I am a student of observing people’s behavior. What makes them tick, laugh, cry, angry. I’ve met, worked and mingled with literally hundreds of individuals that have their own special quirks, habits, personalities, faults, gifts, addictions, anxieties and so on. You build up quite the card catalog of personality references over 30 years in the service industry. With high volume turnover you may only get a brief glimpse of some of these characters. Some may come through like a hot plate on a pass and others stick around like sharpie graffiti in a dive bar bathroom. I’ve been knee deep with service industry peers for my entire career. Even after parting ways with my old company I still find myself surrounded by this menagerie of dramatis personae so to speak. The brewery had them and the meadery folk I rub elbows with also fall into that category. The spectrum of personalities has no limit in the service industry. You may awkwardly walk into a new building, new concept, new vibe with new faces and background but after a brief time we all start speaking the same language. We all have one thing in common. We embrace or at least try to control the chaos.

These are my people.

We operate under pressure better than most. Some of us embrace it and ride it like a solid west coast wave while others tether along on an inner tube and hope to god the line doesn’t break. The service industry brings these types of personalities together, corrals them into efficient herds of hospitality driven, worker bees, buzzing with high volume stress and the quest for consistency. The ones on the surfboard are the lifers. The others keeping their heads above the surf are the brief glimpses of holiday season help and part timers. Often times they get a taste of service industry and think “nope” I’m good while others are fortunate enough to leave their apron at work or in the trunk of their car when they get home. Some of us forget to take it off and find ourselves, sitting on the couch, eating Taco Bell drive thru at 1am with our apron still on, sharpie behind our ear and probably a discarded nylon glove in our pocket. That apron becomes your security blanket. The weight on your body feels disproportionate when it’s not tied tight around your waist. Somedays it feels heavier. I’m writing a fairly complex essay on lifers that will touch base more on this subject. This may actually fill in as a chapter.

I’ve met so many different personalities over the years through hiring and training. Hundreds of orientations, interviews and exits. After a hundred dozen of these or so I could tell you within 5 minutes of conversation whether or not if this individual would still be employed by me within the next 4 months.

I didn’t ask the standard questions like “what motivates you?

“Why do you think you would be an asset to this company?”

“How did you hear about us?”

“What are you key attributes?”

My first question was always-

“What prompted you to want/get into the restaurant business?”

I’d get two reactions. One would be an eyebrow raise and a look of surprise like “wait? I’m actually just here for a job! I’m passing through until I find my real job.”

The other would offer a wince and a smile, lean back and say “let me tell what happened.”

Majority of the time the passing throughs did just that. The service industry vocation was chosen as a quick way to make some cash until you paid that last car note or you’re trying to pad some income for an upcoming purchase or vacation. Occasionally from that majority a few may slip through the cracks and find their home in the service industry. They’ll embrace it. It will adopt them through proxy.

I am one of those people.

The others have already been baptized into the chaos. They might’ve washed dishes or bar backed in their teens. Hosted part time in high school or bussed tables just to have some extra cash to spend or pay for the senior week beach trip. And then 10 years later they’re out back on the loading dock, chugging a blueberry Redbull, smoking a camel wide and asking if the new hostess really has chlamydia or is it just a rumor because the pantry cook is trying to ask her out.

Wiring

We are all wired differently. We have our own circuit boards that relay experiences, emotions, trauma and stress differently. Hard to categorize it would be like categorizing snowflakes. The actual wet cold ones not the ones on social media. It’s our hard wiring that makes us truly unique. It’s how we find our tribe, our friends, ourselves. I’m not referring to enneagrams, astrology or gatorade moons although if that is your thing I’m sure there may be a common denominator. I’m basing my philosophy and perspective 100%, on organic, first hand experience.

I have a few groups of friends I have maintained over the decades – the ones I’ve made working inside the annals of the service industry and all the others. Both groups are filled with amazing humans and personalities that I would give my dominant arm to assist in any situation. My oldest dearest friends I grew up with. Some amazing people I’ve met through my hobbies and social interactions or creating activities online with friends I’ve never met before until social media came about and we hit it off online. We all have some of these friends. You get to know them online, you see their posts when their genuine and you discover your wires cross quite frequently. You engage with them online, randomly run into into each other out in public and next thing you know you’re laughing your asses off over coffee.

Your lifelong friends have had years to adjust to your wiring. They’ve seen you at your worst. They know how you react to certain situations. They may not share the same hard wiring as you but they understand your electrical current. In return you understand theirs through years of intimate exposure and experiences. You know their pressure points and principles. Their quirks, scruples, morals. Sometimes you choose these friends because of these. They are the ying to your yang. The p to your j sandwich. Your wires have crossed overtime, your positives and negatives vibe well. These peeps are an integral part of your life.

My service friends I have made over the years probably compound the other two in sheer numbers. Some of the friendships aren’t as close as my lifelong friends but we’ve built a bond over working in the trenches together during the rushes, abrasive environments of high volume and the constant awareness of controlling the chaos that ensues. That’s what the service industry is. Maintaining hospitality, comfort and consistency in a war zone. Keeping your game face on while your ears are ringing at the table your specializing. You’ve have to piss for an hour but every time you try to pull yourself off the grill the expo printer spews 12 more tickets. A grill unmanned for 2 minutes can fuck up the whole momentum of the chaos building up. I’ve watched grill cooks hiding their sickness on the line because they couldn’t afford to miss a day of work. They’d pull an empty sani bucket on the line and use it to throw up in when no one was looking. There are no savings accounts in the service industry. No money stashed away for a rainy day every fucking day is a rainy day financially. Everyone has roommates out of survival. If you’re lucky you found a significant other to bunk with. That’s about the only benefits that will occur in the industry.

You bond from sharing the chaos. Your shared sections are your foxholes, the kitchen line are the trenches. When the work is done we all sit down together and discuss the chaos. We have to get it off our chests. The half hour of long ticket times, the campers, Karens, militant managers and shitty tippers. That’s how we put the chaos to sleep at night. For lifers your shift doesn’t end after you roll silverware or mop the dish area. It continues in our favorite barstool, hole in the wall or your rotating apartments to party in. Most of us are communed in the same apartment compounds due to geography and affordability. Great for carpooling the ones with multiple DUIs and can no longer drive for the unseen future. Every restaurant has at least two or three of these.

After the chaos we sit, open our favorite poison and discuss. Its therapy.

Its our therapy.

The first hour of conversation will always be about work. Scattering the chaos out of our souls so we can sleep. That’s were the bonding starts. You share your work trauma experiences with your coworkers. Your foxhole stories we all have them and love to hear about the others so we don’t feel alone. Alcohol has a way of bonding people together after a shithole night. After a few drinks we are all on the same wavelength, same pedestal. Managers are comrades and dishwashers can comfort your post work anxiety once that third or fourth round hits. Once the numbness takes over you don’t hurt anymore. You know it’ll all be waiting for you once you hear that alarm clock in the morning. That’s why you’re already focusing on that cozy barstool before you get out of bed.

We shed and share a lot of things when we have these moments. It’s our therapist sofa. Enough late nights in our little herds and we will bare everything to each other. We become family.

This bonding is necessary when that high volume shit hits the fan. There’s no place for singularity or selfishness. The whole team carries the restaurant or the whole team sinks with the ship. The alignment from hostess all the way to general manager has to be balanced and well executed. You want 400 butts in and 400 hundred butts out happy, fed and full. Anything less is a failure.

Lifers as I call us usually come from broken homes or families. Some come from backgrounds of childhood abuse physical and or sexual. Some have anxieties and other mental disorders and find their havens here. Others have been spit out of the system of halfway homes, rehabs and even sleeping in the streets. We take them all in. Race, creed color religion all get put on the back burner here we just want a crew of caring, hard workers. Often times they are spurned from home and use the service industry as a quick fix for income. Restaurants are always hiring and firing. There’s good money to be made if you hustle. If you stick around long enough there’s always a new ladder to climb with a 10% raise as your carrot. You can make a solid income in the service industry. I have managed it for years but it takes it’s toll on your body. The vocational part aside the after work environment is just as debilitating. After a 12 hour shift we may prolong our evenings another 6 hours of drinking and whatever else it takes to melt the pain away. Morning shift be damned we have to medicate first. We bond through the pain, the $15 lunch shifts and the Friday night campers that left 10% at your best table. We cover the griller’s back when he needs nicotine and a piss, we bail out the dishwasher if he bogs. If he goes down we all do.

Service industry lifers are the land of misfit toys. School didn’t work out for us or our degree went to shit. Desk jobs make us want to pull our short hairs out but we yearn for that comfort zone and soft happy feet that comes with it after years of athletes foot, fucked up arches from wearing shitty shoes because you didn’t want to ruin that one good pair you own.

We go home every night smelling like the food your company represents. Sushi restaurants you go home smelling like hibachi, smokehouses destroy your sense of smell for most of the day and you can still smell the smoke on your chef coat after you wash it, Southern I’d go home smelling like a KFC chicken bucket.

The scariest part for me had always been the afterlife. No this isn’t theological what I’m referring to is life after the lifer life. The older you get the less is available for you. Service Industry is youthful and energetic. It’ll hold you at maturation peak of your 20’s full time. That part of the system was the hardest for me to shake. My maturity never evolved after so many years of the industry. Yes I had to behave differently as a manager and then owner but that environment makes you different.

Simple example, place a lifer manager who’s 50 next to a bank manager who’s the same age side by side and have a conversation with both. They’ll look different, they’ll act completely different. They’ve both been chiseled from two completely different stones.

No one wants to be a grill cook in their 60s. Sure if it’s your place, family owned diner and your dad did it, you’re doing it and your son rest next you is along for the legacy ride but if someone else is signing your paychecks it’s different. You don’t see 65 year old men grilling on a Saturday night that often for a reason. You’ll come across the occasional unicorn bartender that’s been at the same place for 30 years but if that place closes down he won’t find another gig that even comes close. As a manager you eyeball the older generation and ask yourself “can they handle a bar that’s three deep?” “How long can they hold up in a 110° kitchen?”

Like a forgotten toy you get cast out of the industry. It’s nothing personal. Just like old milk in the back of the fridge your time expires. Yes there’s some strong loyalty in this industry but all it takes is a hard night of comps because you’ve gotten too slow.

It’s time to make that break. At the end of the day it’s still business. It’s still capitalism.

At my age I’m starting to see some of my old colleagues struggle. Lifers aren’t there for life just the juicy parts. Where do you go when your milk has expired? You don’t think about that in your 20s and 30s. You start sweating it on your 40s. One day you may find yourself spit out. Your body is broken, your mind is mush from all the extra curricular activities that you still crave. Your social circle is broken. You haven’t been outcasted. Like I said, you expire. There’s no date on your arm to reference. Its like retiring from a sport. You wake up one day and realize your body can’t handle it anymore. Your mental health echos the same.

Downside is there’s no fantasy island to sail off to. Alot of my old service friends are living alone in tiny duplexes starting their lives over and not in a comfortable way. They are having to learn new trades or working those jobs they tried to avoid for years but had to make amends. Some went retail, grocery store clerks, office jobs if ther had admin skills. Some went to restaurants that they’d never dream of working in but now they are left with no choice. Others have disappeared or passed too early from decades of hard living. A few others took it upon themselves to retire eternally. God I want to hug all of those. That’s how hard it is for some to let it go. Like Brooks Hatlen from Shawshank when we was released after spending so many years in the system. He had nowhere to go and lacked the skills to fit in. He’s life and family came from the system he was thrown in. When it’s gone some of us have nothing left. Maintaining a happy family life in this industry is hard. Mine was saved from my abrupt departure. I’d go out on a limb and say my life was saved as well.

My intention when I had succumbed to that lifer life was to embrace it, control it, win with it and retire from it. I got two out of four. I wasn’t anywhere near the top but by god I came close but to mo avail and no cigar.

I found myself at the doorstep of 50 years of age looking down the barrel of irrelevance and becoming a museum relic. Opening another restaurant would’ve destroyed me mentally and physically. I lost the desire and my confidence. I still had all the tools of my trade in solid shape but my mind was rejecting all of it. There was no way I could go from where I was to going back to being a line cook, bartender, even a GM. I hadn’t been a GM since I was in my late 30s. When I left my old company I was in the top 5 of hundreds of employees. I pretty much managed myself. The thought of moving backwards at 50 gave me chills of the shitty kind. It takes momentum to reinvent yourself, it takes time and takes a long path of rewiring. I had done it once already in my mid 30s.

A different kind of reckoning.

I don’t use the word luck that often but I was lucky to recognize little signs in my path and journey that resonated with what I had to do.

I had a long talk with myself and recognized that my life in the service industry was over. I had a big reckoning with my ego along side of my liver and brain. The ego lost that fight. Hard one to swallow. To tell yourself that being a multiple level restauranteur dream you had for years was over. Not because I would never have the opportunity again but because I lived that dream and journey and become repulsed by it.

I had been hardwired into that system for so long I became the system. I had no life the industry was my life. My actions, my mental wiring were those of someone that lacked maturity on multiple levels. It was no one’s fault but my own. This isn’t to declare universally that everyone succumbs to this in the industry. I had and I’m the author of my own perspective.

Intimately.

It took a great deal of effort for me to change that intimate perspective. I knew I couldn’t leave the entire service industry. A desk job would put me in a straight jacket. I had to rewire my approach. I had to dig my nails into what broke me.

High volume- man this was my jam my mantra. I used to get off on high volume. My energy level spiked like a quarterback on Super Bowl Sunday. My restaurants couldn’t be too busy for me. I wanted record numbers every fucking year. Not due to financial aspect I was in perpetual competition with myself. And I pushed my staff to beat that fucking guy every year. I could be hard to work with at times due to my drive. I expected everyone to sacrifice themselves as I had. That energy shit the bed when Covid hit. All it took was a break from the service matrix. I created chadcuterie to control my volume. When I get tired or agitated I close up my orders. If I need a few consecutive days off I close my kitchen. Even as a I prepare to expand slightly that will remain the same. I’m no longer chasing Chad from last year.

Staffing- every day I waited by my phone to see which restaurant needed me the most. My day off didn’t exist unless I closed all restaurants for one day and that’s exactly what the fuck I had to do. All restaurants eventually closed on Mondays but that day usually ended up used for meetings. I loved all of my staff. Many of them were like family to me and then some.

But

Being a dad to 100 employees wore me down. I got too attached. I did my best to help them financially, counsel them, hug them if they were going through hard times.

When I’d lose good ones to other jobs it felt like a child leaving the nest. If one passed away it was like losing a sibling. Laying off 83 of them during covid took my heart. I hugged as many as I could and 80 of them came back. That says something about my company.

At the time.

The hub of my staff made my world easy. It was the outer banks of staff, the unreliable ones that came and went that beat me down. I still love all of my work family like we never parted ways. I know I’ll need employees soon but my set up is going to be wired to work with just me and others if needed. Not the other way around.

Financially the bigger we grew the more baggage we had to bring with us everywhere. Three restaurants we created a little restaurant group. It wasn’t even necessarily but looked cool on paper. We opened an office. Created a COO position, extra accountants, more professionals to be paid at our disposal. Our dreams were out growing our checking account.

When we split I wanted to burn all my excess baggage. I was busting my ass for luxurious luggage with nowhere to go to enjoy it. I’ve rewired my business plan into a damn shrink a dink. I maintain all my operations with my wife. I write a lot less checks nowadays.

Pursuit of happiness- my life, my family now comes first. I may take a hit financially from some of the decisions that revolve around that but I no longer care. The past three years alone have been a different life for me. My bond to my family has been cemented. Which has compounded my rewiring for the sake of good. No more war zones at work or at home. I’ve found peace through my deliberate rewiring, lifestyle changes and deflation of my toxic ego.

Also deliberately it exactly how I’m approaching Grazeland. I’m taking my time. And I the business will evolve around me not your other way around. A lot of passion will be involved. It has to reflect that but it’ll take a backseat to my mental health and relationship with my family.

Even though I have a large foot out of the service profession I’m still involved. I making it revolve around me. Not the opposite.

I’ll always be a lifer. By profession and by choice. I’ve mad a better choice of rewiring the chaos instead of containing it, not embracing it. Keeping it at bay, arms length away at all times.

When I open Graze I hope that’s it. I know that may sound odd but I don’t have any interest in building an empire. My rewiring is focused on my legacy as a dad, hubby and individual.

Yes I wish and hope for success but my head is much more level now.

I’m keeping that old lifer unplugged for good.