I never thought that I’d be praising God for a job in a bar, but lately I’ve been doing just that.

After a couple of weeks and a few thousand resumes, I finally found a nicely lucrative position as a cocktail waitress (Oh, wait, excuse me: “Server”) in a nearby pool bar. While I may not be a brag-worthy job, I am excited to report that the other “servers” said that I should average about $250 in tips on Fridays and Saturdays. Mind you, that’s$250 per night. Had I only known that jobs like this existed in the past, I would never have wasted my time as a regular waitress. Today was a very slow night, and even so, I would have walked away with about $90 if not for my usual ability to lose money. How did I lose this money? By being me.

I, more than anyone I know, misplace things. What kind of things, you ask? Everything, I reply. I think it’s moved past an art form, and more into the realm of magical ability. Really, I think I’m magically gifted in this area. Of course, I’m not really sure what kind of benefit there is to being magically gifted like this, but hey. Who am I to complain about being gifted?

Anyways, while I can’t be entirely certain, I have the distinct impression that I managed to lose somewhere in the vicinity of $40 in tips. Either it slipped out of my pocket, or someone stole it out of my pocket, or I just plain counted change back incorrectly. My inability to count money is actually one of my biggest embarrassments. Until I started working in the food industry, I was one of those people who couldn’t count their change to save their life. If you gave me the amount I could perform an inverse square root on it, or apply it into the quadratic formula, or even write an essay about it… but count i? Nope. I think there’s a whole bunch of people out there in the world like me, who have change-counting dyslexia. I can add all the numbers up in my head, but when I start trying to apply that to the money in my hand, everything gets all confusing. Of course, I figure I’m in good company with this inability— It’s rumored that Einstein suffered from the same problem.

So, what I figure really happened to the money is that, in my nervousness to count the change back correctly, I probably gave the people back their $20 in addition to all the change. Since the people I’m dealing with are, for the most part, drunken males in their mid 20s, I’m not exactly surprised that I didn’t have any honest refunds.

So I’m poorer than I should have been after 8 hours running around grabbing drinks for people… but on the other hand, my self-esteem has never been better. I’ve received so many heartfelt, thankful compliments during this past shift that I feel like I should be turning sideways to fit my head through doorways.

Just for fun, here’s a list of the pet-names I was called tonight:

Mama
Sweetie
Honey
Hun
Kitten
Sugar
Babe
Sweetcakes
Sweetthang