>So, like I said, if you really really really need a job, don't rule out waitressing.

I certainly would never feel insulted to take a job that's "beneath" my qualifications, if it came to the point where I needed the money that badly. I've done it on plenty of occasions when I've been in between "real" jobs. However, I have to say, waitressing is on my Absolute Last Resort jobs list, along with telemarketing, SPAM PEOPLE FROM HOME FOR BIG $$!, and making porn videos. I'd have to be not only broke (to the point where I didn't even have any furniture left to sell), but also homeless, starving and morbidly depressed. I'm sorry, but that's just the way it is. You're quite welcome to it, if you find it fun, but .... nope.

When I was doing deckhand/bartender work on the ferries (my last extremely low-paid job), the little I saw of the hospitality industry was enough to make me realise I never wanted to see any more of it. You're right that it is invaluable experience for learning to keep your temper around completely nasty people, and I'm glad I did it for that reason. It was an eye-opener to me, too, in some ways -- I learned exactly how vicious and rude people can be, to people they consider "beneath" them and whom they know can't answer back for fear of losing their already pathetic job.

I'll never forget the party cruise on which an unexpectedly big wave made me drop a tray of champagne glasses onto a plate-steel deck -- and the realisation, as I knelt in a puddle of champagne and broken glass clearing it away, that our delightful upper-middle-class guests were standing around the scene laughing openly at me and making loud comments about how stupid I was. I couldn't help thinking that these exact same people would have been fawning all over me if they'd met me in my previous job, where I was running the national branch of a company and making $65 an hour, and that thought increased my contempt for them by several orders of magnitude.

I have never before had a job where it was not only common, but expected, that your customers would treat you like something less than human. And in New Zealand, you get *paid* for service work -- the thought of doing it in the USA, where virtually all of your income comes from tips, doesn't make it any more appealing to me.