The Braindead Regular

I regularly wait on large parties who come in after their AA/NA meetings. They show up randomly and have anywhere from 6 to 20 people in their party. They are loud and run me around a lot but they're almost always good tippers so I don't have a big problem with waiting on them. Except for this one guy. Every time he comes in, I have some kind of weird issue with him. It's never my fault. Now I know he's probably blown all his brain cells using something or other, and I don't have a problem being patient with people as long as they are nice. This guy is not nice. When his beetle-brain starts a'clickin' that something has gone wrong, it's always because I'm an idiot. He is incredibly condescending until he figures out that he's the one at fault and then just shrugs it off without apologizing. Here are the last couple encounters I've had with him.

I walk up and greet the table and start taking drink orders. I get around to him and he asks if I know what kind of hot tea we have. Like my silly waitress brain can't hold all that tea information in there or something. I tell him we have lemon, orange, mint, chamomile, black, and green. He pauses, then says loudly “GREEN tea? Do you mean MINT?” and looks around to his buddies for approval at how clever he is, calling out the dumb waitress. Like he thought I just looked at the color of the packages or something. As I open my mouth to explain the him that green tea is an actual type of tea, he realized his mistake and started “Oh, ah, I thought...”-ing. No apology for being a condescending jerk.

Next time I wait on them.... They're about halfway through their meal. The guy calls me over and starts loudly complaining that his cup of water is disgusting, there's little things floating in it, etc. Again, making a huge fuss and purposely calling a lot of attention to the problem while implying that I'm an incompetent who brought him a filthy glass. I quickly apologize and take the glass from him. I take a second to look at it as he's bitching me out, and the guy across the table from him asks, “Hey, didn't you put lemon in your water?” Sure enough, the “little things” floating in his water are lemon pulp and seeds. I set the water back in front of him. Again, no apology or even embarrassment at his mistake.

As I said before, I don't have a problem with being patient with someone who is polite, but this guy is making my brain melt out my ears. When he starts being horrified at finding broccoli in his chicken broccoli fettuccine or cheese in his grilled cheese sandwich I don't know what I'll do.

-Penny

Worst. Restaurant. Ever.

My restaurant is a horrible place to work. Now I don't want to sound like a whiner, but we're talking about stuff beyond the stress of serving. I believe that someday someone will show up and say “Wow, you're still working here? We were just messing with you this whole time. You stayed after the wood chip in the pasta incident? Seriously? And even when that lady found a glove in her salad? No kidding. Well, you can go home now because we were just seeing how much a waitress would put up with. Apparently, it's anything.” Yep, I wish I was making those gems up, but they're real, and really only the frosting on the crap cake that is my job.

Everything at my restaurant is broken. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little, but you get the idea. Usually things do eventually get fixed, but we're talking months of waiting. We're also always out of stuff, but I'll save that for another entry. Having a crappy job and being blatantly denied the things you need to do your job well is kind of a slap in the face. This is probably the most poorly run restaurant I have ever worked in, and that's including the one where my general manager was a meth addict.

Allow me to further vent my frustrations. About a year ago, our ice cream freezer broke. There was talk of fixing it, and we waited patiently for months. During this time, if we needed ice cream, we had to go all the way to the walk-in freezer in the back of house and either stand there in sub-zero temperatures trying to scoop ice cream, or drag the 25 pound container up the the front of house and scoop there, only to have to return it to the walk-in so it wouldn't melt all over the counter. Meanwhile, the management has given up on fixing the freezer and has tried to pry the thing out of the counter. They fail miserably, leaving the freezer itself in the counter and the rim pried off so that there is unvarnished, splintering wood all around it. Can you say health code violation? It stays in this state for another two months or so, until we finally get a used freezer from another store in the chain. The new freezer sits on the floor in the dessert area for another two months before it is finally placed in it's loving home in the counter. Rejoice! For there shall be frozen ice cream in the front of house! ...For about another three months. The used one has now broken and it looks like the cycle shall continue for another year. And just in time for summer! Whoohoo!

If the management let that happen, I'm sure that you can imagine the state that the less essential things get into. Our fountain tap for Mountain Dew has been broken for over a year. Finally the management says we're just not going to have Mountain Dew anymore. That's fine, but it's still on our menu, so I'm constantly having to tell people we don't have it. Ironically, we did just get a new juice machine. The old one was fine, they just changed to a new brand (because it's cheaper, I'm sure). The new juice machine always thinks it's out of concentrate so you have to constantly open and close it, reset it, etc. These are just a couple of the treats I enjoy on a day to day basis.

Thinking about all this, I'm reminded of my first restaurant job. We had milkshakes there, something that my current restaurant is blessedly without. If you're not familiar, restaurant grade milkshake machines have a long pipe-like spindle which you push into the ice cream/milk mixture, and a tab that you use the edge of your metal milkshake mixing cup to push up. This makes the machine go on. In theory, you push your cup up onto the machine and it rests on a tiny ledge, mixing away until it is at a perfect consistency at which point you skip gracefully over at the exact right moment and pull it off the machine. This never happens of course; when you check back you either have milk, or a seemingly undisturbed scoop of ice cream in your cup. You have to stand there, holding the little tab up with your finger and kind of grinding away at the ice cream with the spindle until it's ready. Now if that doesn't sound like enough fun, our little tabs started going missing. People would take them out to clean them and they would disappear. We had three mixers and three tabs to begin with, then only two, and finally just one. During a rush there would be like ten shake cups waiting in line for their turn on the spindle. Management claimed they were ordering more tabs, but we waited and waited. Weeks pass. Finally, during a graveyard shift when I was all alone, I took the last tab and threw it on top of the cooler next to the milkshake machine. It was a shining moment for me. The next night we had three new tabs. Go figure.

I guess what I should learn from that is if I want stuff that isn't broken, I need to render it completely unusable, and opposed to the partially unusable state it's in now. I wonder if that shake tab is still on top of that cooler....

-Penny

Pet Peeves: The Closing-Time Campers

For a long time I worked at restaurants that were open 24 hours. This meant no closing, just waiting for the relief staff to arrive. The restaurant I work in now actually closes at a reasonable hour, so I've experienced something new in the last few years: The Closing-Time Campers. This fast became one of my top 5 pet peeves about the industry.

Allow me to paint you a picture. It's fifteen minutes to close. Not a single table in the restaurant. The music in the dining room seems extra loud without the low drone of people's voices to muffle it. You've filled your salt and peppers, finished your sidework, maybe even counted your bank because you're feeling a little optimistic tonight. The cooks have cleaned their grill and stand on the line, relaxed and joking with each other, glancing at the clock. The busser has started vacuuming.

Then you hear it; the slamming of the front door. You pause, looking up from the piece of throwaway pie you've been snacking on. There is a moment of hope; perhaps they just want some dessert to go. No. They never want desert to go. They want to sit in your station, probably get food and dessert, and then sip of their coffees for another hour. These people, these Closing-Time Campers, are one of the worst tables you can get, because you know right away that someone who will ask to be seated in a restaurant at fifteen minutes to close is not a considerate person. Inconsiderate people are not good tippers, and usually rude to boot.

I had just this experience the other day; two kinda new-agey yuppie chicks came in at ten minutes to close.

“Oh, are you closed?” They actually seemed pretty nice.

“We close at ten,” I said, sounding a little disappointed, as though to convey that they had juuuust missed it.

They interpreted this as they had just made it! And wasn't it great! Thank goodness!

I seat them, skulk back to the kitchen to warn the cooks, then return to take their drink order. They order two hot waters with lemon. Just to put this in perspective for you, a hot tea is pretty much the biggest pain in the ass to get for someone at the restaurant. Hot waters with lemon are basically free hot teas. Swell. I bring those out and they're still not ready to order, but want an appetizer. Also swell, I can see they're going to draw this out as long as possible. A short time after their appetizer arrives they're finally ready to order. I bring them their soup or whatever they had and return to my pie.

I check on them a few times, refill their hot waters, chit-chat about the rain, etc. Eventually they get pie, which I bring them without complaint. I give them their thirty-something dollar check, and they pay with a credit card, but are still freaking sitting there. I have completely exhausted my entertainment in the back. The cooks are long gone. The poor busser can't finish vacuuming until they leave so we're just standing around trying to decide if my Spanish is worse than his English (it is). By this time it's 11:20; a full hour and twenty minutes after close.

Now the moment of truth: The ladies get up to leave, and as they walk toward the front door I go to pick up their credit slip. They have drawn a line through the tip line and totaled the bill. The bitches stiffed me. Clutching their credit slip, I call “Have a great night, ladies!” as they leave, allowing my bitterness show through in my voice. They look back smiling and wave “Bye! Thanks!”

-Penny

Living the Dream

I have been a waitress for a very long time; pretty much my entire adult life. Believe it or not, when I was a kid I actually wanted to be a waitress. For some reason it seemed glamorous to me, not to mention the idea that if you were good at your job and remembered that Betty wanted a Diet Coke no ice with lemon when you brought a refill, or that Billy wanted his mayo on the side and just a little cheese on his club sandwich, not to mention the hundred other things for your other tables, you would be both appreciated and rewarded for your trouble. I think that's what appealed most to me. Instant gratification and affirmation that I was doing a good job, not to mention the cash in hand.

I got a job as a busser at a family restaurant when I was seventeen. I was a little too good at it, so the management didn't want to move me up. Let me be clear that bussing (at least where I was working) is not hard. It's easy, and you barely have to talk to anyone other than the cranky servers who think you're not getting to their tables. As I rolled my cart from table to dirty table, it took pretty much zero brain power to clean and reset, and clean and reset, so I was inside my head way too much. This was slowly driving me insane, and I think it was the beginning of my spiral down from the sweet teenager who thought everyone had some good in them to the cynical shell that I am today.

Two things really stand out in my mind from my bussing days. All of the burgers, sandwiches, whatever, came with cole slaw and fries, and apparently most people, given the choice, will go for the fries. I would throw away more cole slaw in a single shift than most people see in their entire lives. I can't touch the stuff to this day. Bussing also made me wish that I had a super power which allowed me to see germs; like the so-so germs would be green, and stuff like the Ebola virus would be red. Not so I could totally avoid them; that would be impossible. I just wanted to avoid the red germs because I knew they had to be there.

Eventually management saw fit to move me up to serving, and with a few brief breaks, I've been a server ever since. Serving is what I do, and I'm damn good at it. I'm afraid though, that serving is becoming part of who I am. I've started this blog in order to vent my daily and long-term frustrations, and this will hopefully bring me back down to a more normal level of sanity.

I was told once that serving is one of the most stressful jobs in the United States, right after air traffic controller. I don't know if that's true, but it damn well feels like it. I would place serving on the stress scale right after jobs involving actual loss of human life, although if you forget Betty's lemon when you bring out her Diet Coke, someone, apparently, may actually die.

-Penny