ABD waitress--and how is it different from a PhD waitress?

Eating lunch with the kids at P.F. Chang's the other day, I was reminded of the time I saw a grad student (ABD) there from my previous institution/dept.  She was working there.  As a waitress. 

Is this a tragedy? An ABD working as a waitress?

Many faculty that I have known would think so.  I think not.

For I, too, was an ABD waitress. 

I made more money per year as a waitress than I did my first year as an asst. professor.  And I only had to work 25 hrs/wk as a waitress!  Doesn't that put things in an interesting light?  And yes, that was a tenure-track professor job.

I learned a lot working as a waitress.  I like to think it made me more worldly and even more mature.  Several professor colleagues of mine would have been better off spending a few years in the "real world."  Pure academia provides such a narrow set of experiences, really.  One of my colleagues did a lot of different odd jobs before going to grad school, and he's a more interesting, multifaceted person for it, me thinks.  I mean, he can fix his own porch and fund-raise for the orchestra!

I write best if it isn't my full-time job.  Who can write a dissertation 8-hours a day?  Very few of us.  What were my other ABD friends doing when they were done writing for the day?  I'm not sure.  Good question, now that I think about it.  But I was working.  And otherwise having a good time.  My dissertation took a couple years longer than my adviser thought it would.  But it won a national dissertation award and was a book a few years later.  I really, really believe that it was a much better dissertation because I worked and lived and had a few mini-adventures while writing it. 

Being an ABD waitress wasn't bad, but I was scared sh*tless of being a Ph.D. waitress.  It is important to say that.  I felt that my status as grad student provided some legitimacy to my waitressing, made it OK if someone I knew from high school, say, saw me waiting tables.  "Grad student" was a status title that counter-acted the lower status of "waitress."  But interestingly, "Ph.D." would do the opposite--make working as a waitress seem evidence of failure. 

Around this time, I went to a comedy show.  It was a one-woman show, and for reasons I can't recall, she had us all write on an index card (anonymously, but blue for men and pink for women) our biggest fear.  I wrote "failure."  Going through the cards, she told the crowd that this was the first time EVER that she had a woman write "failure."  Men wrote "failure," not women.  Perhaps that was the downside of being an ABD waitress: "ABD" would only protect me for just so long.  "Ph.D. waitress" is really just "waitress." 

And I could have been a waitress with just a bachelor's degree ;)