by Jessica Schmidt
It’s summer. And when it hits 11pm, it would be safe to say that a lot of twenty-three-year-olds are probably at parties or bars or even just hanging out with a few friends at home. Most of them aren’t on their way to work like Alex Mellinger. “My shift is 11pm to 6 am, five nights a week,” Alex informs me.
Alex works as a waitress and hostess at Perkin’s Restaurant in Niles, where the dining room is open 24 hours a day. She serves customers on her three nights scheduled during the week and hosts on Friday and Saturday night. She gets paid over minimum wage for hosting, too. “Apparently I’m actually a super-good hostess,” she adds in. “Someone who does the [hostess] job without getting in fights with servers is a rarity.”
When not hosting, of course, Alex is paid a server’s minimum wage and relies mostly on tips for income. Having worked at a restaurant that served only lunch and dinner, I wondered how good the tips were at night. “Oh, I usually make a pretty good sum,” Alex tells me, “though this happens after two in the morning.”
She explains why this is the case. “The bars close at two, so that’s when people are bored and hungry. Most of our customers at night are drunk or high and really have no idea how much they’re ordering or how much they tip. Afterwards we get the cops. Cops come in late, after most all patrol jobs are over. They get half off and so they leave good tips, too. And it helps that I’ve gotten to know them all. I’m even friends with some of them of Facebook,” she laughs
I like how bluntly Alex talks about the nighttime customers at Perkin’s and I wonder how interesting this makes the night shift for her. She goes on to describe the unique conversations her customers start up, the fights that break out, the messes that have to be cleaned up in the restrooms, and the appetites the customers bring. “So many people order the chicken tender melt or the Tremendous Twelve,” she says. Intrigued, I ask more about the latter.
“It’s three eggs, four pieces of meat, four pancakes, and some potatoes. I guess the ‘some potatoes’ is supposed to make it equal twelve,” she says. And they go on to order more. It seems these less-than-sober customers are constantly using Perkin’s as a safe haven after intoxication ensues and are always ready to refuel.
There are more trends Alex sees in these regular patrons. “For some reason, everyone wants water and everyone wants ranch. It doesn’t matter what they get, they want ranch to dip it in or smother on top. It’s like a phenomenon,” she adds humorously.
Maybe these large dinners with ranch are not the smartest combinations after all. “Someone vomits in the bathroom every night and usually they don’t have good aim,” she tells me, though she refuses to be the one to clean it up. “We make one of the kitchen guys do it.”
As Alex talks creatively about dealing with the late shift, I begin to wonder what made her take it in the first place and how she copes with it in her daily life. “I basically sleep from 8am to 3pm,” she says. “Then I have 3pm to 10pm to do whatever I want, and that’s the time I like anyway. I started this shift because I do theater and it enables me to go to rehearsals in the evenings. It just works for me, I guess.”
Alex typically has two nights off a week and the evening I interviewed her was one of them. She tries not to change her sleeping schedule too much when she’s off work as to not mess up her daily pattern. She says this isn’t hard, she has adapted and learned to get tired when the sun is coming up. On her nights off, Alex enjoys having friends stay over or catching up on television. “I miss so many of my favorite shows because I’m getting ready for work or out and about before going in, so I TiVo everything and catch up when I’m off,” she says.
I still wonder how someone who sleeps, on average, six to seven hours in broad daylight can have so much energy. As we talk at 10:30 pm, Alex is still high-energy and alert, always cracking jokes and smiling away. Including theater rehearsals into this, I can’t comprehend. Being active in theater myself, I know how much stamina and energy even a two or three hour rehearsal takes. When I do this four or five days of the week for eight or so weeks on end, I’m ready to sleep when I get home. Yet Alex does this and goes to work.
“It’s all about sleeping when I need to sleep, though,” she tells me. “Remember that I get up at 3pm, not eight or nine in the morning. I stay up for almost an hour when I get home, so I make sure I’m really going to stay asleep until I want to get up.”
It seems that working overnight with the type of customers she has would continuously be entertaining at the least, but this is not always the case. “The joking routine just gets old,” Alex states. “Everyone thinks it’s really funny to ask for non-smoking when it’s clear there is no smoking inside anymore, or to say there are eighteen people in their group when there’s really only three.”
“Also,” she adds, “one time a guy broke his nose on a highchair. Okay, it was funny, but really, it was like, did that just happen?”
I think that putting up with these night owl customers would be hard work. “I think it’s like any other job, really,” Alex says. “You have people that are impossible to deal with and you just want to scream at them, and then you have someone who makes you actually like what you do.”
Dealing with the same routine almost every day, Alex looks for ways to spice it up. “I used to change the name on my name tag like, every week. After having about twenty different names, my manager told me to stick to one.”
Along with her name tag, Alex has an apron given from the company as part of her uniform. “They’re pretty cheap about the uniforms,” she says. “I just got my third apron in two and half years because the pocket fell off the first one I had and the second one’s strap was already broken when they gave it to me.”
Though they may skimp on uniforms, Perkins doesn’t skimp on security. Alex says she feels pretty safe while at work. “It’s not really late when I go in and the sun is up when I leave. We have a security guard in the front lobby all night, too.”
I ask her if she has encountered any dangerous situations while she was working. “The most that happens is a fight occurs out of stupidity, but that’s what the security guard is there for. He breaks it up. One time, though, a guy tried to fight the security guard. That was definitely stupid on his part.”
When I ask Alex what she likes most about her job, it’s the stories she has. “It’s annoying to deal with the same situations every night with people that are incoherent, but it’s also really funny and my friends like hearing about it.”
Alex’s may not be at her dream job, but it’s clear to see that she enjoys what she does enough to at least laugh at it. She doesn’t take anything too personal. Her light-hearted and bouncy personality combined with her sense of humor make her the kind of server a place like Perkin’s late at night should always have.
Jessica Schmidt is a sophomore Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theater major at Youngstown State University. She was seen on stage last year in the YSU’s productions of The Baker’s Wife and As You Like It as well as Closer at the Oakland Center for the Arts this September. She enjoys creative writing as a hobby and would one day like to write a full-length play.