Antick Musing's Fridays, Black and Otherwise

[james_davis_nicoll]

[...] [M]odern Westerners can be separated by the work they did when they were young and unskilled. One great mass worked in retail, selling goods of one kind or another. A second cohort worked in food service, waiting tables or working a grill. And the third group, seemingly the luck ones, were those rich or privileged enough not to have to work at all -- the ones who were children, then entirely students, and then set off on their careers, without ever having had "just a job."

Comments

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

1. Retail and food service are inherently unskilled.

The people who get those jobs are not lacking in skills, they're just very good at picking up new skill sets quickly.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Ideally, anyway. I've often observed that it's very difficult to do a good job at waiting tables, for instance, if you're lacking a sufficient amount of native intelligence.

Some people don't actually do a good job, though. I've worked with some of them.

Go, Foodservice Cohort!

(I do take ccw71266's point. Retail and foodservice do actually require a fair amount of skill, it's just that people who haven't done it don't consider it "skilled" and you're usually expected to pick it up in the first couple days of work. Or, you know, officially you're supposed to get a week or two but someone quits or calls in sick and suddenly you're up to your ears in tables and it's sink or swim, baby...)

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Having been a waitress, and being arrogant enough to proudly state I have plenty of delicious, nutritious "native intelligence", I know that intelligence doesn't always translate to waiting skills. Of the waitstaff I've known, worked with, and supervised when I was assisting with special needs students, intelligence seemed to have no correlation at all with skills.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

No, intelligence doesn't always translate to waiting skills, that's absolutely my experience. Though I suspect attitude is a component in situations where "obviously" intelligent people manage to do a dreadful job learning to wait tables. I have no support for that hypothesis, it's just my take on it. Most of the people I worked with who fit that category also felt the job was beneath them.

It's also my experience that native intelligence doesn't always come in the sort of package conventionally expected of it. I don't personally think "special needs" means "not intelligent." No matter what special needs a person might have, if they manage to learn to wait tables well, that argues to me that they are, in fact, pretty intelligent.

The job requires the ability to prioritize and organize--on the fly--anywhere from two to ten--or more--sets of customers at one time, and each set needs lots of little tasks done, at the right time, in a way that hopefully won't delay your attending to the other tables. IMO, no one who can learn to do it competently is lacking intelligence.

Or that's how I see it.