When I was a teenager, I was a server in a small-town restaurant where every table had a deck of cards for the coffee crowd, and the pancakes covered entire plates. It was a good job for a teenager, except for the fact that people got hungry so darn early in the morning.

Opening early was especially hard for me on weekends. But I had a bit of entertainment to look forward to every Sunday around mid-morning. That’s when the church crowd began to hurry in, everyone hoping to have one of the fabulous caramel rolls the restaurant was famous for. If my memory serves me correctly (which is unlikely), the Lutherans got out of church first, leaving the Congregationalists to pray that there would be some caramel rolls left. Often there were not, partly because we Catholics usually had our services on Saturday night and the agnostics had no schedule to keep at all.

Witnessing the ensuing chaos, I learned some valuable life lessons, like how living one’s faith often demands great sacrifice, and how hard it is to practice forgiveness when one has one’s heart set on a caramel roll and coffee and gets only coffee.

As a server I had many insights like these. I also learned some very practical lessons. For example, I learned never to wear white while working with mustard and ketchup. I don’t work with mustard and ketchup much anymore, but to this day, I never wear white.

I learned to make coffee, though I never did learn to drink it—maybe because I didn’t learn to make it all that well.

I learned how to carry three plates in one hand—theoretically—and to stay to the right when using the swinging kitchen doors, especially when I was carrying three plates in one hand.

I learned to plan ahead and to make the most of every step. In the restaurant business, saving steps meant that if I was heading back to the kitchen to place an order, I should take some dirty dishes with me. They would have to be carried back eventually anyway, and my customers were unlikely to do it. All these years later, I still make the most of every step I take. For example, whenever I head to the kitchen to get a snack, I always grab the dirty dishes from my last one.

Like everyone in customer service, I learned that customers are not always right, but they’re more likely to remain customers if you treat them as though they are. When I was a teenager, cigarettes were sold in vending machines, and my customers would often ask me to fetch theirs. What could I do? They were my customers. But I didn’t want anyone else in the restaurant to think I smoked, so I made a production of returning the cigarettes. “Here are YOUR cigarettes! I hope I got the right kind for YOU! Here is YOUR change for YOUR cigarettes.” Often they’d thank me by offering me a cigarette.

Wait staff learn patience and tolerance with a variety of human behavior. Well, some of them do anyway. I’m not sure I did. I know you find it hard to believe, but I once punched a customer right in the gut while waiting tables in a bar. I’m not proud of it—well maybe I’m a little proud of it. The bartender, who was also my supervisor, saw the whole thing and said the customer had it coming. Maybe he thought so too; he still gave me a tip.

While I didn’t learn patience and tolerance from that experience, I did learn that I’m a lot tougher than I thought. (So did the customer.) I think that was also when I learned I wasn’t cut out to wait tables.

Dorothy Rosby is a blogger and humor columnist whose column appears regularly in publications throughout the West and Midwest. She’s the author of four books of humorous essays all available locally at Mitzi’s Books in Rapid City and on Amazon.