The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Sports & Leisure => Topic started by: arkabee on November 11, 2004, 06:29:13 pm
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i have somewhat non-standard reactions to restaurant antics, mostly stemming from 1st work experience at a high-volume, tourist spot. that being said, there rarely occurs an event that truly leaves me shaking my head and laughing.
last night, in the midst of a record low for the local Perkins' dining experience, i found myself uttering words strung together in a formation i had never, ever previously expected:
"Excuse me, ma'am? could i perhaps have a cup for my coffee?"
the look on my girlfriend's face, as i arrived at the table after a quick run to the washroom, was priceless. apparently she expected me to either have an aneurysm or drink the coffee straight out of the carafe, or possible both.
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I like it when employees understand they are there to serve customers, and I like it when customers aren't cocks about everything.
I fly a lot, and just once I would like to talk to one of the pilots flying non-rev, or monopolizing the service agents, or pushing through to the head of the line in the security area (I know, sometimes they are actually flying as the pilot, and therefore need to get to the gate - fuck 'em, get to the airport two hours ahead of time, like we are told to) and say - "Hey, Cap, you are the employee and I am the customer in this dynamic, so why don't you wait your turn, huh?"
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One afternoon when I was skipping class to eat at a truck stop with a friend, I ordered my usual small black coffee and had the incredibly disorienting experience of having the waitress ask me if I wanted gravy with that. I mean, it was a truck stop, but still. So I was rendered completely incapable of speech, so she repeated, as if to a rather slow individual, the question of whether or not I would like gravy with my fries.
"Coffee?" I said.
"Ah," she replied.
That was I think my weirdest service-industry encounter.
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My service industry work experience is limited to occasional bartending, but I've always been a patient customer and good tipper, even when the waitstaff probably deserves to be stiffed a bit.
Unfortunately, I know too many people who are always looking for an excuse to not tip a waitress to ever tip under 20%. I had a group of coworkers at my last job that I eventually had to stop eating lunch with because I got tired of having to tip for the whole table. About half of them would decide not to tip if their water ever got more than half empty. The final straw was when we left our money for the bill, and I threw in my normal huge tip just to get the tip for the table up to 18%. One of the guys recounted the money we were leaving, declared it too much, and took two dollars back for himself. Jackass.
That said, nothing pisses me off more than finishing my meal and having to wait any amount of time to get my check. Lately I've been running into this a lot, even when the waitress is not busy. I greatly prefer when the check comes when I'm still eating so I can pay and go when I'm done.
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I find that if I go out with people I like to spend time with, I don't get very upset about waiting for stuff and things like that. If I'm served what I ordered, and it is the temperature it is supposed to be, I'm down with it. Even if the portions are small, it's best to remember that it is probably not a reflection on the servers or the cooks. That being said, when I worked as a cook, I went out of my way to over-serve everyone, because I could not be bothered to remember which scoop was a number 10. I was pretty much always high (which, in my experience, is true for a large number of waitstaff/cooks).
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There ought to be a happy medium about this check business - you ought to be be able to get it when you want it. But so much of the time it's like the waitperson goes blind once your last course has been delivered - it becomes impossible to get their attention even if they were fine throughout the meal. Sometimes I swear they must have taken a special course in this at waiter school.
So like Gimp I'd rather have the check show up too soon - there are so many more interesting things to do in life than sit at a restaurant table in front of empty dishes.
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What bugs me is my mom. We'll go out to eat and she'll order another beer when she's 3/4 done with her meal. Then we all have to sit and watch her finish it. Meanwhile the waiters keep fluttering by because it's 6pm on a Saturday and they're already running a 2+ hour wait and would like us to get the hell out.
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See, I don't always like the cheque to come while we're eating the main course, as about half the time, we'll stay for coffee. Is this handled as a seperate charge or something there?
But yea, I never get pissed if I have to wait around. I mean, I haven't worked as a waiter, but have done similar service jobs, and hate it when people try to rush me. It's like, I'm doing my best and all. And, considering these are the people who are cooking and waiting for me, I don't want to be a dick about it.
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Having a few friends who have worked food service at one time or another has given me a fairly waitstaff-focused perspective on this. I don't think I've ever gotten truly wretched service, and I've seen customers behave wretchedly more than I'm entirely comfortable with.
I had a friend in high school who just tended to be a dick to waitstaff in restaurants, often in new and creative ways. One dinner involved him ordering via explaining what he wanted veeeeery slowly and holding up the menu and gesturing at the item he wanted, as if he had been dictating the order to a chimp; the waitress seemed profoundly befuddled by this, and who could blame her? Another time (at a different restaurant, thank God) involved him trying desperately to convince the waiter he was 21 and thus could order drinks (he was 17 or 18 and fairly obviously so). That one, at least, he left a ludicrous tip to compensate for.
On the fast-food subject, my mother used to be the worst drive-through orderer ever; she'd spontaneously forget what you asked for every fifteen seconds or so, so I have to imagine it was hell on the poor server on the other side of the mic. "Yes, I'll have a Number 3 meal... .. with a Diet Coke? ... and a... (what was that?) -- a Number 5, with a ... (did you want a Coke?) -- a Coke!" She's gotten better as of recently, but getting fast food with her in high school was like pulling teeth.
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I do think that people who make ordering into an ordeal for the server should be punished severely. The spouse always mumbles when he orders, and he also never reads the menu thoroughly enough to notice that he needs to, say, choose two sides or a salad dressing or whatever, so the waiter has to explain all this and wait while he decides.
I think he is going to have to spend some time in Purgatory as a waiter.
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I have never worked as a waiter but I have friends and relatives in the food service industry so I generally try to treat people at restaurants a little better than I would and give them a lot more slack than I would other service industry job workers.
That being said, if you order a burger and the waitress serves you a chicken salad sandwich, I do not think it is inappropriate to expect her to take it back and get me my burger. There is just some level of service that I expect.
I always tip 20% or more, also, regardless of quality of service. Or if the service is exceptionally, dare I say INTENTIONALLY bad, then I will not tip at all. In poker you shouldn't vary your pre-flop bets based on the quality of your hole cards - and in dining you shouldn't really vary your tip based on service. It's 20% or nothing from me.
Having said that, I've only not left a tip twice in my life (and I eat out a few times a week).
Once the waitress just LEFT before we received our food. The other waitresses (both of them) told us that we were not their table and wouldn't get us anything (they had a runner bring the food out, and eventually we had to have the runner get us drinks, katsup, etc - and we tipped the runner on the sly on the way out). We never went back to that place.
Another time was an exceptionally unpleasant waitress at Ruby Tuesdays who went out of her way to make our dining experience as miserable as possible - wrong food, undercooked ribs with no sauce on them (I suppose many would blame the cook, but ultimately it is the waitresses's responsibility to serve me the food - she should have refused to bring that out to me), no drinks, one in our party had no silverware, etc. When asked for mustard for a hamburger instead of saying "Okay, I'll be right back with the mustard" she said "What do you need mustard for?" If we didn't give her a good answer would she have not brought it? Then after our food was served we never saw her again - well, at least not at our table - she was talking to two other waitresses all night two booths away.
Otherwise, I generally get pretty good service when going out.
Also, I have noticed that I tend to get a lot better service from attractive people - men or women - which I think has to do with their self-esteem being high and thus means that they hold themselves to a higher standard.
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When I moved to New York, I went out a few times with people from my dorm to relatively nice places they picked out, and always ended up spending a shit-load on tip. Both times that this was really bad, my dinner came to $10 and I dropped another 5 or more to make up for the fact that the people I live with are cheap bastards. Actually, the fact that someone wanted to leave $6 on a $70 check made me hate them. Working food service sucks, and there's nothing a waiter hates more than getting a table of young adults, because the assumption is that they will be assholes and tip horribly; I always try to tip 20% at least, simply to fight the assumption.
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Indeed. In college I found that when I ordered food in it would usually arrive in 15 minutes or less, but if another guy called it took like an hour. Apparently I was pretty much the only student who tipped so they always filled my orders first.
What confuses me is sushi places. If you sit at the counter there's a tip jar right there but you also have a waitress. Who do you tip how much?
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I have a friend who will, repeatedly, all the time, even though i bitch his retarded ass out every time he does it, go up and sit at the bar, and the bartender's all "what can i get ya'?" and he says "um, a beer?"
"a beer." dumbass.
ordering beer is not like ordering water.
and the bartender will just kinda look at him for a minute and my friend will have this dumb puppy look on his face and eventually the bartender will start listing what's on tap, etc., and my friend will then take like five minutes to decide on a fuck*ng beer.
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Amateur drinkers are the worst.
You have to tell him that people on order "a beer" in movies and on tv shows because they don't want to mention a specific brand.
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I have, jough, I have!! The next time he does it i'm gonna tell the bartender to bring the fucker an o'douls or something cuase he obviously can't spare the brain cells.
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I used to tend bar. If I made $5 in tips in a night, that was a good night. That was the kind of place it was. My most memorable experience was someone threatening to shoot me.
I also worked at a hotel for a while, which was its own flavor of customer service hell. People need to understand this: when you ask for, say, a non-smoking room, it's "subject to availability at the time of arrival." Translation: if we're all out of non-smoking rooms by the time you get here, you're SOL.
My most memorable tale from that job was a woman who came in with a large party late in the afternoon in the middle of the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, one of our busiest times of the year. "We have a reservation for two rooms, both doubles, with an adjoining door, first floor facing the courtyard, non-smoking." I think we had one pair of rooms in the hotel that fit that description completely, and they weren't available. So I offered her that whole setup on the second floor. I offered her that setup on the first floor, except one room had a king bed, and we'd bring in a roll-away. I offered her rooms that were across the hall from each other. Every time it was "No, that won't do. This is what we reserved." I tried to explain "subject to availability at time of arrival"; she accused me of having the rooms and intentionally not giving them to her. I printed out a list of our rooms, which ones were vacant and which were occupied, and suggested she try to find the exact pair. Her husband actually suggested I kick someone out of a room so they could have it. Then the other desk clerk gave one of the rooms I had previously offered them to another guest, and the woman screamed "WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!?" "Because you said you didn't want it!" was his too-obvious answer.
They finally settled on some "lesser" rooms, but that was the closest I ever came to deleting the reservation on the spot and saying "I obviously can't make you happy. Get out of my hotel."
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What confuses me is sushi places. If you sit at the counter there's a tip jar right there but you also have a waitress. Who do you tip how much?
I think it depends on how much work the waitress does. We generally split a 20% total tip either 10% chefs-10% waitress if we're at a table or 15% chefs-5% waitress if we're at the bar.
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I also worked at a hotel for a while, which was its own flavor of customer service hell. People need to understand this: when you ask for, say, a non-smoking room, it's "subject to availability at the time of arrival." Translation: if we're all out of non-smoking rooms by the time you get here, you're SOL.
I guess I don't understand this system. I would think that when I make my reservation 3 months out that a specific room would be blocked out for me depending on what I asked for as opposed to a general admission type set-up.
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I guess I don't understand this system. I would think that when I make my reservation 3 months out that a specific room would be blocked out for me depending on what I asked for as opposed to a general admission type set-up.
Well, perhaps things have changed--I worked at this hotel back in 93-94. Our reservations system noted "preferences," but people weren't booked into specific rooms until arrival (you could block a specific room for a reservation on the day of arrival, but we rarely did so). Perhaps new and improved computer systems can keep track of requested room types better, but our early-90s crappy DOS-based system did no such thing.
Even with that, if hotels continue the practice of overbooking you could still be screwed. We would sometimes take more reservations for a given date than we actually had rooms, on the theory that someone would cancel before the date. On those occasions that everyone actually showed up (it only happened two or three times in the year I worked there), we would have to "walk" the late-arriving guests: find them a room somewhere else (often at a lower-quality hotel) and pick up the tabl. Some guests were fine with this--"Free room? OK." But often they were fuckin' furious, as you might expect--it's midnight and I have to drive across town to another, shitty hotel? I found this practice idiotic--in the busiest times, we had no trouble selling rooms to walk-ins. Why overbook and risk pissing someone off, when a same-day cancellation will probably get filled up by a walk-in anyway?
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Yeah, I don't have a non-smoking *preference*. It is a requirement, and a hotel that books me for a non-smoking room and then gives MY room, the one I registered for long in advance, to someone walking in off the street is going to have to suffer a little pissed-off-ness, regardless of whether the tool behind the desk is at fault or not.
That's the thing that people who work in customer service often fail to understand. To the customer they ARE the hotel. They may as well be the owner. They make the decisions about screwing customers over so they should be the ones to deal with the complaints.
Having said that, I've had mostly great experiences at hotels. Usually the kind of room that I want is available, and there's really very little that is important to me - you're out of rooms with a king sized bed and want to put me in a room with a queen? Oh well, I guess I'll have to suffer.
Usually when they don't have something I requested on the reservation form (I usually just book online anymore) it's usually something stupid, and they'll usually up- rather than down-grade me. So I'll wind up in the huge suite with four beds on a higher floor rather than the single little dinky room I requested (and paid for).
Some people have far FAR too specific needs. The only thing that's important to me is the view (this is really only important if booking a room by the ocean and they try to put you in one overlooking the parking lot) and non-smoking, because let's face it people, smoking rooms tend to stink of both cigarettes and alcohol (and other funk).
Otherwise I don't really care if there's a sofa, how many televisions there are, or if there's a shower-clock-radio (I see this as an option in some hotels more and more now - is that really a big deal?).
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True, the vast majority of our guests were happy with their stay. But, you check in 176 happy guests and 1 bitchy one, guess which one you remember.
I worked the overnight shift on the weekends, during which I wrote up the daily accounting logs. Graveyard shift was interesting.
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I worked the night shift front desk at a hotel for several years, and hotels are run in a manner basically to make the front desk night shift guy want to commit suicide. If everyone on the crew doesn't work together, you get screwed. If one person doesn't stay with the plan, you get screwed. The day shift takes walk-ins when they know full well that the hotel is going to be sold to 110% of capacity. They over-sell all the time. Airlines do it too, but the end result isn't as screwed, because everyone leaves at once. Someone would come into the hotel at 2 in the morning, after their flight had been delayed and they've been flying for twenty hours or so. They'd say "Johnson, king non-smoking" and I'd say "Yeah, I've got no rooms." At that point in the airline model, the airline asks the group of 240 people who is willing to be bumped. In the hotel model, the night clerk might as well say "would you like to just punch me in the face?" because the way hotels are run is indefensible, but the hotel doesn't give a fuck about the night clerk. If I am that customer, I am a little more reasonable, but like Jough I won't sleep in a smoking room.
I can't tell you how many times customers would just heap abuse on me. Screaming, cursing, calling me an idiot, insulting my parents, everything short of physical violence. Toward the end I just started ripping up their reservations and leaving them fucked, because no matter how angry you are, as a customer, you should not be like that.
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Toward the end I just started ripping up their reservations and leaving them fucked, because no matter how angry you are, as a customer, you should not be like that.
Yea. I'd rather go sleep on a bench than be a dick to the poor guy who has that job. Unless, they are being a dick, in which case, they just brought it on themselves, and I'm not going to be insulted or pushed around either.
it really does amaze me how unreasonable people can be though.
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Toward the end I just started ripping up their reservations and leaving them fucked, because no matter how angry you are, as a customer, you should not be like that.
Yea. I'd rather go sleep on a bench than be a dick to the poor guy who has that job. Unless, they are being a dick, in which case, they just brought it on themselves, and I'm not going to be insulted or pushed around either.
it really does amaze me how unreasonable people can be though.
And the thing is, no matter how you treated him, if there aren't any rooms, you're sleeping on the bench anyhow...
But Slink - you don't actually sleep, do you?
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Well, if we didn't have rooms, we had to call around all the hotels in town to find rooms for the customer, and of course we would pay for them. And I really shouldn't have ended my employment there by going out of my way to fuck the customer, but the abuse and scorn just got to be too much. My next step was going to be to commit credit card fraud, because of course all these rooms were reserved with credit cards.
I guess I should have just said to the shitty customers "you realize I have your credit card number, don't you?" or just posted it somewhere on an internet message board.
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But Slink - you don't actually sleep, do you?
I go through cycles of narcolepsy and insomnia. It would probably be easier to deal with if it was always the same!
And yea, that's what I never understoof about people being total dicks to people in the service industry. If it's food based - nasty things can be done. If it's a hotel or shop or anything, then credit fraud can happen... The only thing stopping these is people not being dicks in general, and yet...