The High-Horse Regular

In any restaurant, there are "Regulars." These are the people who come in semi-frequently, order the same thing, tip the same way, and who are either easy to take care of, or utterly impossible to deal with.

In the latter category, you have the basic type of person who wants to sit in the exact same seat every time, order the same thing with over six thousand guidelines for how to prepare it, and often won't tip generously, but assume that he or she is doing everyone a huge favor by coming back over and over again.

When something doesn't go right, they tend to become irate;



One of the bartenders I know had a great story for me about one of these crotchety old attention magnets. He sat down at his usual seat at the bar, and instantly began making demands;



Instead of conceding to the regular's demands, the bartender responded with care and concern for all of the bar's patrons. It went well.



As expected, the old fart didn't pay any mind to the offer the bartender made for another spot at the bar that had a television for his own personal viewing. He expected that he didn't have to move from his seat, and wanted the other people at the bar who were watching world cup soccer to lay down dead for him and his baseball game.

Now I agree that soccer is gratuitously boring. But I disagree wholeheartedly with anyone who comes into an establishment and demands that he get his way (no matter how unpopular) just because he's been there a few more times than the others. I will say one thing for soccer, though; it has the rowdiest fans in the world. I would have loved to have seen what would have happened if the bartender had changed the TV to the baseball game this guy demanded. The soccer guys probably would have kicked that prick's wrinkly old ass inside out.

Seemingly in an effort to convince the bartender that an extra ten minutes of equivocally boring baseball was worth an eternity of shouldering the identity of "complete fucking douche-bag," the regular demanded a pen and paper to begin mathematical calculations of his tips for the past year.



If he were trying to assert that he comes in enough to place a monetary value on his time there, it would mean that if the two soccer fans had tipped $201 dollars on their meal (not so unreasonable--people have left tips of this magnitude before), it would mean that they should now have a say over what everyone else at the bar watches.

If those two soccer fans were regulars themselves, the regular probably would not have had his way either because it would have devolved into a pissing battle between the opposing customers. There would be no civil way to determine who was more 'regular' than the other.

The only fair and sane way to determine who gets the TV is to simply allow those who arrived first to control what goes on. When they leave, someone else can request something to watch. Speaking of what to watch, the regular changed the channel after the soccer-viewers left just in time to find that there WAS NO BASEBALL GAME. It wasn't even on that evening.

Just goes to show you that just because you're a regular doesn't mean people there are forced to respect you, and it CERTAINLY doesn't mean that the people there LIKE you. Bear that in mind if you frequent a place you really enjoy going to.

A Higher-Than-Thou Health Inspection

The pervasive cliche of the "Health Inspector" is a notion that scares restaurant managers into operating their kitchens as strictly as possible. It makes waiters, chefs, and other assorted employees do things like wear gloves when they touch silverware, not eat twizzlers while operating the deep fryer, and not serve chicken cutlets to guests that have since been accidentally dropped on the floor in excess of four times.

Some restaurants take this notion to the next level on their own volition, seemingly to make it seem like Jesus Christ sits down to dinner there every Sunday afternoon. These restaurants bring their own health inspectors, paid for by the company, just to come in and "make necessary health changes to the restaurant's operating procedure." Oops, that was a typo. What I meant to say was "fuck with everyone for absolutely no reason."

A health-inspector came in recently to one of the restaurants I work at. She wouldn't be worth her six-figure salary if she didn't come in and fuck with everyone and the fruits of their labors at completely fucking random.



They do this to reassure their mass market that they are completely perfect and would never put food in front of you that would put your health or well being at any risk.

Talking points;

-If you throw out hundreds of dollars worth of food that is one or two degrees warmer than specified temperature, the company is losing money. And wasting food. In a time when being green and non-wasteful is a selling point, potential customers will look down on you for committing such heinous acts of waste.

-By tearing apart a restaurant that you spend less than 1% of your time at, you are effectively tearing down and destroying the hard work that people who make 1/50th of your salary are spending their mornings and evenings doing. This creates unnecessary resentment, and could possibly endanger your life.

-Many of the issues that you are "circumventing" are trivial and uncontrollable, and should not be blamed on employees. They deal mostly with the poor functionality of equipment and appliances. Explained; if you fail restaurants and suspend employees for things like refrigerators not being cold enough, you are misdirecting blame and targeting the wrong issues to "resolve" the problems.
Try fixing the refrigerators and replacing the air conditioning in the sweltering kitchens instead of firing the line cooks.

-Instead of tying the management of the restaurant up in meetings to address problems during business hours, try remembering that there are people trying to have lunch who aren't getting their concerns addressed by the people who are paid to reassure them.

-Because the health inspector was yelling at various members of the kitchen staff, a 5-minute dish which was supposed to get to a table that was in a half-hour hurry took more than 40 minutes to arrive. Instead of having a quick lunch, they spent the better part of their lunch break thinking their waiter was an idiot and couldn't handle a simple task. And they left hungry.

If you don't work on the restaurant level, it isn't that hard to pay simple attention to the basic things that pay your salary every week. While breathing down the necks of people who are trying to provide a good evening to the everyman, you are ruining the experience(s) of the people who pay your overblown salary.

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.

The Necessity of Micromanagement

The true telling factor of what life is like in any restaurant depends heavily on the competence of its management team. In privately-owned restaurants, managers are typically the friends of the head boss who can be quite demanding, but who are agreeable, sometimes fun, and actually have souls.

The managers at a chain restaurant have to adhere to codes and endless tirades of corporate propaganda in order to do things like "effectively govern" and "keep their jobs."

Due to the tier-based trickle-down effect of management wisdom implied by the latter example, many disastrous things can happen to the basic base-slave. Oops, that was a typo. I meant to say "waiter who has slightly fewer freedoms than an indentured servant with debts to the mafia."

Observe;



At this point, someone from management usually comes over to stifle your creativity and squash any impressions you have of any kind of utility by saying something non-confrontational like;



...but in reality, the manager in question has no idea what you are doing, why it is necessary, or even why he or she has to venture any form of commentary. But something needs to be managed, and at that point in time, that something is YOU.

You may even try to argue;



But in reality, no manager in a corporate chain will ever listen to a better idea, even if it would revolutionize the way the company does business. Paperwork would have to be filed, people would have to be satiated, credit would have to be due. All in all, the company's CEO would probably love the idea you had if you and the guy were face to face. The reality of the situation is that no matter what you try to do or who you try to subvert in order to create a better working environment, you'll be strangled with red tape from the lower management team to the very top of the pile of assholes running HR for the company.

So you do the only thing you know how;

You get wasted after your shift with your coworkers and bitch about how dumb everyone is. Then you wake up the next day and go right back to work.

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.

A Breeze in the Kitchen

As funny as it could possibly be, I feel that self-inoculation should "rear" its ugly head in my disservice again. I keep "brewing" these unorthodox tales, and will gladly "expose" my problems within the restuarant's "business" at my own "expense."

Every so often, a waiter has to fart. Really badly.

It happens often enough. A waiter often requires caffeine in order to work twelve straight hours a day (every day). In order to sustain that high, an artificial supplement must be ingested. The situation usually starts like this;



After that, a caffeine binge will occur at the restaurant's expense.



The waiter begins to feel great, being extra friendly, running all needed items over to his tables, running all the needed things over to EVERYONE'S tables, explaining things on the menu without being asked, doing more work than necessary, stepping outside to do a backflip, and many other things. Most often, instead of guests saying, "Wow, that guy was very helpful, thorough, and informative," they usually say, "So. What the fuck's up with that guy?"

There's always some twatty co-worker or passerby who, without asking of course, volunteers his or her opinion about why you shouldn't be drinking taurine or yerba matte or whatever the hell is in what you just bought from CVS ten minutes ago.





The problem with caffeine is that it tends to run right the hell through you. Energy drinks cost money/are bad for you, so you avoid them. You decide to deal with the first of the two situations because although everyone seems to know that energy drinks are not only bad for you but will kill you A LOT ALL THE TIME, nobody's going to ridicule you for a somehow socially acceptable caffeine overdose.

So this tends to happen in the middle of your busy day;




But by that point, you're too busy and the employee bathroom at the restaurant is too gross and too frequented to permit you to take a generous crap. Even if you could get two or three people to cover your tables and begin to tolerate the fact that the employee bathroom looks three seagulls short of being an actual garbage dump, you would die if someone came in right after you and said "Dear God this smells. Seriously, who takes a crap at work?"

So you spend the rest of the evening finding safe places to let one rip. You quickly walk through the kitchen where there are constantly fans blowing and strongly-smelling food being concocted, hoping that #1 - Your fart doesn't suddenly become actual poop, and #2 - There are enough X factors to either disguise that you farted really hard or maybe even dissolve it completely before anyone has a chance to smell anything.



It makes the actual moment terribly climactic.

People say that waiting tables is one of the hardest jobs in the world, but I doubt that this is one of the well-known reasons. Still, remember it when a server suddenly has to leave your table while you're ordering and cites that he or she "forgot something at another table."

The Power of Tipping Generously

An odd thing occurred to me today as I went to mail my taxes in and grab a bite to eat on the corner. I walked into the pizza shop and ordered a BLT. When it came time to pay, the man behind the counter insisted I just take it. For free.

When I insisted on handing him the full fare for the delicious bacon-laden lunch, he leaned in and spoke to me in his European accent. He said;

"A few weeks back, our delivery driver dropped off an order to your house. When he didn't have enough change, you told him to keep it. Our driver recognized you when you walked in."

I saw over in the corner that same guy who earlier in the week, graciously accepted $20 bucks on a $12 dollar delivery order. He came over, gave me a quick nod, and said "I always pay back my debts."

Moved as anything, I left the store, BLT and chips in hand. As with anything, generosity is always appreciated if not reciprocated. Conversely, there's nothing you can ever gain by being overtly cheap.

As a waiter, whenever someone tips me generously, I remember that person. I look forward to serving that person again, and would do everything I could to get whatever free or coveted items to his or her table without getting into too much trouble with the management. Often times, I'd risk it anyway.

I forget what journalist wrote that short piece a few years back about his journey to New York City with a stack of twenty dollar bills. He tried to see how far he could get by slipping twenties into the hands of the right people. He was let into exclusive luncheons, ferried around to awesome places, and generally well-liked by whomever he paid.

The important thing I realized about this whole situation was not that the money itself was significant. Of course, the money is appreciated. But in retrospect, the subtraction doesn't quite work out. I left the guy eight bucks when he delivered to my house, but the cost of the sub and chips was more than that upon my return. His net gain was in the negative, but he recognized me for my generosity and future business.

My friend and I recently staked a claim on our new hangout spot, a classy restaurant/pool hall/karaoke venue. The first couple times we went, I doubt we were distinguishable from the other bros in the place. My friend and I both tipped generously each time we went, and by the third time we went, we were treated like regulars, given free beer, and generally made to feel more welcome than the average person. The man in charge gave us free tastes of exclusive and obscure tap beverages, four pints for the price of three, things of that nature.

It speaks to most things about life in general, but if you help others when times are good for you, you can often count on others when you're up the creek and down the waterfall.