I have a confession to make, a secret vice - I have a tendency to harass waiting staff in restaurants. It's not what you think - I don't furtively pat bottoms, anything like that. I just can't leave them alone - can't stop watching them as they go about their work on other tables, talking to them when they attend to mine, and - worst of all - advising them on their future career paths, like some self appointed Marje Proops of the catering world. Are they paid enough? Are their hours reasonable? Does it get really busy? What are the tips like? Are they at college or anything? If not, shouldn't they think about it? And quickly? This behaviour, this outpouring of unsolicited advice, more often than not dispensed slurred, at 1.30am when all the other customers are gone, and chairs are being placed on top of tables, isn't really what a waiter or a waitress needs. They just want you to eat your food and go, if you can manage to leave behind a small mess and a large tip, all the better. I know this, but I can't help it. I'm suffering from over-empathy, the kind that happens when you yourself happen to be a veteran of catering Vietnam. I was a schoolgirl waitress.

My story is as simple and as complicated as that. Simple, because most people do some kind of work when they're growing up for extra moolah. Complicated, because my personal experience of waitressing left me feeling that, as child labour goes, it was only marginally preferable to being sent up chimneys, or down mine shafts, when they happened to run out of canaries.

My sister has a fair idea of what I'm talking about, as does my brother. One by one, independently, we all ended up working at the same place - one of those motel-cum-bar motorist facilities situated on the side of a major road. This particular establishment was situated a few miles from our village, and considering what I'm about to recall, I'd better leave the particulars at that. For us, this motel was to become a cross between the Overlook hotel in The Shining and an unofficial university course in Drudgery Studies. As my sister once mused: 'I'm not sure that what happened to us there was entirely legal.' Possibly more significant was what my brother said to my parents after his first shift as pot-washer: "You know, I think I will have another go at my A levels after all."'

I was just coming up to 14 when my father drove me up to the motel to see about a job, the same job my sister had just left, preferring the relative glamour of exhausting dawn shifts at a bakery. That should have been a bit of a clue, but it failed to register with this particular schoolgirl Sherlock. I just wanted some money to supplement my lack of income. When we arrived, the proprietor (I'll call her Mrs C) greeted us in the snack bar, a tall, gaunt, harassed-looking woman, with grey-streaked hair, and a remarkable odour that was part chip fat, part Camay soap. Completely ignoring me, Mrs C asked my father: 'Is she as good a worker as her sister?' 'Yes,' lied my father without hesitation. That seemed to do the trick. Mrs C turned her attention to me. 'Saturday morning. 8.30. Black skirt, white blouse, hair tied back.' All this barked at top speed, in the style of a B-movie sergeant major. And that was that. I was hired.

It only took one shift for me to realise my error, even quicker for Mrs C to decide that I was the biggest idiot she'd ever had the misfortune to employ. But then, to her, everyone was, until, like my sister, they resigned (which was often). At which point she would mourn them as if they were beloved escaped slaves, the like of which she would never see again. For the rest of us, who hadn't the wit or guts to resign, the harassment was instant and all-encompassing, from the moment she picked up her school-aged weekend team from their homes on Saturday morning to the blessed hour of 6pm when our shifts ended, and we could race home to try to slough off the stench of gravy, kitchen grease, and quiet desperation in scalding hot bubblebaths.

I grew to dread hearing the low growl of Mrs C's estate car at the bottom of our drive on Saturday morning. The sequence was always the same. A short parp, followed by several increasingly hysterical ones, all in the space of about 50 seconds. Mrs C was not the most patient of women. However fast you hurried, it was never fast enough. I could have been shot from a cannon from our living room window, straight onto her back seat, and she would still have been sat there, wild with frustration, muttering about 'the time'. Everybody present and correct, not to mention miserable, she would then drive us to the motel, assigning us all our duties on the way. 'Lots to do,' she would invariably say, glaring at us meaningfully, as we swung into the staff car park. I'll say this for her: She was never wrong.

I suppose I should give you some impression of the establishment. From the road, it looked old fashioned and quaint - none of your all-day-fry-up lorry driver rubbish. We were there for travelling salesmen, local couples who hated each other, celebrating anniversaries on the cheap and coach trip tourists, who stopped by, presumably to have their suspicions confirmed about the extreme tedium of our stretch of countryside.

In my day, there was a 'posh' silver service restaurant, which employed only the prettiest waitresses. Needless to say, neither myself or my sister ever so much as lifted a green bean in this hallowed, glamorous arena. Upstairs, there were the bedrooms, where the sales reps received their breakfast trays. A job much dreaded, because they tended to open the door in their underpants, with a leer on their faces, and their hair doing a Ken Dodd. Then there was the bar, where you'd hurry into the smokey, boozy atmosphere, trying not to scream as your hands melted on red-hot plates of cottage pie no-one seemed to want to admit to ordering.

Finally, there was my 'patch', the snack bar. Behind the counter, where you took the orders, there was a door leading to the galley for snack bar 'prep'. Beyond which lay the main kitchen, the larders, the sinks, and the rest. Let's just call it 'backstage'. This is where I'd start my working day, trudging around the galley, 'prep'-ing for the lunchtime rush. It was also where you got a taste for what it must have been like to cook for an army, albeit an army that marched on an upset stomach. For all Mrs C's screeched orders to 'tidy up' and 'wash hands', hygiene did not seem highly prized at this motel. If a sandwich fell off a plate, it was merely reassembled and given a sneaky dusting with your cuff, before being delivered with aplomb. Elsewhere, cold meats lay next to cheeses and vegetables in fridges, the same knives were used for steak and gateau, and chefs routinely wore aprons so stiff with grease, they looked capable of standing at the table and rustling up a Chicken Kiev on their own.

Looking back, I realise with horror that the motel was something of a BSE Grand Central, but you don't think that way when you're 14 and just biding your time until the next dropped steak and kidney pud has to be scooped up off the floor with a fish slice. In fact, you tried not to think at all as you plodded about the galley prepping. This entailed 'doing' cutlery (wrapping up knives and forks in cheap napkins, in their hundreds, to the point where you actually hallucinated), making bread and butter mountains for sandwich orders, chopping up salad vegetables so small they mushed together to form alien slime in the bottom of plastic tubs, cutting up Stilton and Cheddar for the ploughmans lunches, trying to deposit great gloops of mustard and mayonnaise from huge catering jars into little silver dishes without covering your shoes. All this, so that when Mrs C popped her head around the wall, you had Something To Do.

Not having Something To Do was a cardinal sin, punishable by being frog-marched to the sinks for a sweaty, filthy spell of washing up. Many a proud teenage demi-wave wilted in the onslaught of the scalding hot water and acid-strength detergent solution we had to use. The saucepans were the worst - drying one would take 10 tea towels and the entire front of your blouse. Others caught in the act of not having Something To Do found themselves mopping the kitchen floor, cleaning out fridges, changing the oil in the fat fryers, or scraping the grease off the kitchen walls, from top to bottom. This last one was achieved by gambolling about on stepladders at the sides of the piping hot stoves with an asthma-inducing spray detergent and a dishcloth, with the chefs peering up your skirt. And always, always, jumping clean out of your skin when the bell rang in the snack bar galley, shrilly proclaiming that some poor innocent was outside, suffering from wild delusions that they might be able to procure something edible.

This was showtime. You would trot out, take the order with a smile, ram it onto a hook above your head, and gently panic as you realised that you'd clean forgotten to say defrost the prawns, or butter the bread (or be born rich). Such little problems dealt with - briskly, efficiently, sometimes within the space of a couple of hours - invariably, the next time you looked up at the hooks, they would be covered with orders that seemed to materialise out of thin air. This was the 'lunchtime rush', and it passed in the manner of a feverish dream of inefficiency. Plates were practically frisbee-ed across rooms at customers, cutlery thrown like darts, so that you could race back to the galley to prepare the next culinary delight, all the while fending off Mrs C's vocal and often near-physical assaults on your person. Never the most pleasant of souls, during the lunchtime rush, she would transform into an icon of insanity, a demanding, wailing banshee who, when you least expected it, sprang up from behind walls and doors like the hand-out-of- the-grave scene in Carrie.

As I write, I am trying to remember the rest of the staff, but it's impossible. My motel had such a brisk turnover, getting to know people was like trying to bond with strangers you encounter in the revolving doorways of office buildings. One man, a chef, I do remember with affection (he had a motorbike). Another girl, a waitress, I recall for her huge breasts, which contrasted rather painfully with my continuing allegiance to vests. The rest all merge into a grey sludge of miserable, over-worked, under-paid, gossiping, carping humanity. As do the customers, but, in their case, it was usually my fault they were miserable. Not exactly Born To Serve, I became used to coping with disappointment ('I don't have a knife and fork'), disgusted incredulity (I once served an entire coach-load with a reeking dishcloth slung over my shoulder) and embarrassed complaints ('This scampi is still frozen'). Perhaps slightly unreasonably, for a waitress, I wished the customers would just go away and stop 'bothering' me with their hunger, their thirst, their terrible, seemingly insatiable, need for condiments and clean cutlery. Who did they think they were?

Even when the 'lunchtime rush' was over, it wasn't over. You still had to deal with the 'afternoon lull' and its unexpected coach-loads. These would always arrive at the precise moment I found myself left alone with the only other schoolgirl 'ug' (the pretty waitresses having been spirited away by the chefs to 'make beds' upstairs). I lost count of the number of times, I would stroll nonchalantly through the door to answer the bell, and find myself confronted with a throng of 50 people all expecting tea and crumpets ('And a ham sandwich for the driver') to be served within the next five minutes.

On these occasions, the one kettle would be boiled ceaselessly for the next hour, as we grappled with the little tin pots for tea, hot water, and milk. Only ever used in catering, these vessels were lethal, the handles able to conduct volcano-strength heat within milliseconds, causing terrible burns to staff and customers alike. Once they'd gone, the snack bar would resemble a scene from the Bible involving plagues of locusts, chairs on their sides, and cruet sets missing everywhere. Then it was back to the little staff annexe to eat our horrible lunch (leftovers du jour). Mrs C popping by every so often to exclaim: 'Haven't you got something to do?'

Why did I stay? I have absolutely no idea, but stay I did for two long years. During which time, I found an outlet for my misanthropy which would henceforth only be sated by journalism. Throughout my stint at the motel, my father insisted that the experience could only be character-building, and indeed that insane, irritating side of my character that likes to drunkenly empathise with uninterested waiters and waitresses still flourishes nicely. As does my creeping awe and dread for anything remotely connected to the bottom end of the catering industry. As my sister recently observed sagely: 'After Mrs C, we could have that Gordon Ramsay in a second.' At the time of speaking, she was sitting opposite me, casually munching on a plate of pasta. My own meal remained untouched, as I stared around me, blinking and flinching, unable to believe the evidence of my own eyes. In the interests of this article, we had revisited the motel of our 'yoof', returned, as they say, to the scene of the crime.

However, as is so often the case, everything had changed. In the intervening years, Mrs C had moved on, and the motel had been refurbished. Everywhere was freshly painted and bright, like the Queen was due to arrive, the spanking clean kitchen on full view to the public, a menu you could imagine picking something to eat from. Most unnervingly, all the waiting staff looked perfectly happy, not abused at all. When I asked our waiter if he ever had to do any fat fryer emptying, he looked at me as I had gone completely barking - they had cleaners for that kind of thing. 'Not in my day, they didn't,' I hissed, regressing with frightening speed to my self-pitying 14-year-old self. Suddenly, from somewhere within the motel, a bell rang out clear and strong . It took a fraction of a chilling moment to realise that, this time, it wasn't for me.