Celebrating equality on Martin Luther King Day.

Working in the restaurant industry has a lot of ups and downs.

First of all, it's a very grueling job because it is mostly based on customer service and manual labor.

Everyday each one of us servers must carry a smile on their face no matter what is happening.

Tips absolutely require that.

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I do mean every single day also. People that work in the restaurant industry have a tendency to work 7 days a week, and most of those days we are there all day long.

If you're also blogging or writing fiction then more power to you.

I don't think most people realize how many times we lift an extremely heavy tray, or a set of oak high chairs, or pick up a big table. You get a lot of exercise in this industry.

I worked as a systems analyst for 10 years, and I have to say I made a lot more money doing that. However, there are some servers that are capable of making a lot of money here.... they just work something like a hundred hours a week.

That's incredibly tough on a person's knees, back, shoulder and everything else.

There are some good sides to working in the restaurant industry though. I don't think I've ever seen another industry that was such an incredible Melting Pot.

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At our restaurant we have white people, black people, Mexican people, Asian people, straight people, gay people, lesbians, transgender people, and every single race or creed you can possibly think of.... all working together every single day.

There's simply no place for discrimination when you have a group of people that rely on each other the way that we do.

If I'm helping a table but I have several other things going on, I might need Raul to go talk to them for a minute for me. I might need Steve to bring them a tray of lemons. I might need Rashad to help me carry the second tray of food.

We develop relationships. These relationships are very important.

Everyone develops relationships in their working environment, but they aren't always positive. When I was a systems analyst there were lots of little cliques at the firm I worked for.

The richest people that were making all of the money with their giant offices would never interact with the smaller people that were barely getting by with titles like Clerk.

That's another type of discrimination in and of itself.

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It's the old I think I'm better than you because I make more money than you do and it's extremely prevalent in the world of business.

Now I did pretty well working at my computer back then. I always had tons of emails every day, and everyone was always waiting to talk to me.

People needed things from me. They took me out to lunch. I felt good in a lot of ways, but I also noticed all the Discrimination it was happening in our organization and I hated it.

In many ways it is a terrible thing not to be making the amount of money I was making before. However, it makes me feel really good to see the interaction and the joy that each of us feel when we greet each other in the morning.

There's no place for inequality in our restaurant.

There's no place for discrimination here at all.

Every now and then we will get a customer that is a bigot.

What do you do? Well the customer's always right. We smile and hope for a big tip. It happens to everybody though.

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Each one of us has been discriminated against.

That's what you need to realize as you go through life. The dream is a free and beautiful world without discrimination. If you don't like being discriminated against, then why do you discriminate against others?

Let's keep our world beautiful.

Let's love each other for who we are, and realize we need to work together to make a better planet.

I hope that you are having a great Martin Luther King Day.