The Meal Schedule

While in any given restaurant’s employ, your dietary schedule will inevitably change. When your job consists of either cooking food for thousands of strangers or carrying meals to people at times when society suggests meals should be taken, you tend to become immune to the callings of traditional human hunger.

According to the undisputable law of Wikipedia being right 100 % of the time, most Americans typically have breakfast between 7-8 AM.

In direct comparison, restaurant work has convinced me that the first meal I should have every day should be no earlier than 2:30 PM. A solid craving for a full dinner usually hits me at about midnight.

So in some restaurants, there’s something like a bowl of candy or a some fruit or mints for the customers near the entrance that the host staff and servers usually snack on when nobody is looking.

My restaurant doesn’t have that.

It’s actually for this very reason that I had such disdain for this random drunk lady leaving my restaurant at standard dinner hours this evening.



My nearby host friend placated her by attempting to rummage through the desk drawer looking for someone else’s Altoids. After he encountered mild difficulty (and by mild I mean major), I decided to cut in briefly.

In an effort to placate her by offering an alternative something-for-nothing deal, I asked her this;

“Would you like a free toothpick instead?”

She seemed unmoved by my offer.



I tried to make the toothpicks seem more candy-like.



This woman then looked at me as if I had just told her I was planning on raping her grandmother.



I laid the sarcasm on thick, as I imagined that any sane person would do when confronted with a preposterous request.



Ultimately, I got away with it. Using sarcasm or subtle shaming of the target is a great way to get people in the restaurant setting to leave you alone. I’m proud of myself for being able to delicately pull lines like that off. It can get you out of something, or in my next post, IN to something. Like a room with the Stanley Cup in it.

…But that’s a story for another time.

A lack of compassion during the holiday season

It was a waiter's worst nightmare; The quintessential shift where everything went wrong. It wasn't a dream this time.

My shift started with an influx of tables. A fifteen-top here, a six-top there, a seven here, and a two-top in the last table open.

Normally, it’s not a big issue to have a full section. When each of the people you’re taking care of have specific needs and requests that change the amount of time you can devote to the others, it rapidly becomes a big problem.



My table of seven told me they wanted to catch a show in town in an hour and a half. That wasn’t a major ordeal, because I hear that all the time. I took a beverage order. The older women at the table told me they enjoy Maker’s Mark bourbon. Being a bourbon guy myself, I joked rather ironically that “we were going to get along great!”

Little did I know.

Cue the first real problem.



With a full section and a whole list of other things I need to prioritize, it isn’t easy to divide a large party into three or four separate checks. It makes it even more difficult when each person wants to pay for specific things.

During my attempt at sorting out this mess, I had asked a manager to present a bottle of wine to another table that had sent the first bottle back. The reason for that?



Now, I agree that 2008 wasn’t humanity’s proudest year.



Normally, most average joes aren’t sophisticated enough to be able to find unpalatable differences between two neighboring vintages of the same wine. The difference between an actual wine expert and a complete pile of dicks is that the expert won’t send back two different bottles of wine when he sees that his server is swamped with requests on a packed Saturday night in a restaurant.

He ended up sending back the second bottle as well. The reason?



The reasons that is an unacceptable answer are as follows;
-On a busy Saturday, requests inevitably take longer.
- In this particular case, the gentleman wasn’t even finished eating his appetizer course. His wine had arrived right on the cusp of transition between his appetizer and his dinner.
- Sending back wine twice is the trademark of a complete twat waffle. Especially when the only reason is because it’s arrived 3-5 minutes later than you ordered it.

In the meantime, my two-top table had multiple allergies. I, by the regulations imposed on me by the company itself and punishable by firing, could not take or send in the table’s order without discussing the allergies with the management and the chefs. The guests themselves (A middle aged married couple) were overwhelmingly patient with me and the time I needed to make that whole process happen, but I was interrupted twice by women from the original table (the elderly folks with multiple checks and a massive time constraint) so that I could be rudely reminded that they were not only in a hurry, but needed to settle their towering pile of checks that second.

This jumped to the top of my priority list -- I immediately started accepting the multiplicity of payment forms that only ONE of the ladies wanted me to process. I felt like I was accepting a feudal dowry.



One of the other old ladies in the party had found my manager and proceeded to tell him that “everything had gone wrong.”

When he asked what specifically had gone wrong, the grouchy old crone just shook her head and exclaimed, “EVERYTHING. Just--everything.” Which, to me, meant ‘in all reality, not that much.’

If I had to inconvenience a server by having multiple checks, I would give him or her the peace of mind he deserves by having an even split, and processing one form of payment each. These disheveled old women were outrageously particular in what they wanted to pay for, and used a combination of cash, credit cards, gift cards, and paper gift certificates. I absolutely couldn’t deal with it, so I handed them all to the nearest manager. You correctly guessed that any tip I had any chance of getting was forced through the cracks underneath the weight of all of those convoluted forms of payment.

All of a sudden, the six top with the wine snob wanted to leave. Another waiter had gone by while I was settling payments and swiped the man’s credit card. Apparently, I had forgotten to remove ONE of the bottles of wine from his check.

He angrily spouted to me about how he didn’t end up getting that bottle of wine, and about how he wanted his credit card transaction voided and then have his card swiped for the correct amount. The cherry on top of this sundae of polite requests?



When things started slowing down, I was able to catch up. I was so gracious to have customers who were treating me not only cordially, but with undue compassion that I became way too friendly. My service became exceptional--waiting nearby with beverage refills, offering warming hand towels after every course, inquiring fully about all of the little details of everyone I was serving, et cetera. I made more money in the last leg of that evening than I made in any normal busy Saturday, and I blame it completely on the contrast of the evening’s events.

When Christmas approaches, you would expect that people would be more lenient, show patience, mercy, and all kinds of positive emotions as they prepare themselves for the very holidays founded on the principles of the finest human graces. People eat with family members they haven’t seen in a while, they have time off of work, and they give gifts and take care of each other. Alternatively, do people tend to have shorter fuses when that holiday sanctity is even modestly threatened, even with a less-than-perfect dinner?

I’d like to know what you think.

Paying the Bill; A Duel of Honor

There are very few situations in the daily fray of serving tables that put you uncomfortably on the spot through no fault of your own. People usually don't go off on you if you've done nothing wrong, but very occasionally they do. Sometimes, all it takes for you to be put on the spot is something simple like dropping the check.

From here, there are a couple ways it can go down.



You don't even have a chance to let go of the check before the tug of war begins.



This situation is a bit awkward because people will try to steal the check from you before you put it on the table. If multiple people go for it at once, you could be in the middle of a violent scuffle. When one person tries to put his or her card in the book and give it to you, it's usually a combination of them smacking you with it and fending off the grabbing hands trying to supplant the card in the book with their own.

After getting the wind knocked out of you by a checkbook, you also get displeased grimaces and slow, patronizing head shakes from the others at the table who wanted to pay.

It could also go down like this;



If you get approached, someone (usually a foreigner) will discreetly hand you a card so that nobody else gets a chance to pay.

The problem is that when you go back to announce that someone else has already paid, you get the death stare from everyone else at the table.



The check drop can also be a bit perilous because of the pending hazard of samurai-like dueling between the restaurant patrons.



When people start fighting over a check amongst themselves, I find that it's best to back away slowly and without saying a word. They'll sort it out eventually, and hopefully you won't have to witness an actual decapitation before you go to process the payment.

The best part is, I do this when I go out to eat too. I have no idea why.

One of the things that stands to reason when people fight over the check is that they are typically generous. Since they have no reservations about paying for the dinner that their families and friends just had, they probably won't mind giving you a generous tip for all your hard work.

That's a myth--I've had people fight tooth and nail over paying the bill, but then left me maybe 5%-10% maybe about a third of the time. It simply doesn't make any sense.

The Classic Dine-and-Ditch

A lot of things I write about are severe annoyances to restaurant staff, but what happened to me recently really tests the limits of what most servers are trained to address with any amount of optimism.

I definitely had the worst day in the history of restaurant work on this particular day. Not only were there no English-speaking people around for me to take care of, they all conveniently used cash to pay for their checks. This means there was no possible way I could get any kind of a tip greater than two bucks and thirteen cents worth of "keep the change."

But then this gem of a human being came in to eat. Something wasn't quite right about him, but I don't think I could have decisively said what it was. He was an older bloke, not terribly perceptive, prone to conversational redundancy and verbal self-contradiction.



On second thought, I'm completely convinced he was retarded.

He asked for his bill, and I gave it to him pretty quickly. The convo happened like this;

Crazy guy; Hey, don't go anywhere sonny! I've got money for you I think.

Me; Ok. I'll wait right here.

Crazy guy; (Rifles through wallet for about two excruciatingly long minutes) ...Urmarm...I guess I don't have the money I was going to give you for the food. Oh wait, can you change this hundred dollar bill I just found?

Me; Sure can. Leaving now.

After I went and broke his hundred dollar bill, I considered my options. In any other circumstance, I would have take the cost of his food out of the change, but I thought in this particular instance that he wouldn't have quite understood what I did. Which actually could have potentially turned out in my favor, come to think of it.

Instead I did the opposite of what made sense, guided by my compassion and concern for this man's ever-weakening grasp on the world around him. I walked back with all $100 dollars of change and proceeded to count them out right in front of him. I finally concluded triumphantly with "...99, and one hundred! All there sir. I'll pick up the check in just a second."

I returned several seconds later to find that he had left three of the dollars on the table, but not any money toward the actual bill. I instantly got angry. Did he NOT see me give him back all of the change? Is he really that far gone? Why wasn't I not stupid and why didn't I just do what I would have normally done?

The worst part was, given the horrible 5-6% tipping on the other three tables I had, I now was indebted to the restaurant for this particular table. Coming into work yesterday for six hours actually COST ME MORE than if I had stayed in bed eating graham crackers and watching Maury issue paternity tests to deadbeat fathers.

In most restaurants, there is a specific policy for what happens when people ditch you on a check. In the last restaurant I worked in, the Chinese people in management made it clear that if someone leaves without paying, the waiter was charged with paying HALF of the bill out of that night's tips. If it happens again? The waiter pays the WHOLE bill. I didn't even want to imagine what the third offense was.

In a corporate chain, I imagine the rules are slightly different, but I suppose I'll find that answer out soon enough.

Let's Blame the Kitchen!

Servers usually have six or seven thousand things on their minds at any given time. Throw in the fact that their performances are uniquely rewarded with gratuity. Also, throw in the happenstance that sometimes, the people servers wait on aren't the most understanding people, nor have ever had to work in a restaurant.

When these things all come together, you find that on a nightly basis, waiters, bartenders, and support staff can get very crafty when it comes to diverting the blame for their individual screw-ups.

Here's what I mean;



So naturally, the server in this picture forgot something. Harmless enough, but in order to sustain the belief that the guest has the best waiter in the whole world and would never tip that waiter less than 20%, the waiter resorts to;



The guest is then somewhat pleased that his or her order will be arriving soon, and that the waiter is now going to tear someone in the kitchen a brand new set of assholes.

In reality, this is what is usually happening;



This is a strategy I share with new people to the business. It saves you from being yelled at by irate guests, it familiarizes you with procedure in the kitchen, and it absolves you from blame coming from all directions.

Of course, there's always the possibility that you did everything right, and the kitchen actually bastardizes your order.



In that case, it's karma that rears its ugly head. You did everything right, and no matter how much you tell them that the kitchen fell right on its face when it sent out her order, you have become the restaurant Satan right at her table. You're basically out any amount of tip money, can't go back and fix anything, and may as well have someone else close it out for you.

True enough, I tell everyone that a good waiter is only a good waiter if he or she is good at damage control. If you constantly fuck up orders and are too slow, you'll do decently enough if you can make all of your guests love you and forgive you for everything. Even if the kitchen has to take one for the team every once and again.

Your time is apparently more valuable, sir.

There are always subtle things that make servers angry. Most times, people don't realize they're being shitheads until someone tells them, but in this entry, common courtesy is the one thing lacking in the people I'm choosing to come down on. Which makes it OK.

One of the things that I absolutely abhor is the way some people completely ignore you when you approach them.

Example;







Most times, people who do this have no concept of anything but themselves. They'll prattle on and on about some shit that nobody cares about, completely forgetting that the reason they came to a restaurant is because they are SITTING DOWN TO HAVE A MEAL. In order to do that, the person or people who can't shut their fucking mouths long enough to pay attention to anything else need to actually pause and give their order to a SERVER in order to be fed.

These kinds of people usually expect that they don't ever have to stop speaking. They assume that their food orders are transmitted telepathically to the kitchen, prepared instantly, and placed in front of them without having to break their preciously trivial stream of consciousness for two fucking seconds in order to speak to the waiter.

Even worse, there are the kinds of people one of my friends had to deal with. A long-time coworker of mine, this girl approached the table of six that she was assigned FOUR TIMES in ten minutes to try and take down their order for dinner. Needless to say, these cock-brains just kept right on blabbing their dicks off the entire time, completely ignoring her. Assuming they weren't ready to order after the fourth unacknowledged trip to the table, she went off and did other things for a brief period, only to hear that the people at the table were pissed off that nobody had come by to take their order.

These kinds of people are the worst kinds of human beings in any restaurant. Every waiter or waitress has a table full of shit-munchers like this at least once per shift. If not for common courtesy, these people should at least know that servers don't generally have time to wait around for ten or fifteen minutes for you to finish talking about whatever bullshit keeps tumbling out of your mouth until you are out of breath. Waiters and waitresses have to go around to the other four or five tables they have, refill sodas, open wine, process payments, run food over, and clean tables for new guests, and if you're not ready when the server is, you're just going to have to wait until that server has time to go around to you again. However much you think you're worth, a server's time is worth infinitely more than yours.