When I was in college I waited tables at a popular local Mexican restaurant. We typically had a pretty good lunch rush, so handling the bigger sections could be a challenge, which our management realized. As they were all former servers they were awesome when it came to backing us up.
One afternoon I was handling a ten table section. It was a pretty busy day – not slammed but no time to stand around either. I had a table come in that was pretty obviously a group of middle school teachers and students, about five of each. Several of my fellow waiters smirked at me and wished me luck – at the time I had no idea what I was in for.
Taking the order was no big deal – standard lunch stuff and lots of sodas. The first clue that I was in for an hour of utter hell was that between the time the busboy brought their water, chips and salsa and I took the order (maybe five minutes), they emptied every glass, basket, and bowl on the table. And yes, they wanted refills. So I put in ten orders (which takes a couple of minutes – there are ten of them, after all), refilled everything, got the sodas, and brought them back to the table. The fun started when the largest heifer in the herd (let’s call her Bessie) remarked that it “took you long enough.” By the time I doled out all of the sugar water and fried corn, four of the five kids had drained their sodas. And we want refills. Sigh.
You see this coming – this collection of inveterate lardasses proceeds to empty everything I bring them by the time I return after refilling the last round of what I brought them. I spend the next fifteen minutes just refilling things for this one table, with my other nine sitting there watching. Luckily for me, most of them are incredibly nice about it – a couple of them even grab my manager to tell her I’m in the weeds, and she takes over as primary soda dispenser so I can serve my other customers.
Of course, Bessie notices I’m not bringing her a Pepsi every two seconds anymore and gets mad. Her food order has been in for no more than fifteen minutes when I notice she’s standing at the head of my section and staring at me with daggers in her eyes. I swallow my fear, approach her, and figure I’m going to be asked for another basket of chips. Nope – “Where is our food, we’ve been waiting forever.” No, tubby, you’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes. And in that fifteen minutes, you’ve eaten no less than a dozen baskets of chips, drunk four sodas on your own, and earned my eternal hatred. But whatever, I’ll station my manager by the kitchen and she’ll bring out your lard enchiladas the moment they are ready, since you are so obviously starving and in need of sustenance.
They continue to find ways to make me hate them for the next hour – the chubby brats trash my area, they order deserts, but in groups of two or three, and of course they guzzle enough soda that if we charged for refills, PepsiCo could have used the money to build a new Pizza Hut. I anticipate the split bills (HA!), so I have them ready to roll when they finally leave. And when they finally depart, to my eternal surprise I find they have left me thirty seven cents. In addition to me making nothing on that table (I have my pride – I left the change sitting there for someone else), I had several customers leave pissed off because I couldn’t serve them very well, so my earnings for that shift were pretty dire.
I figure I’d write the whole thing off as a learning experience (i.e.- don’t be scheduled to work when they show up the next time), but got called into the general manager’s office the next day. Turns out that Bessie called him to complain, said I was slow, rude, the herd was considering another pasture for lunch in the future, etc. It’s a good thing for me he was a nice guy, because I saw red, lost my mind, and by the time I finished yelling was fairly sure I’d be looking for a new job without a reference. To my surprise and eternal gratitude, he started laughing. Turns out between the other waiters they’d done this to in the past, the report from the manager who was backing me up, and the incredibly kind diner who called to tell him she’d never seen anyone abuse someone like Bessie did me, he’d decided to tell her to take her business elsewhere.
Tagged as:
owner/manager,
server,
tipping
