. But it's definitely a place you have to "get" because the food is objectively bad (except the coffee, which is amazing).
So much of the appeal for me is the nostalgia and atmosphere. My roots are rural and poor, so when I walk into a WH, I feel like I'm surrounded by "my people." I'll sit down at the bar next to an old, chubby man in overalls and a scraggly white beard and be reminded of my neighbor playing banjo on his porch. When I look over at a table with a mom, children, and grandparents, I can easily imagine them as my cousins. I can come in alone, but I'll never feel lonely.
I'd never been to one until a couple years ago, when my girlfriend swore by it and took me there. I've been hooked since. It feels like stepping into a time machine, to when "fast food" wasn't a chemical amalgamation that a soulless corporation was trying to pass off as food. Waffle House has cheap but honest food, and is staffed by people who don't appear to be miserable and don't have to hide in the back with the microwaves. It lacks the cynicism of its peers.
i'll always think of my father, who had simple country tastes from his southern country upbringing. we'd go there all the time when i was little, and my lifelong love of hashbrowns (over homefries and such) was surely born there. it was also the last place i saw him before he passed away.
Same. I took my wife a long time ago when we were dating and for some reason she ordered a pork chop which wasn't great and it really turned her off of waffle house. I've been trying to get her to go back and will emphasize on sticking with the breakfast classics.
Waffle House has been a favorite of mine for as long as I could choose. Of the restaurant chains out there it always seems that you can blend right in, something about the format brings out a lot of good in people.
don't hurt that they are heavily windowed with lots of bright lighting and always open. after midnight in bar heavy areas can be a good time for people watching
Waffle House has an incredibly interesting notation system so that their cooks know what to make, and any cook can go to a new WH and immediately start working: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nickgray/378694469
One of the aspects of Waffle House that's always impressed me is their commitment to be open no matter what happens. This has prompted the informal Waffle House Index: the informal metric used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the effect of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery.
Wouldn't this just mean that they are putting their employees lives in danger more than the average restaurant? It's got to be hard to choose between following a suggested evacuation and losing your job.
>Those incidents prompted the Rev. Bernice King, CEO of the King Center in Atlanta, to call for a boycott of the beloved chain.
Maybe her heart was in the right place but that idea was doomed from the start. Waffle House and Chick-fil-a are 100% boycott proof in the south, me personally I eat at waho 3 times a week- it’s the best most consistent bang for your buck and the service is impeccable even at 4am.
My first trip to a Waffle House was quite memorable. 6am after a redeye into the Atlanta suburbs. Customers ranged from, uh.. "economically disadvantaged" caucasians missing teeth, to a pair of surfer-dude looking white guys who looked like they just drove in from Newport Beach in their 1970s Porsche 914, to a dapper african-american businessman in a brand new Porsche Cayenne SUV.. it was my first time to the south and it was truly a cross-section of society.
When I started grad school I used to go to the same Waffle House every Sunday evening in Durham, NC. After a few weeks the waitress or cook on shift at that time would notice _when I pulled into the parking lot_ and start making my memorized order (All-star: eggs over medium, bacon, grits, dry white toast, regular waffle). They were awesome people. One day I walked in the door and 12 minutes later I was on my way home (not to-go). It's an incredible restaurant.
This post took me back to my school days as well (Raleigh, NC). It was my go-to place whenever an assignment kept me late at the library, whenever I was bored of cooking but could only afford to spend as much and whenever I craved my usual scrambled eggs with cheese, toast and chocolate waffles. Waffle House was always open and always welcoming. Fond memories.
Waffle House is one of my late night haunts; there's not one near my Miami Home, but, there's one near my place in Cincinnati.
I've been in a Waffle House when a Bengal player walks in with his "crew," and he paid for everyone's food (including mine), tipping the wait staff with $100 bills.
I've also been at a Waffle House with a woman who ordered a salad. Suffice to say, that relationship didn't last at all.
Good nights end at Waffle House -- when one of my friends got married, we all went to Waffle House after the reception, bride and groom included.
The idle chit-chat, the consistent menu...Texas Bacon Cheesesteak Melt sandwich with a waffle, well done and a sprite. Open all night, half the customers are always diverse and or drunk or stoned off their ass, and still manages to have fewer fist fights than a Chuck-E-Cheez.
I live in the suburbs of Atlanta, the Waffle House homeland. When we introduced ourselves to the neighbors, their young daughter made sure we knew where the Waffle House was.
I'm not a Southerner, but I've spent a lot of time here. It's still like a foreign land to me sometimes, but mostly I like it. One of the best things about it is Waffle House. It reminds me of small town Midwestern cafes that I grew up with.
Just went to a new (to me) Waffle House yesterday in Haughton, Louisiana. Highly recommend it, very friendly and a Rock Star Grill Operator named Greg who can sling hash with the best of them.
Waffle House is perhaps the only reason I would return to the South.
Having spent many years in the Carolinas, it was a special time with my daughters that we would have “our time” at the Waffle House. My wife from New Jersey never understood and was happy to let us go.
There is just something about the simplicity of the place that just makes me happy. Now that I live Out West nothing comes close - not IHOP or Denny’s or anything.
This is a great article and I'm going to use this to demonstrate to non-rural Americans (i.e., city peeps or just non-americans) what rural America is actually like. Sure, stretches of farmland, cows, corn. But what it really is is a place where you absolutely MUST have a car (or ATV or horse or something) or the only food you're eating is the food you're growing, and the best restaurant in town may very well be the Waffle House.
I grew up in rural America and then by I guess trick of genetics grew a personality that needed to get out, and so now I've lived in both that world and the Big City America world, and the Big City Asia world and the Big City Europe world. Things you may take for granted (and if you've lived/know rural America, don't take this as me teaching something you know, this is for those that literally don't know) are things like access to public transportation or the ability to walk to the grocery store or some restaurant, or hospital. Like, you might gash yourself on a rusty bit of farm equipment and the nearest hospital is literally an hour drive away - and they might not be equipped to handle some of the weirder shit you can do to your body, so now you gotta head to the state's Big City to get treatment. Things like that create a different mindset, around government, around healthcare, around self-sufficiency.
You might have your kids bus an hour each way to school. There's little choice then. If your kid gets bullied, if the teachers there are racists, whatever, there's not much you can do about it, and what are you gonna do, attend a PTA meeting when it's an hours' drive away?
A lot of the differences out there boil down to those two things - limited choice, high self-sufficiency. Don't be surprised at the non-ironic bootstrap language coming from red state americans - it's the reality for many of them. The benefits that we enjoy in a city might not even exist for them out there - the library, the busses, whatever. Or if they exist they're very very far away. Not many restaurants to choose from, not many doctors. Not many different kinds of jobs - if you're within driving distance of Nashville there's like twenty different cafes or grocery stores you can work at as a 16 year old trying to save for college. If you're not near any Big Cities, well, maybe you can score a job at the gas station? If there's any left?
I'm wandering and meandering here, apologies for making this post a struggle - I'm open to any thoughts people might have on this, particularly from others that get where I'm coming from, that have lived the rural America life. I never experienced it as an employed adult (other than as a visitor to home) so there is a gap in my knowledge there.
> Don't be surprised at the non-ironic bootstrap language coming from red state americans - it's the reality for many of them.
The ten states where federal aid makes up the highest percentage of the state budget are: Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, Arizona, Kentucky, Montana, Tennessee, Wyoming, Alaska, Missouri
The ten states the highest percentage of food stamp recipients are: Mississippi, Oregon, Tennessee, New Mexico, Louisiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina
I still think Joseph Heller had that kind of ideology pegged best:
> He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. [...] Major Major's father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all.
Lately I've had an interest in documentary-style photography, particularly collections with themes such as this. The wonderful BBC feature "The Genius of Photography" helped drive this interest in me.
I feel like I have a strong appreciation for these Waffle House photos that I would not have had a month ago. This is really great.
You might like this, although in Dutch so translate where necessary. It is the website for a recently released book called "Chin. Ind. Spec. Rest." which is short for (translated) Chinese Indonesian Specialty Restaurant. A type of restaurant only found in the Netherlands combining neither Chinese nor proper Indonesian food but which has been a staple for many dutch people for a generation or two.
I have eaten or got take out from a place like this many times in my youth. Think MSG laden heaps of cheap food trying to resemble both Chinese and Indonesian cuisine but with lots of dishes that are neither. Even though I never really eat there anymore, every once in a while my family will still get take out from such a place and even though I have a strong dislike for the food over the years, there is a certain feeling these places invoke which is reminiscent of my youth.
The idea of eating at a bunch of Waffle Houses in order to make social commentary on the South and America sounds like an outlandish thesis topic for that dude who's been getting his PhD for 12 years now. So naturally I loved this.
Seems like the perfect setup for a rom-com. Two star-crossed lovers, gazing upon each other every day from their respective Waffle Houses (Waffle Hice?).
I've driven across the country several times, and across great distances in the South many times. Cracker Barrel is for dinner. But Waffle House is for breakfast. And it's enough breakfast to keep you going behind the wheel all day.
There'll be a couple of middle-aged white guys like myself in there. But the rest of the customers - everything from truckers, to young people there after an all-night binge, to a person or two who looks like they're hitch-hiking to their next temporary destination.
I've been in the back of too many Cracker Barrels to ever eat at one again. A lot of my peers who ended up working at McDonalds or other restaurants say the same thing. But I will always eat at Waffle House. I've worked in several and it's nearly impossible to hide dirt. Everything is out in the open.
It's funny: Reading this thread, I now know what people who didn't grow up with / don't like Whataburger must feel. I'm Texan, born and raised, and grew up around three Waffle House restaurants. My hometown, that grew from a wide spot on the US highway to a very wide spot on the Interstate, had two of them, one at each of the two (then) major exits.
Nobody I knew ate there on a regular basis. They never got mentioned at school or work or church. Me and my family ate there maybe three times I can remember and all three times it was an OK experience but we'd rather go to Grandy's or just the Golden Corral breakfast bar.
After the state redid the Interstate in such a way as to move those major exits to other locations, thus rendering the Houses of Waffle more easily accessible from the city streets but not an immediate off-the-highway-and-back-on situation, they both closed within two months of each other, a year after the change. In an amusing twist, one of those parcels is now home to a Whataburger and I regularly see its parking lot full. I'll never not go to a Whataburger and if by some miracle someone builds one inside the city limits of Seattle, I will move next door and live there until my last day no matter the cost. But I've never seen the attraction of Waffle House.
That makes sense to me. I had the exact opposite experience. Growing up in Florida, everyone went to waffle houses on the weekends, and the only whataburger closed down and turned into some other chain restaurant. After living in Texas for a few years, the locals are fiercely loyal to whataburger, but I still don't share the enthusiasm. I assume it's more about being a part of your personal identity and childhood memories than it is really about food quality.
I worked at one of the first Waffle Houses north of the Mason Dixon line back in my first year of college (soooo, I guess that was the year 2000).
It was a really great time. The hours were rough. Sometimes I worked two shifts back to back. Sometimes I had to drive an hour away to fill in at another store. It was an all-cash operation at the time. But even though there were one or two people I didn't get along with, it was still ok. Certainly not like some of the back-stabbing bullshit I've since had to put up with at almost all of my software development jobs after getting my degree.
We saw some crazy shit. We did some crazy shit. That was during the "post-party rush". Bars in the area close at 2am, so we'd get a rush of drunk people then, but they were all cool. We'd get another rush of mostly tweekers at 4am, and that's when the crazy shit happened. One night, a dude walked in completely naked. I held him off with a mop for the whole 2 minutes it took for the cops who just left to get the call and come back. One morning, right in the middle of Sunday rush, a very large woman exploded fecal matter all over the bathroom. I was the most recent person to be hired, so it was my job to clean it up. I made myself a full body suit out of plastic wrap and some drinking straws for air holes, dragged the parking-lot-cleaning hose in from outside and blasted everything down.
Those are the only "bad" things I remember, though I'm sure more happened. I remember the good things, mostly. Singing along with everyone in the shop, customers and employees alike, to "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the jukebox. The dude who trolled us all by pumping $20 of quarters in the jukebox to play nothing but "Earl's Gotta Die", which we got to stop by unplugging the machine, but it forever screwed up the randomizer, so that was the only song that would play, leading us to take a communal collection of quarters to play songs throughout the day to avoid it. Getting the underside of my car doors "buttered" by my best-friend coworker. Discussing C++ hacks with another. Coming up with crazy, off-book recipes we'd serve to the regulars. Making the grill shine for the next guy. Flipping eggs one handed, over the shoulder, back into the pan behind my back. Getting "hazed" by being made to work a Sunday morning rush on my own for an hour (usually takes at least 3 cooks, if not 4). Which was great training for the time a tour bus of old folks rolled in during the last half-hour of my shift, when I had just broken down the grill to clean it. The time the entire town ran out of $5 bills and I got sent on a wild goose chase to track some down.
I really miss "Mom" and "Bubba" and "Peanut" and "Matt".
I was 16 or 17 and pretty naive to some of the more "adult" stuff going on. I'm (now) pretty sure one of the waitresses was a raging cokehead, and I'm pretty sure one of the managers was sleeping with her.
But yeah, once I saw what the article was about, I knew exactly what it was talking about. We had one of the best views of sunrise. Those overnight shifts were hard, sleep-wise, but they were also pretty fun. And everybody had to do it, at some point. Us young guys knew we were working the late shift because the moms had kids to take care of, not because our managers were being dicks. And if a customer was a dick to a waitress, we'd didn't catch hell from management for telling the him to get out. I've had corporate managers tell me it's "not my place" to call out sexual harassment when I see it in the workplace. I couldn't keep it up because the pay was obviously not anywhere near what I make as a software developer, but also because the floor soap was caustic to my feet and cutting the tomatoes was giving me terrible rashes on my hands (I have a mild allergy to acidic foods). But sometimes, I really wonder if the treatment likely the vast majority of us have received in the corporate environment is really worth it.
There's a waffle house location in Alamogordo new mexico that serves green sauce on the chicken fried steak and it's un fucking believable how good it is.
[+] [-] iambateman|7 years ago|reply
My girlfriend and I had spent three rough months trying to figure out how to date each other. Nothing was working. We were awkward and poor communicators and just generally not a good fit. We were going to a coffee shop to break up but figured we would see too many people we knew.
Break ups are emotional. So we escaped. To Waffle House.
I don't remember what either of us ordered, probably hashbrowns smothered and covered. It's not really my usual haunt. But the coterie of drunk waiters, more-drunk truckers, and government cheese served as the backdrop to one of the toughest conversations of our lives.
At the end of the conversation, we decided to give it one more shot. 7 years later, we're happily married.
I don't care what anyone says...Waffle House is magical.
[+] [-] Sileni|7 years ago|reply
When you meet someone who's similar to you, or doesn't have much overlap, you tend to get along easily, because it's a frictionless surface. When you meet someone who compliments you, it takes time for the gears to lock into place. You're going to miss the connections a few times, but once they click, they're rock solid.
Any time you initially don't get along with someone, but generally think they're level with you in most ways, it's probably best to give it some time and see how it goes. They might compliment you a lot better than someone who's agreeable immediately.
[+] [-] js2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anitil|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dharmon|7 years ago|reply
She said, "I think I remember the swill,
And as I recall, I think we both kinda liked it."
And I said, "Well that's the one thing we've got."
[+] [-] js2|7 years ago|reply
But I don’t care, Anthony Bourdain got it:
https://youtu.be/bct8stbZafI
(As long as I live, I’ll think of him every time I see a Waffle House.)
[+] [-] mywittyname|7 years ago|reply
So much of the appeal for me is the nostalgia and atmosphere. My roots are rural and poor, so when I walk into a WH, I feel like I'm surrounded by "my people." I'll sit down at the bar next to an old, chubby man in overalls and a scraggly white beard and be reminded of my neighbor playing banjo on his porch. When I look over at a table with a mom, children, and grandparents, I can easily imagine them as my cousins. I can come in alone, but I'll never feel lonely.
[+] [-] _bxg1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clairity|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fokinsean|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|7 years ago|reply
don't hurt that they are heavily windowed with lots of bright lighting and always open. after midnight in bar heavy areas can be a good time for people watching
[+] [-] brightball|7 years ago|reply
I spent so many nights in college at a Waffle House after midnight I couldn't attempt to count it if I had too. Lots of great memories in that place.
[+] [-] criddell|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subpixel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OrgNet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyleblarson|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] athenot|7 years ago|reply
https://www.fema.gov/blog/2011-07-07/news-day-what-do-waffle...
[+] [-] et15|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creaghpatr|7 years ago|reply
Maybe her heart was in the right place but that idea was doomed from the start. Waffle House and Chick-fil-a are 100% boycott proof in the south, me personally I eat at waho 3 times a week- it’s the best most consistent bang for your buck and the service is impeccable even at 4am.
[+] [-] peterwwillis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rconti|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddavis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] applesvsoranges|7 years ago|reply
This fun thing happened there as well : https://abcnews.go.com/US/north-carolina-state-university-st...
[+] [-] imroot|7 years ago|reply
I've been in a Waffle House when a Bengal player walks in with his "crew," and he paid for everyone's food (including mine), tipping the wait staff with $100 bills.
I've also been at a Waffle House with a woman who ordered a salad. Suffice to say, that relationship didn't last at all.
Good nights end at Waffle House -- when one of my friends got married, we all went to Waffle House after the reception, bride and groom included.
The idle chit-chat, the consistent menu...Texas Bacon Cheesesteak Melt sandwich with a waffle, well done and a sprite. Open all night, half the customers are always diverse and or drunk or stoned off their ass, and still manages to have fewer fist fights than a Chuck-E-Cheez.
[+] [-] madcaptenor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quantumhobbit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sverige|7 years ago|reply
Just went to a new (to me) Waffle House yesterday in Haughton, Louisiana. Highly recommend it, very friendly and a Rock Star Grill Operator named Greg who can sling hash with the best of them.
[+] [-] chasedehan|7 years ago|reply
Having spent many years in the Carolinas, it was a special time with my daughters that we would have “our time” at the Waffle House. My wife from New Jersey never understood and was happy to let us go.
There is just something about the simplicity of the place that just makes me happy. Now that I live Out West nothing comes close - not IHOP or Denny’s or anything.
[+] [-] jtmcmc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] komali2|7 years ago|reply
I grew up in rural America and then by I guess trick of genetics grew a personality that needed to get out, and so now I've lived in both that world and the Big City America world, and the Big City Asia world and the Big City Europe world. Things you may take for granted (and if you've lived/know rural America, don't take this as me teaching something you know, this is for those that literally don't know) are things like access to public transportation or the ability to walk to the grocery store or some restaurant, or hospital. Like, you might gash yourself on a rusty bit of farm equipment and the nearest hospital is literally an hour drive away - and they might not be equipped to handle some of the weirder shit you can do to your body, so now you gotta head to the state's Big City to get treatment. Things like that create a different mindset, around government, around healthcare, around self-sufficiency.
You might have your kids bus an hour each way to school. There's little choice then. If your kid gets bullied, if the teachers there are racists, whatever, there's not much you can do about it, and what are you gonna do, attend a PTA meeting when it's an hours' drive away?
A lot of the differences out there boil down to those two things - limited choice, high self-sufficiency. Don't be surprised at the non-ironic bootstrap language coming from red state americans - it's the reality for many of them. The benefits that we enjoy in a city might not even exist for them out there - the library, the busses, whatever. Or if they exist they're very very far away. Not many restaurants to choose from, not many doctors. Not many different kinds of jobs - if you're within driving distance of Nashville there's like twenty different cafes or grocery stores you can work at as a 16 year old trying to save for college. If you're not near any Big Cities, well, maybe you can score a job at the gas station? If there's any left?
I'm wandering and meandering here, apologies for making this post a struggle - I'm open to any thoughts people might have on this, particularly from others that get where I'm coming from, that have lived the rural America life. I never experienced it as an employed adult (other than as a visitor to home) so there is a gap in my knowledge there.
[+] [-] microtherion|7 years ago|reply
The ten states where federal aid makes up the highest percentage of the state budget are: Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, Arizona, Kentucky, Montana, Tennessee, Wyoming, Alaska, Missouri
https://taxfoundation.org/federal-aid-reliance-rankings/
The ten states the highest percentage of food stamp recipients are: Mississippi, Oregon, Tennessee, New Mexico, Louisiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/05/S...
I still think Joseph Heller had that kind of ideology pegged best:
> He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. [...] Major Major's father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all.
[+] [-] 2bitencryption|7 years ago|reply
I feel like I have a strong appreciation for these Waffle House photos that I would not have had a month ago. This is really great.
[+] [-] mvdwoord|7 years ago|reply
I have eaten or got take out from a place like this many times in my youth. Think MSG laden heaps of cheap food trying to resemble both Chinese and Indonesian cuisine but with lots of dishes that are neither. Even though I never really eat there anymore, every once in a while my family will still get take out from such a place and even though I have a strong dislike for the food over the years, there is a certain feeling these places invoke which is reminiscent of my youth.
https://www.chinindspecrest.nl/impressie
[+] [-] SwagosaurusFlex|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 49531|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowapple|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] chiph|7 years ago|reply
There'll be a couple of middle-aged white guys like myself in there. But the rest of the customers - everything from truckers, to young people there after an all-night binge, to a person or two who looks like they're hitch-hiking to their next temporary destination.
[+] [-] moron4hire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techsupporter|7 years ago|reply
Nobody I knew ate there on a regular basis. They never got mentioned at school or work or church. Me and my family ate there maybe three times I can remember and all three times it was an OK experience but we'd rather go to Grandy's or just the Golden Corral breakfast bar.
After the state redid the Interstate in such a way as to move those major exits to other locations, thus rendering the Houses of Waffle more easily accessible from the city streets but not an immediate off-the-highway-and-back-on situation, they both closed within two months of each other, a year after the change. In an amusing twist, one of those parcels is now home to a Whataburger and I regularly see its parking lot full. I'll never not go to a Whataburger and if by some miracle someone builds one inside the city limits of Seattle, I will move next door and live there until my last day no matter the cost. But I've never seen the attraction of Waffle House.
[+] [-] fangsout|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|7 years ago|reply
It was a really great time. The hours were rough. Sometimes I worked two shifts back to back. Sometimes I had to drive an hour away to fill in at another store. It was an all-cash operation at the time. But even though there were one or two people I didn't get along with, it was still ok. Certainly not like some of the back-stabbing bullshit I've since had to put up with at almost all of my software development jobs after getting my degree.
We saw some crazy shit. We did some crazy shit. That was during the "post-party rush". Bars in the area close at 2am, so we'd get a rush of drunk people then, but they were all cool. We'd get another rush of mostly tweekers at 4am, and that's when the crazy shit happened. One night, a dude walked in completely naked. I held him off with a mop for the whole 2 minutes it took for the cops who just left to get the call and come back. One morning, right in the middle of Sunday rush, a very large woman exploded fecal matter all over the bathroom. I was the most recent person to be hired, so it was my job to clean it up. I made myself a full body suit out of plastic wrap and some drinking straws for air holes, dragged the parking-lot-cleaning hose in from outside and blasted everything down.
Those are the only "bad" things I remember, though I'm sure more happened. I remember the good things, mostly. Singing along with everyone in the shop, customers and employees alike, to "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the jukebox. The dude who trolled us all by pumping $20 of quarters in the jukebox to play nothing but "Earl's Gotta Die", which we got to stop by unplugging the machine, but it forever screwed up the randomizer, so that was the only song that would play, leading us to take a communal collection of quarters to play songs throughout the day to avoid it. Getting the underside of my car doors "buttered" by my best-friend coworker. Discussing C++ hacks with another. Coming up with crazy, off-book recipes we'd serve to the regulars. Making the grill shine for the next guy. Flipping eggs one handed, over the shoulder, back into the pan behind my back. Getting "hazed" by being made to work a Sunday morning rush on my own for an hour (usually takes at least 3 cooks, if not 4). Which was great training for the time a tour bus of old folks rolled in during the last half-hour of my shift, when I had just broken down the grill to clean it. The time the entire town ran out of $5 bills and I got sent on a wild goose chase to track some down.
I really miss "Mom" and "Bubba" and "Peanut" and "Matt".
I was 16 or 17 and pretty naive to some of the more "adult" stuff going on. I'm (now) pretty sure one of the waitresses was a raging cokehead, and I'm pretty sure one of the managers was sleeping with her.
But yeah, once I saw what the article was about, I knew exactly what it was talking about. We had one of the best views of sunrise. Those overnight shifts were hard, sleep-wise, but they were also pretty fun. And everybody had to do it, at some point. Us young guys knew we were working the late shift because the moms had kids to take care of, not because our managers were being dicks. And if a customer was a dick to a waitress, we'd didn't catch hell from management for telling the him to get out. I've had corporate managers tell me it's "not my place" to call out sexual harassment when I see it in the workplace. I couldn't keep it up because the pay was obviously not anywhere near what I make as a software developer, but also because the floor soap was caustic to my feet and cutting the tomatoes was giving me terrible rashes on my hands (I have a mild allergy to acidic foods). But sometimes, I really wonder if the treatment likely the vast majority of us have received in the corporate environment is really worth it.
(BTW: scattered, smothered, covered)
[+] [-] stefanmichael|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitxbitxbitcoin|7 years ago|reply