I might need to speed along my farm chronicles because I think people from back home are starting to question what I am doing with my life. Note, I am using the internet and still have all of my body parts, so I’d say it’s going swimmingly.

When it dawned on Dora and I that we weren’t going to get paid, our next plan of action was to ditch Eddie’s farm as soon as possible. We spent our punishment day mapping out options, but there didn’t seem to be any. Dora’s plan was to stop working and call Eddie every night until he paid her. It wasn’t so straightforward for me. While Dora lived in a sharehouse owned by an Australian, I was living in Eddie’s sharehouse, with Eddie. I couldn’t exactly quit and hang around until I ‘figured things out,’ demanding money from him when we ran into each other in the kitchen. Although I wasn’t receiving pay for my farm work, it was at least putting a roof over my head since Eddie deducted rent from pay, whenever he did decide to pay people.

I made a few phone calls in response to advertisements posted around town looking for vine trimming/rolling/pruning workers. All of the conversations would go like this:

(Me): “Hi, I just saw your ad looking for workers. I am definitely interested. Could I have more information?”

(Asian or Indian man): “Yes, good, good, we need people. Are you in Robinvale?”

“Yes, I am already here.”

“Good, good we need people right away. Where are you from?”

“America.”

“Sorry, I am in the middle of something. Can I give you a call back?”

…And I would never hear from them again. Out of desperation, I would call back again after every few hours, only to be ignored. As a test, Dora called from her phone after one of my calls went unanswered and the man picked up. Her conversation went similarly, only when she said she was from Taiwan, he stayed on the line.

So, Dora would quit and in the meantime, help find a place for me to live and a job for the both of us. I would go to work until Dora figured something out or I lost the will to live. Whichever came first.

I went to bed that night extremely unsettled and uncomfortable about our decision. I felt stuck in a sketchy situation that I couldn’t seem to resolve. And then that moment came — that moment when your brain finally decides to start working again. ‘Oh, and why can’t you get yourself out of this situation?’ I asked myself. ‘You are in control of your life, you know.’

Mechanically, I left the bed at three in the morning and packed up the little belongings I had into my rucksack. With nervous excitement, I shoved clothes and books into my bag as my two roommates slept. I crept into the kitchen for my groceries, aware that I would need to save every dollar through whatever was to come. Inside my food cabinet sat an unopened box of cookies with a note on it addressed to me.

A few posts ago, I briefly mentioned a guy named QQ who was dating a girl named KK. KK from Hong Kong was the friendliest in the house and QQ shot daggers at me from his eyes and left rooms when I entered them. He hated me, or so I thought. KK and QQ left the night before to move to Melbourne and find work that didn’t involve the outdoors or physical labour.

Before he left, QQ must have slipped the box of cookies into my pantry. He wrote: “Take care of yourself Tina and good luck. I will miss you. From QQ.” I couldn’t believe it. QQ didn’t hate me. When he watched me with such intensity, it wasn’t malice; it was probably curiosity. I was the only white skinned, English speaking person in not only his house, but most of the town. He was naturally wondering who I was and how I had ended up there. I had been a big, defensive, too-quick-to-jump-to-negative-conclusions jerk.

When you are sneaking out of a house at 3 a.m., scared and alone, it is amazing what a small act of kindness will do to you. I cried — silently — to avoid waking anyone else in the house up. I was shaking. If someone were to come out into the kitchen and ask why I was wearing a giant rucksack, holding a bag of food and crying, what would I say? Now that I had figured out what kind of man Eddie was, I half expected that he would demand I pay him a few weeks rent before I left. No way man.

I had everything I needed. The last major obstacle included opening and closing the house door without making too much noise and walking through the yard and opening the gate without Eddie’s dog Buppy barking. I estimated that there was a 2% chance Buppy would not bark. That poor creature spent his existence tied up outside to a fence post. The smell of a human was enough to send him into a barking fit in hopes that someone, anyone, would pay attention to him, even if to shout ‘shut up!’

I exited the house and crossed the yard. Buppy didn’t stir from his corner. It was too cold to move. “Bye Buppy,” I whispered.

I fumbled with the lock on the fence. On the best of days, when it was light outside and I was relaxed, I struggled with this lock. My face burned and hands shook as I waited for someone to come out of the house at any second and demand that I explain myself. Finally, it came undone. I slipped through the gate and shut it, overwhelmed with a sense of freedom and possibility.

I walked in the direction of the bus station, gazing up at the night sky. A small town with little industrialisation, Robinvale emits no light pollution. The Milky Way illuminated the sky, stretching across thousands of gold flickering stars, which seemed to be only metres above me. I’ve never seen the sky look like this — it felt like someone painted this vivid scene onto a canvas and displayed it over Robinvale.

After a ten minute walk, I parked myself on a bus station bench and waited. I waited to go anywhere, anywhere that wasn’t a place I had already been.

The downfall of a farming prodigy

As days dragged by, the stiffness and swelling in my fingers left, leaving behind rough calloused hands — the type of hands (of a seventeenth century Russian serf) designed to trim grape branches. Trimming was second nature now. I could zone out and trim for hours, taking flight from farm worker Tina to embark on a mental journey to the frosty peaks of the Alps or to the ancient ruins of Cambodia. Some days I was in India stuffing my face with exotic curries in my new house the Taj Mahal and other days I was back in Northern Virginia, stuck in I-95 traffic, shouting at radio DJs during my morning commute to Washington D.C. While blossoming into an expert grape vine trimmer, I was also developing the kind of daydreaming skills that get one far in (through) life.

It was unbelievable how fast Dora and I were trimming. Literally, we couldn’t believe it and neither could anyone else.

“Are we doing something wrong?” I’d ask Dora.

“How are you two so fast?” other trimmers would ask, their tone filled with a lot of skepticism and little admiration. I couldn’t blame them — how was the bumbling Westerner and frail Tawainese girl outpacing people who had been there months longer?

And then it clicked.

When I was 17, I took a career aptitude test during one of my high school electives. The result was extremely clear – I was, without question, well fit for the fields. It calculated that  I was like in the 90th percentile for a career in agriculture. The test results provided me with a distant, very distant, second place choice — an assistant P.E. teacher and/or assistant little league sports coach. Angsty teenage me said something like, ‘What the hell this bullshit test know about me,” but deep down I knew that the test knew. I had tried so hard for so long to suppress that I was a cat-loving simpleton who genuinely enjoyed raking leaves, watching a loaf of bread rise in the oven and wearing  amorphous neutral-coloured clothes, and it was all out in the open now. But I was 17 and forgot that the test existed by 5th period. Months later, I went off to college and got what they call a higher education. Two years later, I finally fulfilled my high school prophecy. Of course I was good at trimming grape vines! I was destined for the fields.

Dora and I grew comfortable with our aptitude in farm work and started dreaming big. Word in the fields was that working on a lettuce farm was money and lots of it. Apparently you had to hunch over for nine hours a day and by the end of the first week you had irreversible scoliosis, claws for hands and aged 70 years, but that didn’t matter. We had been exploited for too long and we were worthy of a lettuce farm pay day.

And then Napoleon dashed our hopes and dreams, as a Napoleon is wont to do.

“Don’t look now, but Napoleon is coming.”

“Oh no…” Nothing good ever followed Napoleon.

We maintained concentration on the tree while the tight-lipped little man scrutinised our work with his beady black eyes. I half expected to look up and find fire blazing in his pupils.

He spoke to Dora in rapid Chinese. Never one to understand anything outside of the English language, I stood dumbfounded but could gather by his menacing glare and vaguely threatening hand gestures that it was no good. He eventually left and Dora looked grim.

“What did he say?”

“He said we are no good.”

“What? I don’t understand.” This couldn’t be right — I had just convinced myself that I was a heaven sent woman-child prodigy at anything and everything farm related.

“We are doing a bad job so tomorrow we have day off.”

More disbelief. Amid my travel fantasies was a fantasy where I had a day off work and could wash clothes that hadn’t seen laundry detergent in months and eat greasy fish ‘n chips at Robinvale’s most happening (and only) take-out joint. I had apparently screwed up so good that someone was granting me my fantasy day off.

Dora went on to explain that we had been cutting too many branches off the trees. Our job was not to cut entire grape branches but to trim the thousands of tiny offshoots from each branch. We had been doing that all along, until a week ago, when Other Crony came by to give us pointers. It pained him that we were so slow.

‘You don’t need to keep all the branches,’ he told Dora. ‘If you don’t like a branch, if it’s too hard to trim, just cut it off.’

‘But I don’t like any of the branches,’ Dora had said.

He explained that when the tree was ready for grape regrowth, the farmers only rolled six out of the seemingly millions of branches back onto the wires. That special care we were taking with each and every branch was unnecessary. They would get chopped at some point regardless. We could use our best judgement to keep the more promising branches and hack the ones that bothered us. I stopped and watched to see if other workers followed this method and did they ever.

From then onward, Dora and I channelled Edward Scissorhands and massacred swathes of trees, leaving branch carnage in our wake. Now Napoleon was telling us this was wrong. And it was so wrong that we were going to be punished by sleeping in, maybe even until the sun had risen, and were allowed the freedom to do whatever we wanted for an entire day. We were so bad that no one was going to take the time to give us pointers on how to do the job right. No, we were going to be sent away for a day to think about what we did, lose 15 dollars and come back just as clueless as before. I started planning my day off but Dora was onto something else.

‘He said Eddie sent him to tell us to take day off,” she said. ‘Eddie is right there. Why didn’t he come?’

A valid question. Eddie had no problem jumping on a four wheeler and verbally harassing workers throughout the day. Why didn’t he just ride up and tell us that? He had cronies and it made sense to send cronies to do the stuff that cronies do, but at the same time, it didn’t make sense that an honest boss who was sincerely going to pay us for toiling in the fields 45 hours a week would send other men to do his dirty work while not taking the time to properly address our mistakes.

Dora and I sat under a grape tree and processed this.

Wake up in the morning, fold my hands and pray for rain

It was early July – the dead of winter – although weeks and months don’t seem to exist when your primary purpose is trimming grape vines in the middle of nowhere. I paid attention to time lapsing throughout the day, following the sun’s usual movements. Sunrise meant time to start work and sunset meant time to stop work. No sun meant rain, which entailed no work. Unless it rained – and rained hard – there were no days off.

It never rained.

I had only been trimming grape vines for seven days, but it felt like eternity. Dora and I would mindlessly snip away in silence for hours, stopping now and then to check in on each other. Sometimes one of us would look at the other, dressed in plaid button-up shirts, baggy dirty jeans and wide-brimmed hats, trimming furiously at a wayward branch, and laugh.

‘Can you believe you’re here, doing this? In nowhere Australia working on a grape farm?’

‘What do you think your friends would say if they could see you right now?’

‘Is this really our life?’

When we weren’t laughing or poking fun at each other, we were assessing the more serious side to our situation – the boss Eddie and payment. We hadn’t been paid and Eddie refused to disclose when exactly we would get paid.   

Eddie was a shady character in our lives. He never made eye contact. His manner was terse. He indicated that he could not speak English, but then fluidly communicated with an Australian farmer. Other people who worked with us were dropping like flies, leaving town without warning to find jobs elsewhere. The two Malaysians who trimmed vines five times faster than us claimed they made next to nothing. Dora and I did the math; we were working nine hours a day and averaged 15 dollars a day – if we ever got paid.

Eddie had a few cronies who would supervise us while he drove off and disappeared for hours at a time. One would come by and verbally abuse Dora in Chinese, then wander off to the next group.

‘What did he say?” I’d ask.

‘Nothing, don’t worry about it,’ she’d say.

We didn’t know his name. He was small – about a head shorter than me – and appeared to have a power complex, so we named him Napoleon. We channeled our negative energy into cursing Napoleon throughout the day, making him the enemy. Dora eventually renamed Eddie to Satan and we’d go about our days casually contemplating Napoleon and Satan – what were they doing? What were they thinking? How were we going to deal with them? We eventually forgot that Napoleon and Satan had ever been anyone else. I struggled to come up with Satan’s real name when I needed to refer to him in front of others.

Weeks slipped by and still no word on payment.

‘Well, at least we can’t really spend money,’ I’d say, in a weak attempt to console Dora. There was nothing to do in Robinvale – no bar, no restaurants, no cinema, no outlet to spend cash – just an IGA and a greasy fish ’n chips joint. Dora’s normally calm and practical disposition was turning to agitated and bitter. She had been working a month longer than me and still hadn’t seen a cent.

‘I want my money. It’s not right.’

‘I know. What can we do though?’

We had no internet and no contacts – no connection to anything or anyone from the outside world that could offer us a tangible solution. While labouring nine hours a day as a migrant worker with no pay in sight was frustrating, I was in no hurry to go crawling back to Melbourne and end up the spiteful waitress again. The sunshine and physical activity had a cleansing effect. The golds and reds of grape leaves glistening in sunrise each morning was beautiful. When the sky threatened to rain and send us home, we felt childish excitement. Farm life was simple.

Life at the grape fields

After driving on a highway through hours of arid bushland, a colorful sign appeared:

Robinvale

Where the River’s Fun

I knew next to nothing about Robinvale, but had gathered at this point that it was in the middle of nowhere Australia and indeed, there was a nearby river which was apparently fun.

My stomach tightened with nerves as the bus pulled into the town station.  It was done—I had finally quit my job at the café and left the city for the Australian adventure I had daydreamed about for the last two months.  Perhaps the last minute decision was impulsive, rash and like most moves I’ve made traveling, not planned out at all, but it was too late at this stage to ponder whether this was a good idea or not.

I got off the bus and saw Dora appear from an old green car alongside a Malaysian man who looked to be in his mid-30s.  He had wavy hair and weathered skin, both faded from years of long days in the sun.

“Tiiiina,” said Dora, as we hugged after a five week separation.  “I can’t believe you are here!”

I could hardly believe it myself.  Dora and I had been going back and forth on the phone the last month about possible farm jobs, but nothing ever transpired.  Finally, one night she called stating with confidence that she had a job for the both of us, but that I’d have to leave within two days.

And like that, I packed up the little belongings I had and went to the Melbourne train station to leave behind my life in the city and head for the farms.

“This is the boss Eddie,” she said, motioning to the man.

He grunted hello without making eye contact, popped the trunk and retreated to the driver’s seat with no further communication.  An extremely thin Malaysian girl sat in the passenger’s seat and gave a shy smile as she introduced herself as Ling.  She pointed to Eddie and said apologetically, “Uhh…we can’t speak good English.”

We drove for three minutes and pulled into a neighborhood, where I would live in a share house owned by Eddie.  Dora lived in a different share house down the street, which made me nervous as it was soon apparent that she was the only person I would be able to fluidly communicate with.  In addition to Eddie and Ling, there were six other people living in the house from Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.  They could all speak fluent Mandarin, but English was an unfamiliar language.

Dora went home after dropping me off and I put my bags into my new room, at a complete loss over what to do with myself.  If I stayed in the room I would look anti-social and strange, but if I went out in the common room, I would have to sit in uncomfortable silence as everyone around me spoke Chinese.  I compromised by sitting in the living room with a book, looking up every now and then to smile at my new roommates.

KK from Hong Kong dealt with me the best she could, giving me a tour of the house and pausing occasionally with furrowed brows as she racked her brain to come up with the English word for something.  “It’s okay,” I said, feeling like a burden.  “Don’t worry.”  QQ, her quiet boyfriend from Taiwan watched me with a puzzled expression mixed with curiosity and what I thought might be disdain.  He always gave me searching and often mistrusting looks as if trying to figure something out.

I went to bed that night wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into.  Our first day of work was the following morning and it hit me that I actually had no idea what the job entailed—Dora mentioned something about grapes but she was kind of hard to understand over the phone.  I had no idea what the pay was like, how long the season was or what would be expected of me.  I was so desperate to get out of the café and Melbourne that I had totally failed to find out fairly important details.  It’ll be okay, I kept telling myself.  It’ll all work out, it always does, I never have to waitress again!

I woke up at 6 a.m. and awkwardly went to the kitchen, realizing that I never went to the grocery store and had nothing to eat.  My cheeks burned as I fumbled to find a way to express this to my new roommates, but the perceptive KK quickly sat me down and provided me with toast and Nutella.  “Eat, eat!” she said.

I finished and wondered how I would get through a long day laboring in the fields without a lunch or snack.  Then, Ling handed me a box of cookies. “For you today.”

I didn’t have coffee (the importance of which is akin to air for me) or a bottle to keep water in, but I figured I could will myself through the first day and deal with these pressing matters after work.  Dora had told me the weather in Robinvale was warm, so I didn’t do much in the way of packing winter clothes and was shocked when I stepped outside to find frost on the ground and a bitter chill in the air.  We stood around and shivered as Eddie hosed the frost off the cars.

The sky glowed with illuminating shades of pinks and oranges as the sun rose over the town, providing for a beautiful drive to the grape fields.  The landscape stretched for miles—grape fields upon grape fields and orange groves wedged in between glimmering with the sun and frost.  KK elbowed me to point out a rainbow jutting out of the clouds, with a red glow as if it were on fire.  The doubt I had toward leaving Melbourne immediately disappeared.

We pulled onto a dirt road which led to endless rows of overgrown grape trees, stopping at a section we would trim and maintain that day.  Dora’s car pulled up behind us and we excitedly exchanged remarks about how awesome the sky looked that morning.

I waited around for someone to explain or show me how to do the job, but everyone went to work and Dora led me to a row and tried to show me what we were supposed to do.  I put on gloves and took out the scissors handed to me and watched Dora as she trimmed the offshoots from the grape vines.  “We clean up the vines so they can be rolled on the wires,” she explained.

Each tree seemed to have a million vines, which all had another million little vines protruding from them.  It’s a two person job—I trimmed on one side of the wires while Dora trimmed on the other.  Dora is a bit shorter than me, so I took the taller side of the tree, straining my neck to trim each vine.  The trimming was painful– our fingers were stiff from the cold.

“Dora, I’m already tired!” I said after an hour.

“Haha! You are joking?  Tina, we have eight more hours!”

I have always been confident in my physical stamina and endurance, but I had been too tired the last few months from long shifts at the café to maintain my fitness.  Nausea and headaches emerged as my body reeled from caffeine withdrawal.

“Dora, I can’t live without coffee and I didn’t have any today.”

“What! How much coffee do you drink in one day?”

“Um, three…four…sometimes five cups a day?” (The one good thing about working at a café was all day access to free coffee.)

Dora could only laugh.  After a few hours she became as sore, tired and cranky as I was and we stopped to eat lunch.  I pulled out my box of cookie wafers and Dora also pulled out a similar box of cookies.

“Is that all you have?”

“I have apple,” she said, unconcerned about her lunch.

“Do you eat cookies every day?”

“Yes,” she said, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.  “I cannot cook and I wake up too late.”

“Oh, Dora,” I sighed.  “That is really not good for you.  You can’t be outside doing physical work and eat cookies to keep you going.  You need meat and vegetables!  You need protein and sustenance!”

I felt myself getting frantic.  I was looking to Dora to guide me through this foreign experience, and it was soon apparent that Dora hardly knew how to look after herself.  She was already frail and underweight, and if she continued living off cookies while working outside nine hours a day, well, that was recipe for disaster.

“It’s okay,” she said laughing, in her carefree way that temporarily eases worry.

We went back to work, and I noticed how far behind we were from the other workers.

“We’re really slow,” I said.

“It’s okay, they have experience.”

She went on to tell me that we were paid 30 cents for each tree we trimmed.  I scanned the row we were trudging through and calculated that we had each probably made about 10 dollars so far.

What have I gotten myself into….

Along came Dora

For about a month, I hopped from hostel to hostel, looking for a comfortable place to stay while I lived in the city. 

I’d strap my rucksack onto my back, a backpack onto my front and carry a large grocery bag, then shuffle across town to my new home, refusing to take public transportation.  I was convinced of my own physical capability and also feared getting in everyone else’s way with my life’s worth of belongings.

As I’d stagger down sidewalks, it seemed any Australian man in his mid-20s lacked the capacity to resist poking fun at such a pathetic sight. 

“Look at you, just backpackin’ around with your backpack.  Havin’ so much fun…”

“Nice backpack.  Have fun luggin’ that around!”

“Get this girl a taxi!”

I’d look straight ahead, chin held high, and give myself misguided pep talks.

“Ah, this is just a morning workout…”

“What a lovely burning sensation in my quads! The muscle strength I must be getting…”

And when things really went south:

“Pain is weakness leaving the body.”

I’d sweat profusely, while my knees threatened to buckle at any moment.  I’d nearly collapse at every turn, but it never occurred to me to stop and take a break.

Taxis would shadow me for blocks, waiting for the moment I’d go tumbling into the street or have a heart attack, in hopes of beating the ambulance in rushing me to the hospital.

I’d arrive to the hostel reception, where they took one look at the disheveled mess that was once me and assume I had returned to civilization after a year in the outback.

This went on for about a month.  Finally, I retired from my nomadic lifestyle and settled down at one Flinders Station Backpackers.  There was nothing special about it—I was tired and had lowered my standards.  The hostel was cold and dirty, with massive spiders lurking in the laundry room and people who seemed as though they’d been at the hostel their entire lives, merely shadows of their former selves.  However, there were free pancakes every Tuesday and only three other people sharing my room, which was enough to hook me. 

When I first checked into the room, there were two girls who pretended not to notice I had entered, which is characteristic of backpackers who have been traveling a while and are jaded from meeting new people, and backpackers who can’t speak a word of English and are afraid of letting this show.  I didn’t feel offended because I could relate with the former and felt bad for the latter. 

 A third girl immediately got up and introduced herself, asking me where I was from and what my plans were.  Her name was Dora.

Dora was a Taiwanese girl with a waif like figure and short-cropped hair.  I was surprised by her outgoing nature—most Asian backpackers seemed to avoid Westerners, gravitating to people from their own countries.  William, another Taiwanese I’d later meet, said this was due to shyness and a lack of confidence in English speaking.  A lot of Asians feel embarrassed by their conversational skills and fear being ridiculed if they make mistakes.  In many Asian cultures, people are under a lot of pressure to be perfect and this follows them when they leave the country.  

Dora had been in Melbourne a few weeks looking for a job, but with little success.  A Chinese restaurant hired her, but she quit after one night.

“I worked for 12 hours with no break and walked home by myself in the morning, in the dark” she said, while I thought man, I know what that’s like.  “I caannot do that, you know?   This is work holiday.  Work HOLIDAY!” she exclaimed, her tired face breaking into a wide smile.  She clapped her hands together, swung herself to the side and let out a lively contagious laugh.

I told her about my own work woes, describing the long shifts, the new overwhelming manager, the cold co-workers and fussy customers. 

“But you’re lucky!” she cried.  “You have job!”

“I know, but it makes me miserable!  I’m always tired and angry,” I said, opening up to someone for the first time in a while.

Dora and I traded stories for a few hours.  We both had been down-and-out in Australia, but after talking about it aloud, everything suddenly seemed funny and ridiculous.

Before coming to Melbourne, Dora had worked on a grape farm in a small Australian town. 

“It was so bad,” she said, describing long days in the sun, the monotonous job and how there was nothing to do and nowhere to go in town. 

As Dora explained how bad the farm work was, I kept thinking about fresh air and sunshine, the exercise, the tranquility and coming home after a hard day’s work to a novel and cup of milk tea.  Dora’s nightmare experience sounded like my dream job.

“God, that sounds amazing,” I’d say, while Dora looked at me with confusion, thinking I had missed the entire point of the story.  “I’d give anything to go out to the farm.”

For the next few days, I’d come home from work and have similar conversations with Dora.  I’d ask her more and more about the farm life and she grew more bewildered by my interest.

“I don’t understand,” Dora would say.  “No one…NO ONE…wants to work on the farm.  They want restaurant job in the city but they have to work on farm.  You have restaurant job and you want to go work on farm.  I don’t believe you!” 

One day, I came home from work to a sullen Dora.  On the verge of tears, she packed her suitcases to go back to the farm the following day.

“I feel like you’re going to your death!” I said, noticing her abject state.

“Me too.”

“You know, I’d switch places with you if I could.”

“Me too.”

Suddenly, Dora lit up.  “Maybe I can get you job.”

“REALLY!” I said, thinking she’d never ask.

“Yeah, I can do this.  But will you really come?” she asked, eyeing me with suspicion.

“YES!  I know you don’t believe me, but I will come without thinking twice.”

Dora said she’d make it happen, but deep down, she suspected I’d back out and deep down, I thought I’d never hear from her anyways.

We went to bed, said goodbye and wished each other luck, both secretly thinking, well, another person I’ll probably never see again.

Just say no

During a fifth round of wiping tables, I felt a pair of eyes burning into my back, and sure enough, a young couple had been sitting in my section for God knows how long. 

“What can I get you folks today?”

“Well, you see, I’m on a diet,” said the stout girl, her tone suggesting she was about to make my life miserable because she was insecure about her body. 

“We have a few salad options if you look here on the menu…”

“No, no.  I was thinking about going with pasta.”

I wondered what the hell kind of diet allowed one to eat restaurant pasta, which tends to immediately cling to your belly and remain there for the rest of your life, but dieters are an irrational bunch, so I kept quiet while she ordered.

“I would like spaghetti and meatballs, but I’m not eating meat.”

“So, you just want spaghetti.”

“No,” she said, glancing from the menu to her meek boyfriend, her look saying, why is this waitress such an idiot?  “I want something else.” 

I waited with feigned patience while she studied the menu for another five minutes.  I noticed a few other new tables watching me impatiently, eager to put their own orders through.  “Ma’am, would you like a few more minutes?  I can come back.”

“No, I know what I want,” she replied, studying the menu yet another five minutes.  “What kind of oil do you use here?”

“Uh, probably vegetable oil,” I answered with the first oil that popped into my head.

“Can you go find out for sure.”

I cursed myself for not sounding more confident about our oil selection.  I went to the kitchen and repeated the woman’s question and was met with irritation, as if I personally wanted to bother the chefs about oil.  “I’m just the messenger,” I said, noticing the exchange of sour looks.

“I don’t know, olive oil?”

“Yeah, olive oil.”

I went back and reported my findings to the girl.

“Hm, can you ask them if they have a light oil option?”

“I doubt…”

“Can you go find out?”

Defeated, I went back to the kitchen and asked flatly, “We don’t have light oil…right?”

Joey, one of the younger chefs, crossed his arms and rolled his eyes.  The kitchen wasn’t busy, but Joey is one of those with a cooler-than-thou, tough-guy persona to uphold.  Therefore, he treats most people, namely women, with disdain.

I translated his glare into, “No, we don’t have any f*cking light oil,” and again, reported this to the girl.

Finally, she ordered a bowl of gnocchi, with cheese, but not a lot of cheese, and tomato sauce, but there absolutely could be no meat in the tomato sauce, and not a lot of tomato sauce either.  Oh, and vegetables, but only green vegetables.  Her boyfriend, God bless his soul, ordered a cheese pizza, no modifications needed.

I studied her boyfriend’s face, trying to detect any sign of embarrassment or agitation.  There was nothing there, just mutual indifference.  It didn’t matter to him that she was being demanding and unreasonable, nor that I was starting to show signs of hostility toward his partner.  I started to wonder how certain people end up together, then realized it’s impossible to understand the dynamics of relationships.  I put through the order with the full awareness that it was going to get sent straight back to the kitchen once it hit the table, no matter how good or bad it tasted.

Sure enough, the pasta was undercooked.  She got mad at me and went into detail about how pasta should be cooked, as if I were the person responsible.  Her vegetables had come out on the side, and she ate all of them, then was really confused as to why there were no vegetables in the pasta. 

“I asked for vegetables.  Did you hear me?”

“Yes, and that was them,” I said, pointing to the empty plate.

“I wanted them in my pasta.”

Did she think we gave complimentary side plates of vegetables with every meal?  “You could have just put them…okay, I’ll take it back.”

The kitchen remade her entire meal and despite it being accurately cooked with vegetables, she didn’t  touch it and spent the rest of the time casting me dirty looks, which said, “You, yes you, you ruined my day, and I won’t let you forget it until I leave.”  I looked back at her, my glance saying, “No, you ruined my day, and you did it on purpose.”

Under these circumstances, we’re supposed to give a compulsory “I’m sorry…the kitchen is sorry…the restaurant is sorry…we’re all sorry,” speech, even if it’s evident the customer is out of their mind, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was tired of apologizing to people for things I wasn’t sorry about.

Instead, I avoided that side of the restaurant and complained to another waitress about the dieting-devil I had to wait on.

“If anyone else says they’re on a diet, I’m telling them to go home and eat lettuce.”

“Some advice,” Verena told me.  “Whenever a table asks for something like that, say no.  Always say no. ‘No, we can’t do that.’”

 I thought about this, and my mood improved.

“Can I have my latte extra hot?”

No.

“Can I have some tomato sauce?”

No.

“Can I please have more water?”

No.

“But…”

No!

I could get used to this.

Work woes

My first day back to the café was a cold, rainy Anzac day, an Australian public holiday to commemorate soldiers, or “diggers,” as they’re informally called.  Naturally, everyone honored their veterans by going to cafes and ordering overpriced soy lattes and gorging on fish ‘n chips.

There was no being eased back into work.  As with any public holiday, we were slammed and didn’t have enough manpower to handle the onslaught of customers who expected quick and efficient service.  I’ll never understand the gall of women who scan a jam-packed dining room and demand without a trace of empathy or politeness that their well-done steak come out in 15 minutes because they have somewhere to be.  Don’t we all lady, I think, knowing that going into the kitchen and asking the chefs to hurry up a specific food order was a death wish.  I’m never coming back here! she’d declare, despite eating every ounce of steak and hanging around to chat another 30 minutes.  Well, thank God.

Within a few days of working, my calm and relaxed exterior two-months in the making unraveled.  When the public holiday ended and everyone went back to work, I rose each morning at 6 a.m. to wipe tables for ten hours.  If we stopped wiping for a second, a supervisor would appear out of nowhere and command us to “look busy.”  I’ve never found anything so draining as “looking busy.”  If the rare tourist happened upon our restaurant, the wait staff would circle their table, racing each other to refill water cups after each sip or clear a plate, asking if there was anything, anything, else they needed—coffee, a second meal, dessert, an escort to their car, a tour around the city, anything.  I loved when customers would try to guess what country I was from, easily eating up 10 minutes of time as they went through every European nation and Canada before I finally revealed I was American.

“I could have sworn Ireland!”

“Oh, don’t let my pasty skin full you,” I’d say, repeating the same lame line I had used on the last five tables who thought I was from Ireland.

This zeal would disappear by lunch time, as it’s hard to stay friendly and attentive after you’ve been hunched over a table all morning with a greasy rag, asking yourself, is this seriously my life?  I’d see a couple waiting to be sat at 1 p.m. on a Monday and be disgusted.  Don’t these people have jobs to go to?!

During the summer night-shift days, we were bound together by the steadfast conviction that the customer was the enemy.  No matter what, the customer was wrong, even if they found a strand of hair in their food that was strikingly similar to the food runner’s.  The nerve!  Me, I’d just pull it out and eat my food.  It’s just hair!  We all have it!  We were always on the defense, with the full-fledged belief that people didn’t really go out to eat to enjoy a nice meal, but to ruin our day.   However, the day staff didn’t share this sentiment.  If anything, we were each other’s enemy.  The common goal was to give excellent service, and well, I had always assumed that if food merely made it to the table, then it was a job well done.

It felt like working under Big Brother.  I’d be wiping a permanent floor stain and a feeling would creep up on me—the I’m being watched feeling.  I’d glance over my shoulder and sure enough, the barista, the cashier, the dessert guy, the head chef, the barman, were all watching the wait staff and exchanging whispers and grimaces.  I noticed the barista look at the girl I was working with, raise his eyebrows and roll his eyes, as if to say, this girl is helpless. 

“See those?” Danish, the dessert guy, asked one day as he pointed to the ceiling where black CCTV cameras were installed.  “I bet Len’s sitting at home right now, watching us from his laptop.”

“I don’t know, I think most of us wouldn’t be here right now if that were the case,” I replied, but really I was growing more paranoid by the week.

I’d see Lori, the day manager, talking with someone and look at me for a second as she scanned the dining room. 

I’d run to her immediately, asking, “What is it?  What did I do?!”

“Nothing!  Stop worrying, you’re one of the good ones.”

By this, Lori didn’t necessarily mean I was one of the better waitresses, just someone who gave her the least strife and was somewhat obedient.  I was one of the few people who came into work with their head down, didn’t make schedule or floor plan demands, mastered “looking busy,” and did what they were told without asking questions. It was all the same anyways.

One day, I noticed a suited-up businessman sitting against the back wall of the restaurant.  There was nothing too conspicuous about him—businessmen were frequent customers—but he had been sitting there an awful long time and seemed to be watching us all meticulously.  This sent my red flags a-waving because normally, we are invisible to businessmen, merely faceless figures who bring them hot coffee so they’re more awake while they fool around on their iPads.  It was extremely alarming that this man was paying such close attention to us.  A spy.

“Hey Rob,” I said, beckoning another server over.  Rob had told me he thought our workplace was a mediocre café, a small step above the food court, and therefore I trusted him.  We both didn’t understand why the higher-ups were suddenly trying to implement fine-dining standards upon us when this clearly wasn’t a high-class cafe.  “Who’s the joker in the back?”

“Oh, you didn’t know?  That’s the new manager.  He’s here to observe us.”

My heart stopped.  How long had he been there?  I tried to count the amount of times I had scowled, dropped cutlery, and dreamily gazed out the big window that morning.  It all added up to me being done for.  Soon enough, the new manager began calling workers over individually, talking to them with exaggerated animation.  Rob was one of the first to go, and after what seemed like forever, came back to the floor without saying anything.

“So, what was that all about?”  I finally asked.

The man was Scott from New Zealand.  He had been in the restaurant industry for 22 years and was recently hired by Len, the owner, to overhaul the restaurant completely.  We were answering to him now, and there was going to be major changes.  I tried to maintain a smile and keep busy the rest of the day, to replace whatever opinion Scott had already formed of me.  I was caught off guard when he approached me, saying, “You,” with a beckoning wag of his forefinger that people normally reserve for dogs and small children.  “Come with me.” 

As it’s wont to do, my face burned red as I tried to keep smiling.  Scott and I introduced ourselves, then he told me stuff about himself that I already knew from Rob. 

“So Tina, what is your strong point?  What do you bring to Baci?”

I felt like I was interviewing for a job I already had.  Scott was someone who exuded unrelenting enthusiasm and positivity, and this made me nervous. 

“Well, I guess I’d have to say I’m good with customers,” I replied, which was mostly true granted a customer didn’t say they were on a diet, ask for something gluten-free, want me to describe how big a bowl of pasta was, or use more than one adjective in their coffee order. 

“I think I can communicate well with them,” I continued, thinking how I was one of the few employees who spoke fluent English.

Scott paused and pursed his lips, while I waited for him to refute what I had just said.  He was going to say something like, really?  Do you really believe this?  I didn’t see you smile once, and honestly, you look utterly miserable here. 

“I completely agree,” Scott gushed, his serious expression breaking into delight.  “You’re a natural with the customers and that smile.  Your face.  You’re charming!”

I thanked him, wondering what his angle was.  Did I have no self-awareness or was Scott instilling each of us with false confidence, to gain his trust while he turned the restaurant we knew upside down.

Either way, the voice telling me to find a new job was getting louder.