Mean Girls

The female population is known extremely well for judging other females as well as males based upon appearance. When the addition of cliques becomes part of the daily lifestyle you can become accustomed to being judged by girls and women. They will pick out any reason to make themselves superior to another individual. This aspect of life can best be displayed in the movie “Mean Girls,” one of the girls continually makes every other person around her feel bad about themselves.

When you work in a population of mostly females you begin to understand how negatively women look at each other. When I was in high school I was a waitress at Bob Evans Restaurant in Bedford. I loved my job I made really good money for a high school student only worked on the weekends and they let me off for my sporting events. When I moved away to college I took educational leave because I did not want to work during the school year. This allowed me to return to my job at Bob Evans in the summer when I was done with my spring semester.

Obviously when I left I had to be replaced by another individual in the restaurant. I knew this would affect how many hours I would be allowed to work when I returned back the first summer. I stopped by the restaurant on my way home from removing all of my belongings from the dormitory where I lived while at school. To my surprise they were short staffed that night and my general manager, Dave asked me if I could be back in an hour to close the restaurant.

I drove home and changed my clothes and returned to the restaurant. Unfortunately I did not know any of the other workers that night except for the grill cook. We had always gotten along because I strived to make sure there were no mistakes between my ticket markings and the cook so that they could remain in a good mood without having to make food twice and that customers were happy because they did not have to wait on their food. I introduced myself to the new waitresses that I would be working with and they responded with “Oh you are the one Jessica was telling us about” was their response. Apparently while I was gone one of my former coworkers had taken the liberty of “filling in” everyone about how I worked.

My new coworkers already had an opinion of me based on those of another coworker. For the rest of the evening the other waitresses avoided me and became very angry when I asked if they needed any help with anything. Jessica and I had worked together for only a few months before I had to leave for school so I did not understand why the other waitresses were treating me this way. I felt that it may just be because I was new to them and they were not familiar with the way that I would help out others who needed it.

I realized that they were only acting this way the next time I was scheduled to work with them and Jessica at the same time. I had the experience of walking into the room while they were all huddled together and then when I approached they all became very quite. As any girl knows this is a sign that you have recently been the topic of their discussion. It did not affect my work but I said hello to everyone and continued to work. We continued to work together and they constantly refused my help and would rather their customers become angry with them than to let me help in any way.

I later found out that Jessica had told all of the new employees that I was a “table thief,” if I thought you could not handle the work you had that I would take the new tables if my section was full and I had nothing to do. The new employees eventually found out this was not the case. I would go and help as much as possible and I may take the table but only if they table ordered. I would not enter the food in and would make sure that the tip went to the actual waitress whose table it was. If they had not been to the table at all I would take this tip and make sure that they received the money from my next table.

Being the judged individual because of an active work status gave me a double standard. I was a hard worker and my managers appreciated this, however my coworkers did not. They felt that I was taking some of the money they deserved but I was making the restaurant and managers money. My coworkers eventually judged me based upon their own opinions and not those of Jessica and I am still friends with many of those people today. They understand that I was only trying to help the situation at hand and would never actually try to take any of their profit. This has made me go into situations more cautiously I continue to be a hard worker but try to not “step on anyone’s toes” while they work. I help only when asked or when my offer is accepted.