Lesson 6

Welcome back to Lesson 6! So many little annoyances to talk about today...so be forewarned a lot of ranting is coming your way ;) More specifically over the period of 5 days the one I'm going to talk about the most was last night. A couple of nights a week I wait tables around the bar called cocktailing. Normally the closer it gets to the weekend the busier the bar is and last night being Thursday was no different. My second table of the nights sits in the large table underneath the biggest television in the bar. Just for future reference we have seven t.v.s in the bar. So a couple of guys sit down at the table and before I can even greet them they have already requested the t.v. be changed to the Duke game. I greet the tables first few members and get their drinks while the rest of the men stagger in and finally I take their dinner order. They all drank beer and were nice and easy going but I didn't set high expectations for my tip, either. A while later they cash out and an hour later they are still sitting there watching the game. Restaurant X starts getting busy and the bar fills up. Well the sausage fest from earlier decides that apparently the biggest t.v. in the restaurant isn't enough anymore and like Hitler taking over Europe, these men start claiming televisions. Well management starts getting annoyed with them requesting channel changes when obviously they were busy sending lots of food out of the kitchen. The management changes the tv for the last time and I walk over to one of my many other tables. Before I have a chance to say anything they request that a tv near them be changed to a game that was turned off when Hitler took over their tv. Are you fucking kidding me? Do you see how many times I've typed tv in this blog? YOU ARE AT A RESTAURANT NOT A SPORTS PUB! Finish eating your food and go home to watch your basketball game! I get so sick of this day in and day out. SO of course when I go to management with yet another television request they flat out refuse to change the tv and my last table was fucking pissed at who else? Me. When I open my restaurant that is made entirely of tables and no booths I am also going to have one tv...either playing cartoons, oxygen, or MTV. Instead of calling my restaurant "Antibooth" it will be "Antibooth and sports."

Here is another thing I hated about last night. I absolutely loathe it when eight twenty somethings crowd around a booth for four and get obnoxiously drunk. I had this one guy last night that thought he was so drunk and funny. Every time I walked over to this table it was (in a stupid ass drunk voice) "Excuse me miss can I ask you a question..." followed by something really stupid. For example, "Excuse me miss, can I order some chicken tenders."
"Oh, I'm really sorry but the kitchen closed at ten, would you like to order a pizza instead?"
"No that's okay, do you have any chickens back there I could fuck?"
Like I've said before, I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. Who the hell says that kind of stupid crap to anyone, let alone a stranger that happens to be bringing them beer? Followed by a chorus of his stupid drunk friends asking if we have live chickens in the restaurant.

On a lighter note, last night I got inspired by my coworker to write about something I find funny. When you work at a restaurant you're there so often that you know you coworkers well enough to distinguish their real laughs from their fake ones. I find it so funny when I walk through the dining room and hear fake laugh after fake laugh coming from my friends at their tables. What your diners don't know is that you are NOT very funny. Sometimes you get a table that says something genuinely funny but for the most part people....we're faking it. We are kissing your ass and laughing at your shitty jokes for a good tip. A good fake laugh is just as important as a fake smile because we want you to think we like you, so you'll think you like us and give us some of your money.

I have also been thinking about making a special blog once a month or something where I write this blog from a consumer point of view with a server bias ;) I was thinking that once a month I'll write about a dining experience and grade my server. I feel that for us to Save the Servers we need to realize that we aren't perfect either. Who reading this blog has never forgotten about their table for 20 minutes? Who here has never gotten a great tip that deep down we know we didn't deserve? We make mistakes too. For example I was eating at a restaurant once with my family and 30 minutes after we got our food we still hadn't seen our server again. Finally he comes back with some bullshit story about a table of women taking forever to order. Oh really...those bitches took 30 minutes to order? He was also reeking of a cigarette smell he didn't have the first couple of times I'd seen him. I work in a restaurant to motherfucker, don't bullshit me. I also want to talk about restaurants like San Jose. Believe it or not, you will never get better service than at a Mexican joint. You literally have a server who seats you and takes your drink and cheese dip order, a person to bring you chips, a server to take your actual dinner order and someone who brings your food out. And even if you only have one server he has the speed and agility of Speedy Gonzalez. Your tab is $30 and you never sit around needing anything the entire time your there. Its frustrates me that diners go into a Mexican restaurant with the notion that the tipping scale is different there than another restaurant.

Thanks for reading and I'll have another one up for you in about four days :)