Everyone has had a sub-par experience in a restaurant at one time or another; maybe your order came out wrong, the food tasted unpleasant or the cleanliness of the dining room was questionable. But what is it like being a food service worker in those situations? Do those situations constitute the dehumanizing of the person serving you?

Abbigail Goetze-Thompson: We have served our time in restaurants and would like to offer a glimpse into what it’s like to work with the general public when they are hungry and impatient.

I recently started working at the Chipotle on Hillsborough, which is actually the first job I’ve ever worked. My parents have always urged me not to go into the food service industry for my first work experience, having worked a similar job themselves. I always thought to myself it couldn’t be as bad as they made it out to be. I picked Chipotle because the work seemed like it wasn’t too taxing, and the location was very convenient.

I was right about the work being fairly easy; I make bowls. It isn’t rocket science. The work itself was never the issue. The issue very quickly became the way I get treated by the people in front of the glass.

I get that people are constantly stressed; especially if they are students, which most of them are, and I’m no exception. I’m a student myself, which is another full-time job of mine. I understand the feeling.

What I don’t understand is taking the stress out on somebody else, no matter how hungry or how tired you are. It feels as if the people who step up to the glass see me as some bot. Somebody whose only purpose is to make their food. This is far from the truth.

I often get very excited when somebody approaches me and asks how I’m doing, or thanks me for making their bowl. It feels good because it doesn’t happen very often. I think manners are a very crucial concept that has tended to be forgotten over time. We sort of lost this courtesy for one another, and it hurts.

I’m not asking for consistent good moods or big smiles. I just think many of us tend to underestimate how far a good attitude can go when interacting with someone else.

AJ Toler: Another issue is that female food service workers specifically tend to be treated like objects by male patrons. The amount of times a man has asked me for my phone number while I worked at Smithfield’s Chicken ‘n Bar-B-Q is too large to count, and what’s even more unsettling is that most of them were probably twice my age.

I once had an elderly man ask me out on a date, and when I told him I was only 16, he responded by saying he could be 16 for me. I was at a loss for words.

I would also like to note that being disrespected by customers is not exclusive to quick-service restaurants. My dad is the retired chef-owner of Bloomsbury Bistro and spent well over half of his life working in fine-dining restaurants. I also worked for him during the pandemic as a prep-cook and hostess.

Obviously patrons are paying more in a fine-dining setting, so they sometimes have more emotional reactions whenever things don’t go as expected.

For example, one of my dad’s customers once threw a piece of tuna against the wall because it wasn’t cooked to their liking. In their defense, this was during the ‘90s and before eating raw fish was in vogue, but I think it was a pretty dramatic reaction nonetheless.

All this to say that food service workers are human too; we have our own issues and emotions.

Putting on that uniform doesn’t relieve us of our own feelings or problems. It doesn’t make us numb to the treatment we receive.

According to the National Restaurant Association, an estimated 27% of restaurant employees are also students. The odds of the next person serving your food being a student are more than one in four, so maybe consider the challenges of balancing school with a career before taking out your own frustrations on a food service worker.

Trust and believe that we know what being hangry feels like. It sucks. But so does getting treated poorly by someone you don’t know over a reason that is never that serious.