Working in the hospitality industry, I have learned to accept all responsibility for everything from overcooked hamburgers to the nazi invasion of Poland. If it happened and a guest is in some way upset about it it is my fault and the first order of business is to take responsibility and apologize for it. This does not come naturally to most people. Most people, who have been trained for real jobs and careers, are taught to defend their choices and absolve themselves of responsibility. People naturally have a tendency to "lay the blame" if something went wrong and it was completely out of their control. But in a restaurant, just about everything is someone else's fault. And yet, we never place the blame elsewhere. It breaks down like this:
percentage of time a server is directly responsible for bad experience: 18%
percentage of time we take the blame: 100%
This is because we're the only one's getting tipped. It is in our best interest to simply take the problem and put our own spin on it, then resolve it and look like the hero for buying their soggy mashed potatoes or weak drink (but really, after 5, what drink isn't weak?).
Case in point: post wedding breakfast. 30 guests, half under the age of thirty the rest over. The first category is in a good mood, the latter has as stank attitude from the start. Stank attitude is the worst because it means the guest came in a bad mood and will leave in a bad mood and in the middle is looking for any reason to blame that mood on you. If you so much as neglect to drop a teaspoon at the table he'll demand a discount on his bill. Servers hate these tables. Examples of stank tables:
fighting couples
hung-over old people
groggy old people
old people
jet lagged business men
people from Connecticut
I, personally, look at these tables as a challenge and try to flip them. These people are expecting you to pick up on their bad attitude and mirror it right back to them, but if you go out of your way to be nicer to the stank guests they appreciate it more. It's like pouring ice water on a hot surface as opposed to a room temperature surface, the effect is that much more exaggerated. And with thirty guests the tip was going to be included anyway so even if I failed at least I'd be getting paid.
The table ran smoothly the young people mostly got pancakes and hot chocolate and the old people got eggs and heartburn. Then, after everyone ate, the plates were cleared away, the party was getting up to leave, and the check was dropped one of the men came up to me with a serious look.
"Our pancakes were inedible," he said.
Let me pause this scene to examine the nuances of this complaint. Here is a person complaining about an item that someone else ordered and ate using over exaggerated language only after looking at the bill. This is a heart-healthy bowl of cheap-y-o's. The old man, father of the groom probably, is now having buyers remorse after offering to pay for the breakfast. He sees a six hundred dollar check in front of him and his frugality alert is code red. He immediately goes into disaster mode and complains to the first person he sees in an apron.
"I'm so sorry about that," I respond. "However, nobody who ordered the pancakes complained and most of them were eaten.
"Well they were worse than McDonalds pancakes, I mean how can you run a restaurant if you can't even make pancakes."
"That's a good point. If the people who had ordered them would have said something I would have been happy to exchange them or bring them something else."
"Well I don't think I should have to pay for sub-par pancakes."
"I see."
"Because almost nobody could even eat them they just tasted awful."
"I'm sure."
"Just, really bad."
"Yeah."
Like dogs, you just have to let their spurts of energy run their course. Most people can only complain so long before they run out of steam. In the end I took five of the ten pancake orders off the bill,not because he was right but because it didn't matter to me. My tip, included in the bill, is calculated on the subtotal before discounts, so comping half the bill wouldn't change my outcome. I could care less that this was a clear cut case of I-don't-want-to-pay-my-bill-itis, and he wasn't so much complaining as much as prolonging to process as long as possible. Basically, most servers will give the guest anything in the restaurant just to make them shut up. If it makes them stop bothering us we'd give them all the cutlery and some of the plates.
You see a server is going to do anything in his power to get the most money he can out of you first and foremost, and once he has accomplished that task the second priority is to get you out of the restaurant as fast as possible. Every decision we make is to accomplish those two this get paid and get you to leave. And only if the server is good and uses the right amount of finesse will those two steps not only be completely unnoticeable, but it will actually seem like you were in control the whole time when really we played you like a 8-bit game console.
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