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This is you, only not as cool or amusing. And I hate you. |
Moving on . . .
Coming in late
Almost everyone pays lip-service to being sorry for this one, yet it stops perhaps .1% of them from doing it anyway. The last hour that a restaurant is open is not for new customers. It is to give the people who were already there a chance to eat in peace. Toward the end of the night, when business begins to dwindle, restaurant staff start the long process of closing the building: putting away equipment and food, cleaning up, polishing the table you let your infant eat directly off of (gross, we don't sanitize those, FYI), etc. Pretty much the most thankless part of the job, except all the other parts.
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It's not as sexy as it sounds, and leads to impromptu fornication less than 50% of the time, despite what pornos would have you believe. |
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Just your average cleanup job. |
And, for the love of Wolfgang Puck, if you have the gall to come in and order a meal in the final hour, tell your server everything you want upfront. Forgot you like olive relish with your sandwich? Tough shit, Needy McBitch-a-Lot. You're going without it tonight. I cannot count the number of times I have been sent back to the kitchen by the same clueless guest multiple times to face the wrath of a cook because s/he needed two more ranch dressings, which has by now been moved back to the cooler in the rearmost part of the building, probably beyond the Chasm of Certain Doom and a churlish guardian dragon.
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"So you are on a quest for honey mustard? First, you must answer me these riddles three!" |
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Fuck this country. |
Who doesn't like to save a buck? In these hard economic times, with a family to feed blah-blah-blah (*insert obligatory recession-acknowledging bullshit opener from every article about penny-pinching and corner-cutting written in the last decade*). You know what? I'm one of those people suffering, too. So just because you got a meal for free with the purchase of another, after you argued with me for ten minutes about using two coupons and combining them with another in-store special even though every goddamn coupon on the planet has the same stipulatory fine print that reads Cannot be combined with any other coupon, discount, promotion, or special offer, does not mean you are excused from tipping on that other meal. I have said this before, but it bears repeating: you tip on the original bill, not the adjusted one.
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Please take one! |
As for those darling media-cunts Rachel Ray and Oprah Winfrey who have both condoned lousy tipping in general as a perfectly acceptable way to save money . . . I'm sorry, I just had to shunt an aneurysm in my brain with a box-cutter and a silly-straw. That's because I cannot afford medical insurance on your shitty tips, Mrs. Extreme-Couponer.
Modifying food or requesting non-existent items
Do you remember when waitresses in pastel skirts and paper hats took your order on a little notepad, hung it on the old-fashioned ticket wheel, and retrieved your food half an hour later from the open-windowed kitchen? And you could get fountain Cokes flavored with vanilla or cherry syrup while taking your best gal out after the football game, where you gave her your letterman sweater? No? Maybe it's because that was so six decades ago.
It may have escaped your notice, but eateries have changed a tad in the interim, especially massive chains. We now have these fancy machines called "computers" that we use to ring in your order, and they are not word-processors. Your sever doesn't just type in exactly what you want letter-for-letter. In order to simplify, streamline, regularize, and otherwise expedite your restaurant-going experience, which is the express goal of casual dining, the company designs and installs a program with the specific items from the menu each represented by a single icon on a touchscreen.
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Think of it like your iPad, except less pretentious and even more prone to bizarre fuckups. |
It gets even worse when you decide to build your own meal from scratch without regard for the actual food the restaurant offers, because - guess what? - there is no fucking button for that. Instead, we have to try to assemble your plate like Dr. Frankenstein from one of the preexisting entrees, modifying roughly 17 conditions in the process and tying up that computer terminal for ten minutes. Then you wonder why your meal took a bit longer to hit the table? And you have the audacity to bitch that it's not what you ordered? When I said we don't have burritos, I wasn't just trying to hide the massive hoard of delicious burritos from you so I could have them all for myself - I said it because we don't make them.
Which reminds me of a sidenote. Do not attempt to argue with your server about items that (1) the restaurant has discontinued or (2) never offered. Menus do change over time, and when a company opts to stop making a particular dish, they generally stop stocking the ingredients as well. Nuts, huh? At my workplace, not a month goes by when some jackass doesn't ask for a particular kind of nacho platter we literally discontinued over three damned years ago. Give up the torch, dude, they are gone. It's gotten to the point where I myself am not even entirely sure which nachos they are referring to, and I have served there continuously the whole time. I guess Jesus must have dropped by three years ago and invented them. Well, sorry, we quit making Christ Nachos.
Similarly, let's just pretend I am the server who is and has been at this restaurant day in and day out for several years, and you are the none-too-bright patron who stops in once or twice a month; believe me, I know our menu better than you. You did not get our colossal onion-petal appetizer here two weeks back, because we stopped serving it in April 2009. And, no, for the last time, we never had burritos. Ever. Period. This is not up for debate, so don't you dare roll your eyes at me and condescendingly assure me, "Oh, you used to, it must have been before your time." My servile status is degrading enough without you telling me how to do my job. Compared to you, I am Gordon Ramsay. You are . . . Pauly Shore. At best.
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Do not make me cut you. |
So, in summary, employees of the serving industry drink a lot.
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Just like Carson. |