Yesterday’s Socks

I’ve waited tables in at least five U.S. States. In one of them, a restaurant owner told me his secret to getting through a split shift: Clean socks. A split is where you work lunch, go home for an hour, then return to work dinner. (A double, by contrast, is two eight-hour shifts with no break in between.)

This owner had multiple restaurants with different themes in the same town, so it was possible to work lunch at one place and then pull a dinner shift in another location altogether. Those were fun days when you never really knew where you were going to end up. Work lunch on the street at the cart then dinner at the live music joint? Coming right up. Lunch at the dive bar and then a little fine dining for dinner? Don’t mind if I do.

Of course there were schedules and planning, but I’ve learned that a great restaurant is all about organized chaos, so there were usually contingency plans (shortages) where staff got shuffled to places they didn’t plan on at the start of the day. For that reason, most of us had a server “go bag” in the car, filled with changes of uniform, nametags, hats, shoes, aprons, etc. With a wig or a passport, we could have been actors or spies.

The restaurant owner told a group of us the socks thing as we were all serving up burgers and fries under a tent at an outdoor event. I remember thinking that I was currently wearing yesterday’s socks and I was hoping that my face didn’t show it.

So, on the one hand, he has a point. Clean socks make the man. Or the woman. Right? They make you feel better about yourself from the ground up and they refresh your ability to throw yourself back in the ring, as they say. Like coming in from playing in the snow and Mom puts your gloves in the dryer so when you can go back out in the cold for another round of play you’ve got toasty gloves. That kind of refresh, because a bunch of ready pairs of clean socks seem like a similar luxury, one where you need Mom’s help to pull it off. Even if I’d had enough socks to change between twelve shifts each week, there was nobody at home to wash all these socks but me, so it was still more likely that I’d still be wearing yesterday’s mismatched socks with holes, or that my go bag would only have one sock and I’d have to go without. But this was advice from a successful restaurant owner. And I, well, I took orders. So I listened to him.

The first thing I did when I made a little extra money (we’re talking years later, after I’d tackled the essentials) was to go out and buy new socks. No holes, no fading, no missing mates, just pairs and pairs of proper dress socks. I felt like I’d joined the human race.

On the other hand, and this is very important, I know I can deliver an impassioned speech in yesterday’s socks and never miss a beat. I won’t misstep when one sock is bigger than the other, won’t lose my cool when one sock falls down, won’t second guess my ability to discuss fine wine, crack a joke, and dazzle a crowd while wearing socks that are as swampy as Louisiana in June.

I can. And I have.