I am the overnight manager at the local IHOP restaurant. The normal everyday life of the restaurant is quite dull and boring. We are open Sunday through Thursday from 6 A.M. until midnight. On Friday and Saturdays we are open twenty-four hours a day. When the witching hour hits at midnight on these two nights, in particular, it is like being one of the main characters in a Tim Burton movie, maybe perhaps, “A Nightmare at IHOP”.

The first of the stragglers start to uproot themselves from their graves around 2:30 A.M. This is when the majority of the clubs start to shut down all over Birmingham. You know what kind of night you are going to have when you see the first of your guests trying to detangle themselves from the restraints of their cars. If it takes them twenty minutes just to exit the vehicle you know you’re in for a bumpy ride.

The next thing you notice is the clothing of the people that are about to enter the restaurant. Clothes make up a huge part of this chilling experience. These girls have also rummaged into a t-shirt drawer and decided that a t-shirt will be the choice dress of the night. The t-shirt barely covers the back of their hairy upper thighs. But hey, the mirror that they looked into before they left their house for the night said, “Girl, you look damn sexy”. Glittery makeup is acceptable when it is worn on the eyelids but when you have liberally powdered your entire upper body it is only accentuating the stretch marks. The majority of the women are extremely intoxicated and they are attempting to walk into the restaurant on eight inch high heels. They tend to resemble the leaning tower of Pisa because they are so drunk. The men. Most of the men that walk next to the creatures of the night have one arm firmly attached to their date’s ample rear and the other, (if they are not grabbing the crotch of their jeans) then they are holding their pants up by the belt loops. The generation of today, feel that I want to know what color their underwear is, and they proudly display this by wearing their jeans buckled at the knees.

They come into the restaurant like they were still at the club, loud and deaf. They ask for a table of four but there are actually eight of them and we follow them throughout the restaurant until they decided where they are going to sit. Once seated, the fun really begins. The servers have been there all night. They are extremely tired and irritated because they work for too little money and have to deal with the ignorance of some people about tipping. The servers already know what they are in for when our tanked up table of eight wants to know how much water costs. Really? But none the less, our server battens down the hatches, brushes the imaginary hairs of her shoulders of the battle gear we call “uniform”, and with pen and paper gripped tightly within her white-knuckled fists begin to take their order. By the time the server is finished with the order, she limps away with hair disheveled, her little name tag which was once pinned firmly to her chest hanging on for dear life, and a nervous twitch that has slowly started at the corner of her mouth. She proudly waves the ten pages of their food order that this “quirky party of eight” has ordered. There are so many changes to the original menu that I feel
IHOP was morphed into a Burger King restaurant. Once the food has arrived to the table, the server has to nudge our guests because they have fallen asleep. Many of them, while sleeping, have accumulated the little pools of saliva at the corner of their mouths’. Like General
MacArthur to his troops, they proceed to bark orders and commands to our server which keeps her running back and forth between the galley and the table. She trudges on because this is her job and her income depends upon the best service she can deliver to even the most dissatisfied of guest. Once our merry gangs of mirth makers have been fed burped, and content, they are ready to tally up the meal and tip our ever so grateful server. When the bill has been paid they tell our server to “keep the change”. Fifty-eight cents for her time and their trouble. The server walks away, head held high, tears glistening in her eyes (threatening to spill over) but she forces them down because she is the best of the best. She hikes up her sleeves and starts to plow through the mess that was left by our “patrons of the
night”.