Why is it that some customers feel as though they can trick us servers into giving them food/drinks/desserts/etc on the house? And why is it that people feel as though they’re going to get closer to that free fill-in-the-blank with irrational anger and frickin’ uncalled for hostility?

Probably because most servers work at a Nationally Franchised Restaurant. A Nationally Franchised Restaurant is a downright scary thing to think about because it’s at a Nationally Franchised Restaurant that the customer can get away with thinking that he or she is always right.

A Nationally Franchised Restaurant has so much food and money at its disposal because of its status as a Nationally Franchised Restaurant that it can hurry angry and/or disgruntled customers out the door with nothing more than a free ticket and a fake smile.

…reminds me of the Baptist church, but I digress.

Lucky for me, I work at a small, independently-owned restaurant that has only one sister restaurant ninety miles away. The owner of my store has to think twice before giving away free stuff. A customer can’t expect to get their meal for free just because they are willing to act like a five year old and throw a temper tantrum at me or my manager for a few minutes.

For example, the other night a mother and her six-year-old child were sitting comfortably at their table, empty plates pushed ahead of them. The mother even had her napkin on her plate. Any server reading this worth their order booklet knows that a napkin on the plate is the plate’s way of telling the server, “Hey, the lady eating off me is done now. I can now go through the wonderfully fanciful process of being washed and put in front of another hungry customer!”

Not so with this lady.

I go up, put on my shit-eating grin and ask, “May I take that up for you?” Of course the lady was on her cell phone. Of course she doesn’t know how to act at a restaurant. So I ask again. I am looked at sternly and then given a wave that I thought meant “I’m too dumb and ignorant to know how to respond to another human being so I’ll wave like a frickin’ ape instead.” I take up the two plates.

You’d think I’d sold Jesus for thirty shekels of silver or something.

Her: “Why did you take up my child’s plate?”
Me: “Uh…I thought he was done?”
Her: “Never mind what you thought! He had a full plate of food there!”

I’ve taken tens of thousands of plates from the back of our restaurant out to the dining floor and I’ve never seen one that looked as barren and empty as the one I took from in front of that six-year-old.

There were literally a few grains of rice on that plate. Ethiopians could have overlooked that.

So of course she freaks the frick out and goes into a whirlwind of rice-loving, server-hating fury and tries to get (I kid you not) an ENTIRELY NEW MEAL because of it.

April on the other hand is smarter than that. She asks me what happened and if there was enough food left on the plate to warrant a free to-go meal.

Me: “There wasn’t enough food on that plate to fill a shot glass.”
April: “I see.”
Me: “If you want to give her a to-go shot glass of fried rice, I’d be more than happy to do that.”
April: “I…uh…don’t think so.”

When she learned she wasn’t getting her free meal, she paid her bill (with exact frickin’ change) and stormed out.

I only had one thought as she left: Who still carries pennies in their wallets?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 12:28 and is filed under Kids, Moms, Stuck Up Yuppies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.