Dumb waiter

I had forgotten the feral mentality of the waiter until my first full shift at the Goose. It is a truly mercenary business. Any attempt to help my colleagues - carrying plates, sharing cutlery, making coffee - is met with hostility, curiosity, aggression. The reason for this is tips. Assisting someone with their section is tantamount to demanding a share of whatever tips from whichever tables you assist with, and splitting tips is taboo. The gratuities are the only reason we work there - nothing else would justify the pressure, which can border on violence. It may sound like I am exaggerating the workings of the restaurant business, but you simply have to understand: the Goose is a machine. Moloch, burning babies, ancient industry. Minimum staff level, maximum customer numbers, a goddamn factory line from Brakes Bros. to the microwave oven to the greasy burning plates to my hands to the table. Three plates stacked along my right arm and one held in my left hand, or two plates and swooping on the pickle tray as I pass the dumb waiter. Computers relay the order to printers stationed throughout the restaurant. The system is perfect - the weakest link is the soles of my feet. Dessert menus, further napkins, another pint, do you have a children's menu no madam we offer half portions.

You can't fight the system. Sometimes the Goosing isn't too bad - other days I'll get a thorough Goosing but the tips will make up for it - and often I'll be horribly Goosed without the sweetner. The tips can be phenomenal. On Saturday I worked from noon until 10pm with a twenty minute break. I am paid minimum wage of £5.35 an hour - totalling £53.50p for my shift. But I also took £97 in tips - taxfree cash - not including the visa card tips on which we are disgracefully levied tax as part of our wages - so I made £152.30p overall, or £15 an hour, which is actually a better hourly rate than most of my employment as a camera assistant. So much is unusual, but I make a minimum of £20 a day, and more often £50. This money goes directly into the bank, though I want to buy a rope and Tiso's are selling last year's Edelrid stock at £85 for 60m...

There is a soundtrack of unoffensive music drifting discreetly throughout the restaurant. You can't hear it in the evenings because the chatter, but on quieter afternoons the horror is unleashed... Enya, The Corrs, James Blunt (best rhyming slang ever?), Rod Stewart raping Cat Stevens. Dire fucking Straits. I can just imagine Knopfler in the studio, perma-tanned and wizened as a walnut, smug in his sweatbands, nodding with pleasure as some hard-up session musician does terrible things to a pawnshop saxophone and weeps silently, thinking only of the rent. Did any instrument ever suffer so much abuse for so little reward? And I'm not sure how, but somehow Richard Cheese covering Nirvana 'Come As You Are' has made it onto the soundtrack. This was probably a mistake but could potentially be a joke by some hateful graduate student with an iPod and spots.

Everyone comes to the Goose. Only three things are certain in life - taxes, eating in the Goose on a Saturday night, and death, which is actually the one I wish for if I am working on Saturday night. Not my death, of course, but the deaths of everyone who comes to eat. Slow death, painful death. We get the nouveau riche Irish eating fillet steak with asparagus, cooked rare, and the old money Scots who come every week for the bangers and mash. We get ned drinkers demanding WKD, which we don't serve, and pensioners in for their halves of IPA. Newlyweds who have already run short of things to say and grandparents still holding hands. Yelling kids, babies wearing mashed potato, German bikers in full leather, surly teenagers with eyeliner and hair dyed black, nuns drinking only water, business lunches who never ever tip on the company credit card, first date dinners, American tourists appalled at the atrocious service.

Last week there a woman wearing sensible boots and an ankle length skirt. She was in her late fifties and she was called Charlotte or Margaret or Victoria or Elizabeth. And she was sad, so sad, looking after her husband and his stroke, or his depression, his haemorrhage. He took over an hour to eat his ploughmans, and I don't think he spoke at all. He sat there with his big red nose and an archipelago of blue and grey on his arms, his rolled-up shirt sleeves, the shoelaces she tied this morning, sat there staring down at cheese, chutney, apple. I think at school they must have called her Charlie or Lottie or Lizzie.

One month and twenty-nine days to go.

Tune in next week... same Goose time, same Goose channel.