How NOT to win loyal customers
As Pegs and I were waiting in the train station to go to Lille this weekend, we decided we would order a couple of hot chocolates and pastries to open our stomachs before the Christmas gorge-fest. One lady behind the counter took our order while another stacked clean dishes for later use. The stacking lady had finished arranging all of the flatware and dishes when she dropped the last coffee cup at her feet. She picked it up and started to move back to the cleaning tray, which stood empty and ready to receive dirty dishes, when she reconsidered and put it with the clean coffee cups right in front of me. I've seen some disgusting things in restaurants, but this was pretty blatant.
"You're kidding me, right?" I asked the lady behind the counter. "What?" she asked dryly. "The cup," I said. "You're not seriously going to leave it there, are you?"
"It's ok," the other lady said, as she prepared our hot chocolate. "Those are the dirty cups."
"Muskrat, muskrat," Pegs said as she urgently tugged on my sleeve. The pestilence spreader, completely unfazed by my objections to her behavior, started taking someone else's order. "Make sure you get it to go," I told the other customer.
The lady who had taken our order had to go back to the kitchen to get our pains au chocolat, since they were out of them in the front. By that point Pegs had lost her appetite and was pretty PO'd at me for having called the filthmongers on their actions, so she refused to eat any of her breakfast. I ended up eating both of our pastries; they may have been sneezers, but they were still pretty tasty.
Got any interesting/gross service industry stories to share? Oh yes, you do. Be sure to describe them in the comments section below.
3 comments:
Of course I was pissed off. You love to be bitchy with service people, sometimes it's warranted and sometimes it isn't. But what I don't get is why in the hell you don't wait until after we have been served our freaking food. Or after we get off the plane. I worked in a restaurant for christ's sake. I know what people are capable of. When are you going to learn that you just can't do that?
yeah, lee...it's one thing to be disgusted and to complain...but you dont have to be an ass about it...i.e.-"you're kidding me, right?" you can just tell them, that the cup is dirty and you'd like it to be rewashed. You dont need to have attitude. Sooner or later, you're going to get worms or something for your bitchiness.
I don't have a gross service industry story off the top of my head, but I do have an interesting one. As some of you know already, the summer after my freshman year in college I worked the graveyard shift from 6:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. at Cafe du Monde. Boy, was that a blast: I got to wear a paper hat every night, dip my hands in boiling grease to pull out beignets, and have my boss hit on me by promising me the "good tables" if I went home with him at the end of my shift. Then there were the fabulous customers - like the ones who would ask for directions to such prestigious New Orleans landmarks as the house where the Real World people lived, or the Baptists who would give out pamphlets informing me that I was going to hell as a tip.
The best night, though, was my last shift of the summer. It was about 3:00 a.m. and two drunk college girls stumbled over to the cafe from Bourbon St. After ordering a single plate of beignets between the two of them and two glasses of water (a grand total of $1.75, which would leave me an aweseome time, by the way), they proceeded to wage a powdered sugar war against each other and the neighboring customers. When I went over to the table to please ask them to stop, the shining examples of the future of America proceeded to throw the remaining powdered sugar in my face. To top it all off, one of them then grabbed the granulated sugar dispenser from the table, walked up to me, and asked in complete seriousness, "Would you pour some sugar down my left tit?"
Hoping for a big tip, I obliged.
The End.
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