Why are old people so complicated?

There is nothing more fantastic than waiting on old people. They are the #1 distributers of the "oral tip," ala telling you how wonderful you are and then leaving you a low tip as a bonus to their kind words. Every single table of old people that I get seems to follow the same routine. Anyhow, here are some of the really annoying and repetitive things to expect when serving shrivs.

Discounts/Coupons - Mondays are our restaurant's old people friendly day. Unlike the normal grimey waste of life people that use comps and voids to their advantage, shrivs get a nice 10% off discount if they show us a card indicating that they are ready to die soon. We then have to hound down a manager and actually pretend we care that they are old and that they are going to cut our tip down by 10%.

Hot tea/coffee, soups - Old people hate cold beverages because they are rotting away and might freeze to death, so they need everything very warm. They seem to have lost the feeling in their mouths, so the hot beverages stimulate their taste buds so they can once again eat food. Often, you will serve them hot tea with regular milk instead of creamers. Regular milk actually requires effort, being that it has to be poured. In some restaurants, you have to ask the bartender for milk. What a waste of time for a low tip. To top that off, shrivs often order soup and then have the nerve to complain about the the soups being cold. One time I took the thermometer out to the table and took the soup's temperature at a whopping 183 degrees! My guess is that this shriv was too caught up on their hot tea to realize that the soup was also very hot, but seemed only warm because of the temperature of their hot beverage.

Water with everything - Any shriv that orders a soda, a cocktail, even a hot beverage has a 95% chance of ordering a water to go along with their drink. The other 5% order a water with a lemon.

Special modifications - Old people hate spices! They hate anything that will rupture their little tummy in any way so they stick to the classics. They even find ways to modify a house salad! I have this one old couple come in every week (usually Tuesday lunch) and order a salad with just lettuce and oil and vinegar. Wow, that's a great salad! Tonight I witnessed a server entering about 10-15 lines of special modifications to a shrimp salad that already has nothing in it. The old bag then called our kitchen manager out to talk to him about the dressing, and how she had the same salad last night, the same way and got this mysterious dressing that we never had in stock. She then proceeded to fall asleep at the table for about an hour...What a camper!

Nasty faces - Shrivs make nasty faces whenever something isn't to their liking. It's not our fault that the guys in the kitchen didn't cook the blood out of the steak. No problem though, we'll fix it! "No, I'll eat it the way it is." Old people would rather complain about every bite than let you fix a kitchen error.

Bathrooms - Shrivs hate dirty bathrooms. Even if there is one piece of paper hanging out of the trash can, they will complain that the bathroom is dirty. I still have never seen an old person use soap in our bathroom, but you know damn well they are watching us to make sure we wash our hands.

Sweet N Lows/Equals - For a while in our restaurant we only stocked sweet n low, but now we stock equal after two years of asking for it. Now, people want splendas. Miraculously, nobody in their right mind uses this nasty stuff other than fat women on diets or old people. I just love it when at the end of the night I have to fill up a sugar caddy that I know was hijacked by some old person who couldn't afford to buy a box of equal for their coffee at home.

Grandkids - It's always a grandkids birthday when grandma and grandpa bring the kiddies out to eat! Be prepared for balloons and birthday songs!

Don't forget the coffee refills. Old people love the endless cup of coffee. Make sure it's fresh too because they will ask you to throw on a new pot of decaf.

Inappropriate accenting of words that are blatantly in English on the menu...

Today several of the other servers were talking about mispronounciations that guests make in regards to some of the items on the menu. Here are a couple that are worth laughing about:

Sirloin - Sir-Loin
We often hear Sir-Leon, Sar-Leon, or Ser-line

Cajun - Cage-un
We often hear Cah-hune

This is not hard here, this is simple English. I just hate having to ask an English speaking guest to point at the menu so I can figure out what it is they are trying to order.

Can I get more of the white sauce?

One of the most annoying things about my restaurant is the fact that they are extremely stingy when it comes to giving out certain sauces. For wings, they give a tiny ramekin of blue cheese, and for one of our salad's, they kind of pour the dressing into the bottom of the bowl and plop the salad on top of it. Dropping off either of these two things always follows with a "can I get some more of the white sauce?" It's not such a bad thing at all though, I must admit, I love extra sauce on certain things. We're all human here, or else I wouldn't be arguing that servers are human too, but most of the time I will ask for an extra sauce if I have run out of the first, or was on the verge of running out. These people ask for it as soon as you get there, which is also fine, if they are going to use it. Hey, they could even be saving you the trouble from getting it later, but nothing is more disheartening than when you get a really low tip on a table that ran you around for sauces, sour cream, extra sodas, and useless things that they never ended up even touching! You better believe that these people will lick every ounce of sour cream out of a ramekin when you let them know that they were charged for it, but they will continue to ask for excess of any free sauce just because they can, not because they really need it.

Sometimes my job isn't so bad...

Last night was an exceptional night. For the first time ever, I was thanked formally for singing the birthday song, not by the people who asked me to sing it, but by the birthday girl. She was young and looking forward to us coming and singing to her. It was a legit birthday and when the little girl came up to me without her parents having told her to, in order to thank me, I could only say "thank you sweetie, you're the first person to ever thank me for singing the birthday song."

After their table I had a few nice tips from easy going guests. One tip was $8 on a $30 tab, which was totally shocking but a really really nice surprise. I then proceeded to get less than 10% tips from the rest of my tables until that one last table came to sit down in my section.

They started off extremely friendly and nice, knowing what they wanted without even seeing a menu. They were chatty, humorous (in the good non-corny way) and caring of their kids. They asked if I had a sweater or anything of my own I could lend their little girl, but unfortunately I left my sweatshirt in my car a few parking lots away, so I ventured throughout the restaurant looking for someone to loan me something. I ended up not finding anything but another guest joined their table and brought a sweatshirt for the girl to wear. Their food came out fairly quick and they ordered some more drinks and another kid meal. I really didn't seem to worry about these folks, and when they asked for the check I already had it on hand. They were really pleasant and didn't run me around at all. The bill was around $59 and change, they left me $100.

While I don't feel I deserved that large of a tip for such little work, these people must see something in another way. Who knows, maybe they have served themselves or just know how it works. Either way, they made me a very happy person last night, and I can't even think of any other way to thank them other than writing about it in this blog.

9% Sunday Lunch?

Apparently Sunday is the day for trash to come out to eat. If you think about it, it's Sunday dinner and you want to take the family out. My family would go to a nice sit down restaurant that serves bread and salad with the meal, and leave a nice fat 25-30% tip for the server who probably didn't work half as hard as I do in the corporate chain restaurant. Anyhow, it's Sunday lunch and after a long and well earned broken sleep, I exhaustedly drove out to my job this morning. Aside from the Sunday drivers (and there were a ton of them) there was a huge motorcycle gang which also happened to get off of my exit and managed to all cut in front of me so that I got stuck at the light. I already should have seen this as a kiss of death.

For the most part, the beginning tables were easy going, mostly families with young kids. Aside from having to handle my tables, sidework, and dealing with hunger while serving food, I also had to train a new manager in training how to be a server. Luckily, he was already experienced as a server (most MIT's are cooks or bartenders it seems) so I thought this was going to be an easy shift.

My first bad table was a husband and wife with their bratty little girl. They must have been straight from Europe because I could barely understand a word they were saying. Anyhow, I let them point to things on the menu and out went a Grey Goose martini, a kid lemonade, and a pint of Guiness. The lady sent back the martini saying it was "too strong." I took the drink back to the bartender and asked him to put it in a shaker. He threw the shaker at me and left me to fend for myself. The couple ordered their food and I made sure to check on them often. They were pretty cool after that and asked me to wrap up their leftovers. They then gave me a $50 and I went to get change for the $48.20 check. I figured they needed the $1.80 back so they could drop me a tip from money they already had. When I turned around they were leaving. Ouch.

The next bad table was a group of 3 girls who were waiting for the 4th person to show. Like always, the 4th never showed. They all had "water with lemon" and ordered entrees, all with special modifications. When they were done eating, I wrapped up the girls food, making sure to give her little cups of each of the sauces that she asked for. They then proceeded to camp in my section for over an hour and left me $3 on $30. Come again!

I love making $27 on over $300 in sales.

I'll have a water...with a lemon...

I cannot even think of a time when I was at home and put a slice of lemon in my water. I honestly doubt that 95% of the people who ask for a lemon with their water ever put a slice of lemon in their water at home. Is there something special about having a little sliver of citrus in your water just because you are eating out? Tap water is free at our restaurant. Our company's standard for guests who order water is a plain tumbler glass filled with ice and water. We aren't even supposed to provide guests who order only a water a straw, let alone a lemon slice. Lemon slices are meant for diet cola, hot tea, and sometimes espresso according to our standard. I've also noticed that "water with lemon" is popular among the female guests more so than the males. Is there some new diet fad that involves "water with lemon" or is it just the fact that they can swindle a free beverage with a slight flavor without paying $2.09 for a Pepsi or Coke?

The best has to be the folks who order waters and a plate of lemons. I have actually witnessed people who have ordered already half priced appetizers and waters with plates of lemons so that they could make their own lemonade at the table! Sure, our restaurant is extremely skimpy on the lemonade, which is 90% ice and about 10% concentrate and flavor, but come on! Half price appetizers and $0.00 beverages? We do deserve to make some money for the running around we have to do during the half priced time! Most of the time people who order half priced food leave half priced tips after making you cut a new tray of lemons so that they can avoid paying for a lemonade. Come on now...

10 percent on a Friday night...

When you work at a corporate restaurant chain, there is no possible way to get away with upsetting your guests. The management will do anything to keep even the worst of customers from never returning. A guest lost is considered a crime to many of the franchise owners in the casual dining industry...you know, the people who don't quite deal with the types of people who manage to put you in the weeds for hours after they have left the building. Apparently their hard earned dollars being spent on microwaved and deep fried food is more important than your integrity and work ethic as a server. We as servers need to make a living too.

It seems that a lot of customers not only do not know how to tip, but also do not realize that there are such things as tipouts, taxes, minimum wage, and teamwork. The mere fact that servers in corporate chains and often mom & pop style restaurants only make a measly $2.13 an hour is not stated when a guest walks through the door. At the moment of the initial greet, as a server, it's incredibly hard to not have a preconcieved notion that you are either going to get a great tip, an average tip, or no tip at all.

Tonight I had some kids ring up a $50 check. They got refills, extra sides, extra sauces, and anything else they asked for. When it came time for the check they paid with a credit card. As they were leaving, they laughed and signed the credit card slip. When I picked up the slip there was a dash through the tip line and no money on the table. For about a half an hour these kids hung out in the patio area outside chatting with some friends. If I were to ask them if there was anything wrong with the service or in any way dispute the fact that I just paid $2.00 out of my pocket in tipshare for them to eat when I should have gotten at least a $7.50 tip (at 15% when the standard is now about 18%) I could have risked losing my job. Instead, I kept my cool for a few minutes and then proceeded out the front door. I waved to the kid who paid the bill and said to him "Thank you, and take care." They laughed. Little did they know that they robbed me of an hour and a half of my time at a table I could've rotated twice. They also did not care. Maybe they think that servers get paid hourly? This is something I will never quite understand. On top of their lack of a tip, most of my tips for the night were less than 10%. The few really great tips I recieved all seemed to make up for the bad tips leaving me at 10% of my sales after tipping out $60 in tipshare and dropping another $20 for the food runner.

Sometimes I think to myself "is this all worth it?" I could be working a 9-5 job where I am getting hourly pay and benefits, but I choose the flexibility of serving because I am still in school. For the most part, serving food is a gratifying job. When my guests feel good, I feel good. When my guests are rude or are complainers, I feel distressed. Tonight I sent back several items to the kitchen, mostly things that were just flat out caused by kitchen neglect. It felt good to know that none of these things were in my error, but the guests don't seem to think this way. I don't cook their food, I just ring it in on a computer and sometimes run it to their table. We have a runner system where everyone works as a team. When something comes out wrong, the server gets blamed. There's nothing I hate more than someone complaining that their steak came out wrong when I rang it in correctly and the guest lowers my tip because of a kitchen error. The kitchen still makes the same money in salary no matter what goes wrong. Why can't servers at least make the money they deserve?

I wish an automatic gratuity law would go into effect sometimes. There are restaurants in New York City that add an automatic gratuity due to the large amount of tourists in the area. At least the servers who work in those restaurants can be guaranteed to make a certain percent of their sales per night. Our restaurant is very hit or miss. I can't understand how I can walk with 30% of my sales on a Monday night when the restaurant is extremely slow and only make about 8-10% on a weekend when the movie theatre next door is overflowing into our restaurant. I just hope that someday the corporate owners of some of these chains will take into consideration the hard working people that make their restaurants so successful and give great service so that the guests will keep returning for more microwaved and deep fried food.

Some of the most annoying things you can put your server through...

Please don't snap your fingers.

Why ask for a cup of hot water to soak your silverware? Hot water isn't sanitizing.

I hate that squiggly sign in the air thing indicating that you want the check.

Don't ask for something, and when your server comes back, ask for another of the same thing, and on and on....make it easy, ask for everything at once, but make sure it's your server you ask. Asking other servers only makes it more difficult for them to take care of their tables.

Please, please, please, don't ask for the soup of the day 10 minutes before last call. The soup is nasty at the end of the night. I'm only saving you the indigestion.

This also goes for salads. We close the salad area up and then have to run around like a chicken with no head at last call trying to find things like tomatoes and cucumbers.

Don't ask us to have the bartender "hook up" your drink. Everything is measured and is very textbook according to prep. If you want your drink "hooked up," go to a real bar, not a family restaurant.

Don't call us "waitress/waiter" or "server." We tell you our name for a reason. If I run something to another servers table and the guest asks me for something, I usually ask them what their servers name is to see if they were paying attention. This helps me to decide whether getting them a side of blue cheese that they aren't even going to touch is worth crashing over or not.

Don't write all over the check how horrible I was while I had 8 tables and then call up my managers to complain. You've already made my night terrible by writing me a bad note because I couldn't get you all of the sides that you didn't need or touch quick enough.

If I am a good server, thank me in your tip. Don't tell me how great I am and then leave me 4 on 80. I tip out a percent of my sales. Like you, I need to eat and pay my bills too.

Please don't leave me your phone number either, especially after a 5% tip.

If you're not going to tip me on a high check, make sure you never show your face again. If I see you again, I am going to hold the door for you while you exit the restaurant on your next visit, and I will call you out on it without violating company policy. (Yes I have done this before)

Don't tell me everything is okay and then sing a sad song to my manager for free food. Not only are you making yourself a laughing stock of the waitstaff, but you're also cutting into my comp cost for the night, and also cutting my potential tip in half.

Don't order alcohol and think that I'm not going to ID you because I will.

If you order a soda, there is no reason why you should need a water with it. There's also no reason why a party of 4 needs 4 waters and 4 soft drinks. If I drank 64 ounces of liquid in less than an hour I'd be peeing like a racehorse.

Hot tea......need I say more?

Slip Resistant Shoes - Reviews

Slip Resistant footwear is quite possibly any server or kitchen staff's best friend in a high volume restaurant. I must have gone through about 10 pairs of Slip Resistant shoes in my first year of serving. Trying different pairs gave me the opportunity to find a style and fit that I liked, but also while also spending several days worth of tips in the process. Below I have chosen to review a few of the pairs of Slip Resistant shoes that have really stood out in my past few years of serving.

The first pair of non-slip shoes I purchased was in October of 2003. They were from Payless shoes and were one of their generic no-name brands with their patented nonslip grids on the bottom. These shoes were not only ugly, but they weighed a ton. These were the women's design, which more or less looked like a super bulky running shoe with cheap plastic flaps hanging from the sides. I ended up getting stuck at my first serving job late that night and missed the last bus. I walked 4 miles to the next town to catch a late bus, and boy did my feet hurt. These shoes were just not fit enough to wear outside of the restaurant. I give them a 1 for comfort, and 10 for the non-slip tread being so well made.

The next pair of non-slip shoes I purchased was in February 2004. I purchased the TX-Traction women's shoes from Famous Footwear. These shoes seemed like they were very well made and featured a super cusioned insole with a raised section on the heel. After my first serving shift at the new high volume restaurant I still work at to this day, my feet were burning. I wore these shoes for a few more weeks before tossing them in the garbage. I learned recently that TX is now in with Dr. Scholls, so maybe their shoes have some more comfort? I give these shoes a 1 for comfort and a 5 for the slip resistant bottoms not being reliable when there is food stuck in the grooves.

After my battle with the TX's, I bought a smaller pair of men's Payless velcro non-slips. These shoes were extremely comfortable compared to the women's Payless shoes. The added bonus was the fact that I never had to bend over and tie them. Instead, I dealt with ridicule from the rest of the wait staff for wearing shoes for a 5 year old, but what can I say? These shoes still have not done me wrong. They clean up nicely, and I never slip no matter how much mashed potato and sour cream I have stepped on in the garbage area. I give these shoes an 8 for comfort only because they sometimes stress out my toes and a 10 for the non-slip tread being the most reliable tread once again. Go payless!

In April 2004 I made the mistake of leaving my velcro shoes in another state 4 hours away with my family who wouldn't be home for another two weeks. Ironically enough, I was driving home for a 3:45 pm shift and had already been about an hour into my trip home so I decided it would be a waste of time and gas to head back for a pair of $20 shoes. When I made it relatively close to my job, I stopped at a Payless in the mall for another pair of my velcro wonders. Instead, I ended up having to buy a pair of mens' tie up Slip Resistant shoes that were a size or two too big. These shoes lasted me two years before I finally had to throw them out because of the smell of rotten food and green mold making me sick. I give these shoes a 10 for never hurting my feet or letting me down.

Through all of this I have also purchased other pairs of Slip-Resistant shoes from Kmart and Payless, including the new and updated version of the women's non-slip shoe. Payless is doing a good job at trying to fix the women's version of the shoe, but it still feels uncomfortable on my flat feet, so I tend to stick with the men's shoes.

As for now, I still wear the velcro shoes. They are starting to wear down on the upper parts now, so I am going to invest in a pair of Shoes For Crews as they are now available at my job. I've been hearing great things about them from the servers at my job who have purchased them. They even have a pair that resembles Converse All Stars and offer them in both Hi and Low top. I am going to look into a pair of those or a pair that resembles Converse Chuck Purcells. Until then, I hope you enjoyed my shoe review!

Thank you for being my guest!

Hello fellow readers! This is going to be a blog for servers, waitstaff, bussers, cooks, managers, and restaurant staff alike! I am going to cover all of the fun experiences of serving in a chain-restaurant as well as some of the important things such as food safety, tip research, how to handle angry guests, and more. I do hope that you enjoy this blog and take advantage of some of the information provided in my future posts as well as enjoy the humor that will go with all of those bad guest stories.