CAN I TAKE YOUR ORDER?

MY PERSONAL STORY

Finding New Wrinkles

Denny’s played a significant role in my development, as it did for my uncles and aunts. I’ve spent more than half of my life working alongside my family. In order to understand how Denny’s reshaped my life and led the way to educational success, we must go back to the beginning. Our move to a bigger home in 2002 also coincided with my mother’s new job at Denny’s. The living circumstances were not all that different than they were during the McDonald’s days. My mother was working every day, from dusk to dawn. It meant that I had no other place to go other than Denny’s after I got off school. I recall one occasion where I was left stranded at school, only for the principal to personally deliver me to my mother at Denny’s. My mother was engrossed at work. Granted, that was as extreme as it got. I spent many days sitting at the restaurant’s counter, quietly waiting for my mother to pick up her bags and signal us to depart from the back door. More agonizing than the next, each instance tested my patience and capacity to find new wrinkles in the mundane Denny’s experience.

Befriending Customers

The restaurant had little for entertainment beyond the toy crane machine, which I frequented early and often. The toy crane machine’s allure loses a bit of its intrigue after you win a certain number of times. My attention, in due course, turned to the customers themselves. I’d begin to recognize specific repeat customers and consequently befriended them.

Mr. Hunter would frequent Denny’s with his son in the early evenings as I arrived from school. He was, as we would call, a regular. He was youthful for his old age and filled with stories during his time as a soldier in World War II. I was uneducated on the war until that point, and our foreign roots didn’t necessitate the importance of American history within a family discourse. Mr. Hunter had a wonderful way of involving a curious young child in the dramatic events of his long life. I remember his large smile and the accompanying hot fudge sundae that stood between us. He would end up passing away shortly after I met him.

My relationship with Mr. Hunter represented a wealth of opportunity that the Denny’s environment enabled. I hardly ever interacted with white men outside of school. My family’s friends walked, dressed, and spoke like us. It was a particular issue within many of the growing Latino communities living in the United States. There was a trepidation to interact with others outside the Latino bubble, whether it was fear or a lack of familiarity. Throughout the years, multiple customers have shown similar acts of kindness, as epitomized best by Mr. Hunter. From free rides home to providing college guide books. I got it all from all sorts of people.

12 Year Old Host

As a child, I often didn’t receive any of the high-priced items that I so coveted. I was forced to settle with what I was lucky to get. Money didn’t grow on trees, so my mom said. It was then understandable why a 12-year-old was so eager to respond to the proposal of a paying job. What could be so difficult about it? I was sure to have it easy since the boss is my very own mother. Saving up for a new gaming console, or whatever else a 12-year-old would want, was all that mattered. My miscalculation was the expectation that the earned money would reach the sight of a 12-year-old’s wide-eyed desires. The money instead went towards my future, a trust fund, to be exact. It didn’t take long before I grew to regret my decision to start working at Denny’s. I am joking, of course, but I do recall being very angry at the time.

The very first role that I took was that of a host. A host in itself would encompass greeting all incoming customers, then guiding each party towards an available table. That’s simple enough. I worked on Saturday and Sunday mornings, considered by most to be the busiest time of the week. Everybody who was considered a regular came around this time, in addition to people who were simply passing by. The restaurant couldn’t accommodate everyone, so there was a line funneling out the door. As hosts, we were tasked to keep track of each party waiting, even those standing outside the door. The job wasn’t difficult, but it felt lifeless. I didn’t enjoy standing around for hours on end, writing names, and being stared at by a swarm of people. Eventually, I was promoted from host to cashier.

I enjoyed being a cashier as opposed to that of a host. It was my very first experience handling large sums of money over a short period of time. Nevertheless, there was a larger sense of responsibility in making sure I didn’t hand any more or less of what was owed back to the customer. There wasn’t any room to slack off— quite the tall order for a 12-year-old. I also got to speak to customers more intimately beyond the rudimentary hello; conversations usually led to why I was even working in the first place. People found it unusual to see such a young face handling their hard-earned money. Even coworkers outside my immediate family found the whole ordeal comical.

Refill the Coffee

I would eventually be promoted at the age of 15 after a few years of working exclusively in the restaurant’s front area. By all accounts, it happened out of necessity rather than a deliberate choice. I was tasked to take care of the customers at the counter during a day in which the restaurant was understaffed. It was sudden. I didn’t know how to properly handle a customer’s order, let alone give good service. The counter customers were a bit of a different breed, usually an older crowd of blue-collared workers looking for a quick bite and a coffee. The long days sitting at the counter that dominated my early days at Denny’s served as an excellent foundation for what was to come. Bring the coffee. Order the food. Refill the coffee. Bring the food. Rinse and repeat. The counter crowd was not a demanding crowd to please, and they only cared about a constant flow of coffee and a person to talk to, either the waiter or the stranger sitting beside them. Naturally, they found it easy to talk to a young child. I won them over in that respect. Perhaps growing up in the foodservice industry played a part in my gift to gab. I wound up racking up a total of $70 in tips on that impromptu day.

It wasn’t easy, but we succeeded.

The Payoff

Being a waiter came to be a natural fit for me. The work was fast-paced and required a higher sense of intuition. I spent each of my summers working full-time as a waiter at Denny’s. The money was immeasurable for a child my age. By the age of 17, I had opened my very own bank account and saved $7,000 from all the collected tips. I didn’t know how to handle all that money properly; to be fair, I was only a naive high school student. At the end of each summer, I would transition to working on the weekends as I returned to classes. The following schedule went on throughout high school, and by the end of it, I had saved enough money to help pay for college.

From an early age, I understood that my family worked hard for every penny they made. Denny’s wasn’t a glamourous place to work at, but it was a job they all took pride in building up. My mother always said that she wished for me to live an easier life than her. My role at Denny’s put my mother’s decisions and sacrifices in perspective, allowing me to be closer with her. She spent the entirety of her adulthood working tirelessly to have enough money to maintain us as a family while saving for my college fund. It wasn’t easy, but we succeeded.