I’ve never been a restaurant server.

At this point in my life, I’ve worked multiple jobs with varying income levels, but I don’t know what it’s like to wait tables at an Olive Garden or an Applebee’s. I know that service-level jobs like cashier and restaurant server are low on the totem pole of job prestige. People don’t strive for them so much as end up in them. Why are they not good jobs?

My impression is that they aren’t good jobs because (1) they don’t pay very well and (2) they are hard. I don’t think they’re hard in the technical sense—I guess I could be trained to be a cashier pretty quickly, but maybe a waiter position may require more skill and dexterity. It’s a different kind of hard. Perhaps they’re hard because they’re monotonous, they’re demeaning, and they suck the soul out of you shift by shift.

And you have to deal with people.

Is this the hard part? What is it like to serve people? Not just the well-behaved professional people you deal with in business, but average people? A representative cross-section of humanity? What percentage of customers are normal, unproblematic people, and what percentage are irascible “I want to talk to the manager” “The customer is always right” types that make your day miserable? As someone who has never been a server, I can only speculate.

I myself have been a customer many times. Probably at least once a day. But I have never been an I Want To Talk To The Manager customer, and I can’t fathom what goes through the heads of IWTTTTM customers. If ye seek the measure of a person, watch not how she treats her peers, but how she treats her inferiors. IWTTTTM customers are bad people and I very consciously avoid being them.

I know rude customers exist, through server testimony on social media. Reddit horror stories, Facebook awareness posts. In fact, precisely because I know servers are worn down by rude customers, I go out of my way to be genial in my brief interactions with them. Usually, all I have time for are a radiant smile and a profuse Thank you, thank you so much! They smile back and say Have a good day, but I know they’re smiling because they have to, it’s part of their job to be amiable to customers, maybe their dogs could have died and their partners could be abusive and their last few customers could have harangued them about Back in my day servers were Properly Trained and now you kids can’t even use a decanter correctly and the country’s going to hell but they have to keep smiling because you just don’t not smile when you’re a server, that’s part and parcel of the server-customer power dynamics.

If a server were to tell me, well, actually, 80 percent of everybody are rude customers, well, who am I to contradict her? I’ve never been a server. I could say, “That’s very weird, all of the people I know seem like normal non-rude customers.” But she could say, “That’s because they’re not rude with you, but they’re rude with servers.” If ye seek the measure of a person, and so forth. Or she could say, “Maybe the people you know are not a representative cross-section of humanity.” Or she could say, “Why are you contradicting me? You’ve never been a server.” And I don’t know how I’d respond except for conceding her point.

The trouble with this thought experiment is that the server could convince me of any percentage! Are 10 percent of customers rude? 80 percent? 95 percent? I would have neither the facts nor the grounds to challenge her percentage successfully. I could ask another server, perhaps. “No, she’s lying about 80 percent of customers being rude, in my experience it’s closer to 25 percent.” But when two servers disagree, who am I to trust?

There’s also a perverse incentive structure here. The server knows that the higher the percentage she feeds me, the more respect I should have for her, and the higher her moral standing is. If 80 percent of your customers have been rude, then you’ve seen some shit and your opinion holds more weight than if only, say, 25 percent of them have been rude. So the server is incentivised not to tell me the true percentage, but to tell me as high a percentage as she can without it being unreasonable enough that I could credibly accuse her of lying.

Maybe it’s worth working as a server for a good while? Just so I could see how bad it is, and then have the data for myself, so I don’t go around and get duped the next time a server tells me what percentage of customers are rude?