If I'd have known today what I knew yesterday...

And I was glad when yesterday was over? Today was border-line brutal, but mitigated by the fact I'm getting paid. I started at Hyatt today, and it's everything I remember banquet serving to be. It's non-stop and fast paced when it's busy and when it's slow all you can do it sit around and wait for time to slowly drag onward. Breakfast was an easy and painless function, except for the fact that I had to start at 6 am. It was also kind of neat that I was teamed up with another new-hire, a saucy little smart-ass named Michelle, who was great fun to work with as well as look at. We were outta there at noon, and I was offered a shift starting at 4:00, which I immediately accepted, without a hint of hesitation. I came home, and fell promptly asleep for an hour and a half. I managed to fit in a quick shower and lunch before I left, but no practice, unfortunately.

The dinner wasn't so quick & easy. As usual, I joined the group setting up the room, then did other busy-work, like preparing racks of water glasses & napkin-folding. Then we had to go sit around for almost an hour & wait for the guests (a NYS college teacher's union) to finish up a presentation, which went well over it's scheduled end-time. Which gave us less than 30 minutes to "flip" that side of the room, i.e. clean up and set 17 tables for dinner with 10 settings each. Lest that sound easy, that's 170 full dinner place-settings, complete with wine & water glasses, silverware, coffee cups & saucers, bread plates, wine bottles, salt, pepper, coffee sugars, and other decorations. We had to have a small army of house-keeping & other staffers help us, but it got done, and in time.

Dinner was pretty easy, and was a service dinner... this place doesn't do many buffets, which is too bad. My partner was a really nice guy, although it became apparent that he's found Jesus, and seemed intent on discussing religion with me, although denied he was trying to convert me, which was slight bullshit. He wasn't too obnoxious about it, but he kept inquiring about either my lack of belief or my interest in buddhism.

Next, we had to wait for almost two hours for their after-dinner presentation to finish, which went over an hour longer than it was supposed to, although that's nit-picking in banquet world. Not that this is all bad... we got paid $11.00 and hour to sit on our asses & joke around. As soon as the bastards got up to leave we rushed in & tried to clear as quick as possible, since we all wanted to get the hell out of here. At this point my partner, "D," drew the conversation back to religion, and I was getting tired of his veiled conversion attempts, although he was basically nice so I didn't want to be a dick. So I let him make his points and his arguments for Christianity, and I calmly removed what feeble legs those arguments had to stand on. Eventually he quietly gave up, which was a relief. Two of the tired old arguments he used were appealing to the authority of the Bible, in which I pointed out the obvious question-begging (which I had to explain to him), and also - get this - Pascal's Wager. I didn't think anybody seriously used this one anymore, but there it was. I just don't get why people can't just accept that not everyone thinks just like them or believes the same thing as them & leave others alone. There's a disturbingly self-righteous smugness with born again Christians that seems to make them ram their faith down everyone's throat, and doesn't allow them to understand that not everyone thinks like them. Which is a good thing, since all the born-agains I've run into have had the worst reasoning skills I've come across. Sheesh. Believe what you want, but for fuck's sake leave other people alone.

I'm off to beg for rent money tomorrow, and have another dinner function at Hyatt... can't wait till the bread starts rolling in.... I'm down to almost literally pinching pennies.