the bitter waiter

A smile a day keeps your server away

After a brief hiatus from the restaurant world, I returned refreshed and ready to have a positive attitude about my day job.

That all went down the shitter as soon as I saw my first table.

Before I could even clock in, a suspiciously friendly family of four blondes paraded into the restaurant.  In walked mom, dad, their pudgy tantrum-prone daughter with a box full of Barbies, and their infant son, already screaming with a mouthful of Cheerio's.

Mom was the first to annoy me.  As I was taking another table's order, she eagerly interrupted me to ask if they could sit at my one empty table, which was cluttered with dirty glasses from the previous party.  

"And we'll need you to clean it off," she said -- with a smile of course.

"I'm glad you pointed that out," I replied.  

I instructed our underworked bus boy, who'd no doubt been in the back smoking a joint or impregnating one of the tortilla cooks, to clear off the table.  I played catch-up with my other tables, anticipating that my blond friends would be high maintenance.

I greeted the table, and boy, did they greet me back.

"HOW ARE YOU???????" mom and dad bellowed simultaneously.  I felt like I'd just arrived at a Manson family orientation meeting.  

"Never better, thank you.  Anything to drink?"

"Well I'm Emily and this my husband Joe!!  These are our kids, Stephen and Kimmy.  Joe and I love passion fruit iced tea, and Stephen and Kimmy already have their sippys!!!!!!"

I rarely break character at work, but the random roll call, as well as the plural usage of the word "sippy," was too much for me.  I started laughing.  And not politely.

"Look, kids, our waiter is laughing!!!" mom said -- with a smile, of course.

I returned to the server station.  It took me no more than 15 seconds to fetch their drinks.  When I returned, mom said: 

"Wow, you must be busy!  We thought you'd forgotten about us!!"

She smiled, looked at Joe, and they both began to laugh playfully on cue.   

"I'm sure the mere seconds it took me to grab your iced teas felt like a lifetime," I replied.  

"Well, we had time to comment on how long it took you!" Mom said -- with a smile, of course.

"Then I assume everyone is ready to order in light of how much time I gave you?"

"Oh yes!  We know!!  We get the same thing every time!!!  We love the food here!!!!  Joe you go first!!!!!"

"I'LL HAVE YOUR QUAY-SUE ENCHY-LADAS!"

Joe's intentional mispronunciation of basic Spanish caused the Von Trapps to erupt in canned laughter.  When they turned to see if I found the order amusing, I gave them my best Holocaust survivor look.

Mom ordered for herself, little Stephen and then not-so-little Kimmy, who was dipping Malibu Barbie in salsa and making a horrific mess at the table.

"Oh.  And we're in a hurry!  If you could ask the chef to speed things up, well, that'd be great!!"

I had to stifle a chuckle when I pictured myself approaching the line, asking one of our drunken line cooks to "speed things up."  

Sure enough, not even five minutes had passed before mom flagged me down.

"Hi there!  Remember, we're in a hurry!!  Any idea where the food is!!?"

"If I had to guess, I'd say it's in the kitchen, where they usually prepare the food."

"We sure are in a hurry!!!!!!!!!!!"

Mom and dad shared another creepy laugh.  I didn't want to imagine where this eery, cultish family was headed after dinner.  

The food arrived rather quickly, after mom had flagged down everyone from my fellow servers to Spanish-speaking kitchen workers to inform them that she was in an awful hurry.

They took their sweet time eating, apparently forgetting about their post-dinner obligation.  Once the plates were cleared, they sat around for a good 15 minutes staring at one another as if recreating the opening sequence of "The Brady Bunch."

And then, rather abruptly, as I was talking to the table next to them, mom yoddled a grating "Yooo hooo!" while batting her eyelashes.

"We're...still in a hurry!!  We'd like our check!!!"

Dad, of course, pulled out a $100 bill for a $32 check.  I don't carry a cash register on me, so I had to wait for the moody bartender to provide me with change.  You can imagine how this upset Emily and Joe.  

Instead of leaving any tip whatsoever, mom drew a big smily face on the bottom of the bill, and left a note:

"Here's a tip.  Smile more!"

:)

Adventures in estrogen

I always shudder when I see a group of five or more women enter the restaurant together.  These ladies (generally) fit the mold of one of the following:

1) A group of timid (ugly) girls who order in a whisper, pick at their food, drink Diet Cokes, calculate an exact 15% tip and take their sweet time ordering.

2) A group of overly friendly church ladies who share two salads, look through endless photo albums before ordering, request incessant iced tea refills and take their sweet time ordering.

3) A group of fake-boob-fake-tan early-40s sluts who feel classy eating in a low-end Mexican restaurant and who will accept a compliment from anyone (from the nasty Jewish businessmen to the homeless man outside) and take their sweet time ordering.

With a modicum of restraint, I can tolerate groups 1 or 2.  Grating as they might be, at least they're usually polite.  

The third group and I, however, are sworn enemies.  Because unlike the other testosterone-filled servers who think that one of these Dina Lohan lookalikes will blow him in the back alley, I know the tactics of the cougars.  

All talk, little action, no tip.

The other night I had a group of six cougars ready to drink, giggle, and pretend they were the girls of "Sex and the City" (All Samantha's, the whole badly Botoxed lot of them). 

Every single time I approached the table, one of them had to crack some sort of sexual joke.

"May I bring you...ladies another around?"

"THAT'S NOT ALL YOU CAN BRING US!"

Then, as if taking their cue from an Olive Garden commercial, they all laughed in unison, each of them leaning forward in pretend convulsions while faking the motion of spitting out a drink.

(And's that not all they had to spit out!  See, I can sink to that level, too).

One of the girls will inevitably assume the role of "Nice cougar" once she senses that her reptilian-skinned friends are behaving badly.  In this case, the dumbest one of the group decided to play 20 questions with me.

"So where are you from?"

"Oklahoma."

"Oh!  I know someone from there."

(weak grin) "Cool."

"Did you go to school there?"

"No, University of Missouri."

"Oh, yikes, were you affected by Katrina?"

(beat)

"Were you...ladies ready to order?"

You can imagine what ensued.  A lengthy list of modified salads and tacos, all "enhanced" to be more diet friendly (when in reality the only thing that could save their stomachs would be a month in Somalia carrying around sacks of feed, living off 500 calories a day).

After dinner was served and orders were sent back, the ladies continued downing their white zinfandels and vodka & cokes.  The drunker the cougar, the poorer the server.

Within 10 minutes, one of the cougars was trying to escape her cage and dance on the table.  Our manager, slow to notice fights and fires, sprang into action and tried to cajole the untamed beast back into a safer habitat.  He was not helped by the battle cry of the fellow cougars, each trying to paw her way to a similarly awkward display of drunkenness.

Me, well, I'd given up on ever escaping the cougar den.  I'd dropped the bill a good 90 minutes before it was actually paid.  After running six different credit cards, I was home free.  My tip was a series of scribbles that I eventually deduced to be just above 10 percent.

Fortunately one of the cougars left behind a trail on her way out, a trail that led me to a an extra $25 that had been carelessly left under the table after the feast.  The $25 that would have been callously used on designer knock-offs will now find a better purpose in my liquor fund, which frequently helps erase the memory of this and similar animal attacks at work.

The boys of summer

If there's one faction of people less desirable than tourists, it's pseudo-celebrities.  Because these people have been relentlessly catered to by PAs and sleazy execs from E! and VH1, they feel the whole world will share the enthusiasm of their peons.

Wrong.

Let me just say that I don't watch a single second of reality TV.  Other than LOST and the occasional disgusting glimpse of Sarah "Karen Walker" Palin on CNN, I'm reluctant to watch anything labeled as "Must-See-TV."  So imagine my complete apathy when someone in my section told me he and his six hillbilly frat friends had just been on "America's Got Talent."

Of course every generic, F-list, talentless eye-sore must strive for subtlety, so he didn't come out and say it.  Instead, he asked (in a very thick and disturbing Southern accent). "Do y'all show any TV shows on your TV at the bar?"

"As opposed to showing...?"

"All y'all are showing is sports or the reporter people."

[By "reporter people," he meant MSNBC coverage of the Republican National Convention, where I imagine most of his family and fellow church-goers were salivating with their loaded weapons, Klan masks and fried chicken.]

"Is....there something you'd rather watch...on a bar TV?"

"Y'all ever show 'America's Got Talent?'"

"God I hope not."

"'Cause we were just awn it."

"Is everyone ready to order?"

I was immediately bombarded with menu questions, each one overshadowing the other with increasing stupidity.

"Can I get that fried?"

"Can I get more iced tea?"

"Y'ALL GOT KAY-SO DIP?"

"Can I get more Cherry Coke?"

"Do those chicken incha-ladias got lotsa chicken?"

"Can I get more lemonade?"

"How many tacos come on the dos tacos plate?"

By the end of the order, my head nearly exploded.  I hadn't been subjected to such testosterone-laden ignorance since being forced to attend a Christian youth sports camp in rural Missouri.  

Of course, once the food arrived, no one remembered what they ordered (or, at the very least, couldn't connect the simple Spanish translations with the plates in front of them).  

"I ORDERED THE KAY-SO QUESADILLA!  ALL Y'ALL PUT IN HERE IS CHEESE!"

"Y'all messed up, this burrito ain't even fried!"

"I thought catfish came on the fish tacos?"

I pretended to take their entrees back to the kitchen and fix them.  Instead, I set the plates down at the expo line, texted the few friends who would actually watch "America's Got Talent," vented, and took the exact same plates back.  

The Confederate cavemen didn't seem to notice (and if they did, it didn't matter.  I didn't go back to their table until they waived their 13-star flags in the air to let me know they were ready for the bill).  

My math was a little off, because I could have *sworn* their party had eight people, thus gratuity was included.  At least I saved myself from a bad tip, the one cliche I was able to avoid with my latest dose of reality TV "stars."