Everyone should be made to work in a restaurant for at least a week, once in their lifetime. I could compile an entire novel on the stupid things people do when they go out to eat, but I'll just share a few of my favorites with you here.

-It's Friday night, around 7:30. The parking lot is overflowing with cars, people are standing around, waiting in any available square foot of free space, and all the waiters appear as though they're going to rip off the head of the next person who asks for extra dressing. You walk in with a cute little smile on your face and ask me, "Are you on a wait?" Alright, fine. So you have zero common sense, I can get over that. "How long is the wait?" Okay, so your brain cell count is somewhere down around 5... "Oh, it's going to be 45 minutes or more? I don't think we can wait that long, we have to go blow bubbles up our asses." And all the while you're standing there debating which is more important - eating or the bubbles - a line is gathering behind you of people who actually want to enjoy an enchilada, and aren't idiots.

-Please please please do not EVER go into another restaurant and ask to sit at a different table than the one the host leads you to. Not only do you screw up the seating rotation that we have so diligently created, but you've pissed off the host, the server who was to serve you in the first place (by taking away potential tips) and the server who now has to put up with your ugly face (he's probably been double-seated now, meaning that he has to go into overdrive to take care of your million requests, plus those of his other 623 tables). Oh, and you don't just want any other table, you want a booth? FINE. I only work at this job for the scenery anyway. Seating you is definitely not high on my priority list.

-We have a patio area where I work, and when the weather is nice, it's usually full. However, sometimes the weather is not nice, therefore we don't seat out there, therefore there are no waiters to take tables out there. When it's overcast, theatening to pour, and about 99.99% humidity in 100 degree weather, you're not going to get good service on the patio. First, I have to find a waiter willing to take on the extra duty of picking up your table outside. When I finally give up my liver just to get that accomplished, you have changed your mind, and have decided to move inside. Only as long as I can slap that questioning little smile off your face first. Oh, what's this, we're on a wait? Yes, you'll have to go on the end, because all these other people are smart enough to see that it's going to rain. Just don't ask for a booth, or I'll quit.

Brooke, while I empathize mightily with how stupid the general public is (and I did wait tables for 6 years) I get a little testy when the restaurant is NOT busy and they try to seat my party at a shitty table (next to the kitchen door, next to the bathrooms, in a shitty little squeezed up area) when there are PLENTY of booths around. It's my money, after all. I'm a great tipper if I get the service that I would have provided the guest had I been the wait person.

If, and only if the restaurant is not busy, requesting a better table is okay. I actually had a lady ask me why, when there is no one there, she always gets seated in the back of the restaurant. At the time, there were only two servers on the floor, and one was in the front and the other in the back. Of course, she didn't want to sit in either section, and had to go to three different tables before she found one she wanted. When I tried to explain to her the concept of bringing waiters on in stages, she looked at me like I had lost my mind. "Well why don't you just have them all come at the same time so that people can sit wherever they want and not have to worry about there being a waiter in that area?"

Thankfully, I don't have to work this afternoon.

The struggle, in any business, is that management has provided adequate staffing to respond to the needs of customers. Management wants to spend as little on payroll as they can get by with, before service suffers, or disgruntled employees cause other types of problems (like high turn-over). The employee is caught in the middle of this equation, responding to the needs of the customer with limited resources.

As frustrating as it is, it's not the customer's fault.

Oh, service is already suffering. From wait staff to paramedics to nurses on the floor to firemen, service is suffering mightily.

That isn't really what I meant. "Before service [provided to the customer] suffers..."

No, no. I didn't mean that wait staff, nurses, etc. are themselves suffering (though they are) I meant service to the customer is suffering.

And you're correct, it's not the customer's fault. I'm actually a pretty patient person, thus allowing me to put up with this job for as long as I have, and even enjoy it sometimes. It's only the people who seem to have zero clue about how the world works that truly upset me, even with as much as I may rant about the restaurant business as a whole. But there will always be dumb people, no matter where one works/lives... thus the point of this thread, I suppose.

If you can't seat someone to serve an enchilada in 45 minutes, I think the customer has a right to discuss with their party whether your enchiladas are worth waiting 45 minutes for, or if they should seek a meal elsewhere. That's how the world truly works outside your corner of it.

Why worry about the other people in line?...after all, you can't seat them anyway.

If you have such contempt for your customers, maybe you should consider a line of work with less customer contact. I'm sure the back of the house can find you something to do making enchiladas. Perhaps you can discover the recipe secret that would make them worth waiting 45 minutes for the privilege of ordering them.

All I can rant about is stupid drivers. I have never waited a table in my life and I refuse to start. I understand about their frustrations though and rarely do anything to piss them off and tend to tip above 20% unless the waitperson is REALLY bad. For excellent service 50% is not unheard of.

Tonight, I nearly killed about a hundred motorists coming down I70 into Denver.

Not that *I* did anything wrong, but my brakes were just barely hanging on, it was too dangerous to try to stress them enough to stop, and all the while I'm trying to cool them enough to slow me down enough to keep my tach out of the redline. And here we have Joe Motorist, tailgating me through a cloud of brake smoke. If that wasn't enough of a warning of a truck about to run away, he passes me (no signal of course), then rides along my drive wheels (a HUGE blind spot), finally gets up the speed to finish passing, CUTS ME OFF!!!!! (again, no signal) and as soon as he's safely ten feet away from my bumper, HITS HIS BRAKES!!!!!!!!! Then he looks confused as to why I am hanging onto my air horn and flashing my lights and screaming at the top of my lungs to get out of there before he dies a horrible crunching death and is sent home in a Baggie!

Repeat as needed to age the trucker to Methuselah class.

I pulled into a truck stop a few miles from the foot of the last mountain with my brakes still smoking, manage to park in such a way as not to need to set the brakes (for fear of welding them to the drums, yes they DO get that hot) and go in to sit down, do deep breathing exercises until I calm down again and commiserate with the other drivers who can feel my pain. I was not the only driver with overheated brake linings there, which is about the normal state of things in this area. The winner of the hard luck stories was a driver bringing a D11 (a HUGE earth moving machine weighing over 200,000 lbs) up and over at ten mph, with escort.

I could go on and on about the dangerous things some motorists do around trucks but you'd all get bored.

Off to sleep!

Brian

Brian, were you possibly hauling... bananas?

On a more serious note - I feel sorry for truckers. Most drivers are idiots and have no concept of mass.

People being rude and shouting. That really annoys me. It especially annoys me if the person on the recieving end was just trying to do their job. I don't see how it helps to shout at someone.

Assholes I find sitting in MY yard, on MY lawn furniture, fishing in MY pond when I come home. And yes, it is clearly posted. One of these days......

Why are they in your yard?