On Career Guests: Outrageous Demands and Refusals

           The science of quantum physics tells us that it is indeed possible for to guest to walk into a Kentucky Fried Chicken and ask for a turkey sandwich. If you think this is outrageous, food service tells us it’s possible for that guest to return the next day with an uncooked turkey and request that it be cooked “with your special chicken seasoning.”

In a surprising new study by specialists in Oakland, this is even more likely to occur than all the molecules in a rock arranging themselves in the same direction and then jumping straight up in the air. Further studies have shown, however, that the likelihood of these sociopathic behavioral patterns among guests may be directly related to the guest’s career.

 

Example 1: Graphic Designers or Really Anyone with a Fake Creative Job

            “Are we all set?” you ask the table of two, setting down their sweet teas.

            “Hmmmm…” says one man, drumming his fingers on the table. “Well, you know I really like the sound of this Chicken Sandwich. Could you tell me a little about it?”

            “Oh sure,” you say. You bend down and point to the description beneath “Chicken Sandwich”. “Chicken Sandwich” you read, “slathered with sweet and sticky bar-b-que, piled high with coleslaw and little frilly lettuce shreds, and slammed angrily onto a toasted bun by someone you really don’t want to ever meet. Then stabbed with a cute little pointless toothpick and served on a plate. With some French fries.”

 

            “Ahhh. Well, I have a few questions,” the man announces. “Instead of coleslaw, could you put potato salad on that? I don’t typically tend to enjoy cabbage.”

            “Sure!” you say, scribbling.

“And instead of frilly lettuce shreds….hmmm, well could I get, like, one extra French fry? I know I’m already having French fries, and I don’t really want to substitute anything for the lettuce, but if I could maybe just have one extra French fry, that would be great.”

You nod and write down, “Kittens, rainbows, happy place,”

 

“Oh and I don’t want the potato salad piled high necessarily. If you could maybe put it on an angle? You know what I mean? A sort of…” Here he demonstrates what he means by ‘angle’ by slanting one hand in front of your face. “Oh, and instead of a toothpick in the sandwich, could you put it on the side so that I can use it later? I don’t really understand the idea of trying to pick your teeth with something that already has food on it, you know?”

 “Uhhh—“

 

“Oh and if you have an olive spear instead of a toothpick, that’d be even better. I am terribly afraid of splinters. Also, how sticky is the bar-b-que? I’m kind of a textures guy, you know, I have this terror of maple syrup, it’s pretty much why I don’t eat pancakes anymore. If you were going to compare the bar-b-que sauce to maple syrup, would you say that’s it’s more or less sticky? Also, would it be cheaper if we carved out the inside of the bun, so maybe I just have the bun shell, or maybe vice versa? Texture wise, does one sound better to you than the other? I don’t know.”

 Example 2: Lonely Office Women

            Every day at 1:45, she comes in and orders a “regular burger” mid rare, no lettuce, just tomato and onion, with mayo on the side and ketchup with her fries.

            She is not the sort of gal to demand “the usual”, like some sort of unspontaneous buzz kill, oh no, every day she looks you straight in the eyes, and repeats, “I think what I’d like is one of your hamburgers, maybe medium rare. And no lettuce please. Thank you so much.”

            One day, however, she comes in looking rather wan.

            “How are you?” you ask brightly.

            “Well, I am feeling a bit under the weather today,” she says anxiously, parting and unparting her lips. “I think I’d like to mix it up a little.”

            “Oh, well we have a lot of amazing new salads,” you say. “There’s a new barley salad that will run right through you like a Swiss train. Clean ya right out.”

“No,” she says. “I think I’ll just have your hamburger, maybe medium rare. With no lettuce.”

You blink twice.

“ But I would like the tomato and the onion and the bun on the side.” she says.

“Oh.” you say. “So exactly the same thing you had yesterday except…"

 

"Arranged in the shape of a smile." she says.

 

Your head snaps up, you look her in the eyes. She is not smiling.

 

"Oh-oh-okay, yeah. So maybe two tomatoes on either side of the burger, maybe two pieces of onion acting as eyeballs."

 

"Yes, you can understand now why I have no use for the lettuce," she says, locking eyes with you.

 

"Yes, it is becoming clear now," you say, backing away. "Uh....maybe the mayo dollop can be the nose?"

 

She only stares now.

 

"Okay! Okay, no lettuce, mayo, uh, got it, coming back soon, haha! Okay!"

 

Rejection and Schizophrenia Among Wait Staff

                  

            Clinical trials have proven that schizophrenia in wait staff occurs in approximately 9 out of 10 servers over the age of 24 and a half years old. This disorder manifests itself in the form of exploding at guests in a saucy black woman voice, making fun of guests by repeating them in a small munchkin voice, and winking saucily at small children after asking if they’d like another strawberry lemonade. This disorder has been proven, in labs across the country, to be born from rejection.

             Example 1: Aw Hell No

“Tonight’s special” you announce to your table of five, “ is our Bullhorn Grabbin Ranch Saucy Sauce Lemon Lickin salmon, lightly scented with po pourri, tempered with hints of thyme, pounded with ranch dust and then, for 45 minutes, sautéed in the spicy rare blood of our Lord and topped with a single sesame seed.” You pause and then continue in the voice of a commercial casually mentioning side effects, “Served with a Vanilla Ranch milk shake and a moon pie.” 

            You all sit in silence for a moment (you breathless and proud, the guests simply stunned), before telling them you’ll “let that sink in for a second” before you return for their “final decision”.

            You walk back to the kitchen, maybe giving out high fives or even thumbs ups to the rest of the wait staff as the restaurant echoes with “lemon lickin…” and “single sesame seed…” Regardless of your gender, hair has suddenly sprouted on your chest.   

After five minutes, you return to the table, smiling smugly. You even take the time to wink at each member of the table individually, which takes another full minute.   

            “Have you all had a chance to think about what I said—earlier?” you ask, raising an eyebrow.

             “Um, can I just have the hamburger?” asks one woman.

            A roaring starts in your ears and you feel the blood rushing into your face.

            “Naw bitch you can’t have no fucking HAMBURGER. If you could have had a hamburger, I would have TOLD you you could have a hamburger. What do you think this shit is, fucking CANADA? Fucking PAKISTAN?”

            “Seriously,” murmurs the rest of the wait staff, standing behind you with their arms crossed.       

            Her husband raises a hand as if to defend her, “I’m sorry, I really don’t see what Canada and Pakistan have in common…? Also, weren’t you just white a minute ago…?”

Example 2: Deaf People

            You are chatting with the hostess by the door, and by chatting, of course I mean describing the nightmare of waiting on people from Canada or even Pakistan. Out of the corner of your eye, you see two guests get up from their bar stools, put on coats and head towards you.

            You swirl at attention, immediately ending your conversation. You have never seen these people in your life, and probably never will again.

            “You all have a wonderful evening!” you say, smiling widely. Of course there is something strange about saying this to people you will probably never see again. Why not, ‘Have a wonderful rest of your life!’ or ‘Vote McAuliffe this year!’

             The guests do not reply, and you realize this may be because they were too far away or maybe, like you, also wondering about the phrase about the wonderful evening. They’ve just reached the host stand, they’re now directly in front of you.

            So you try again, “Yeah, like I said earlier, have a good one!....Thanks for coming guys, it’s been a pleasure!..... An absolute pleasure…all our pleasure, to have you come here…”

             Silence.

You turn to the host, lips parted in shock. “Did they just…? I’m pretty sure they just…”

            The hostess squeezes your hand, “Don’t worry about it. It happens to me all the time.”

            You wrench away from her, “BYE GUYS!” you scream. “I hope you have fun!” You run around the host stand and trot after them. “Have a great night! Enjoy the rest of your summer, go swimming or something, it’s gonna be GREAT, have fun doing that, I really hope you have the funest time of any guest I’ve ever waited on because it’s been a fucking pleasure, what’d you eat a fucking hamburger—” The munchkin voice is on full force—“oh can I just have a hamburger and maybe a chocolate milk, can you make the fries crispy I like crispy fries, only the crispiest for me, I bet you like crispy fries—”

             The hostess, encouraged by your bravado, has begun pelting toothpicks at the two deaf people, and screaming out “BYE!” over and over again, also in a munchkin voice.        

           You stop and cross your arms as the guests flee.

           

Insulting Guests

            In the interest of having all guests remain anonymous in this entry, we will refer to all of them as babies. This blog will be more successful for you as a reader if you decide to picture them this way as well. In this way, we will successfully eliminate all suggestions of sexual impropriety, insanity, or never-having-been-out-of-one’s-house syndrome.

            Baby #1:  Approximate Age: 35. Appropriate Baby Shwag: bib reading “I could have been twins”.

You walk up to the baby’s table sporting a new company shirt, with a clever I shamrock Guiness message tastefully splashed across your chest. The baby in question is sitting next to his baby wife, takes one look at you and orders an Irish car bomb.

You imagine that this kind of baby frequently annoys his wife by ordering telecommerical baby weight loss supplements or completely organic reusable diapers.

            You smile. “Was it my shirt?”

            The baby nods eagerly. “I mean, you walked up and the first thing I looked at was your chest!”

            A look of un-baby like horror immediately appears on his face and you watch him turn in slow motion to his child bride, while a series of apparently first words babble out of his mouth. His first discovery as a person newly come to language appears to be that there is a huge difference between the word ‘chest’ and the word ‘boobs’. His arms appear to be flailing as if he were Vanna White were uncovering the letters “C-H-E-S-T” on your boobs.

Being a child wife, she does not seem to grasp this difference and tells him in a uncharacteristically adult way to shut up.

            Baby #2: Also with child wife. Approximate age: forever 49. Appropriate Baby Shwag: a very small piece of candy or an electrical socket with a fork beside it.  

As you reach across the table to refill a water glass, your hidden tattoo (acquired in the mysterious cruel cruel world of adulthood you have lived in since the tender age of 18) pops out of your sleeve, immediately exposing the young, sensitive minds at your table to utter shock.

“Oh wow, what’s that?” Mogely asks, grabbing my elbow. “A dragon?”

“It’s a bird,” you say patiently, tugging down your sleeve.

You even decide to share something personal with this boyish sponge of childlike curiosity. “It’s pretty much the only animal I can tolerate.”

His eyes widen, taking it all in. “Wow, did you get that in prison?”

He laughs with all the carefree bliss of youth, unlike his mortified wife baby who now appears to begging you with her horrified baby eyes to, perhaps, adopt her.

Your eyes suddenly seem to be expanding into big alien saucers of dark knowledge, and with eyes that say ‘Every morning I have to dress myself you know nothing of this adult world of horror’, you blink once and say, “Yeah.”

When you return to the table with a crab cake appetizer and a pocketful of atomic fireballs, the baby is shivering in terror of you. He will not be fed candy and he cannot stop apologizing for his baby faux pas.

Baby #3: Approximate age:  65. Appropriate Baby Shwag: tiny Ms. Benjamin Button t-shirt.

The primly dressed lady baby is sitting at her table (which she found on her own, with no help from stupid adult hostess) on her invisible stack of encyclopedias with her arms folded across her menu, squeezing the bridge of her nose between two ancient baby fingers.

“I’ll be with you in a just a minute,” you say, touching the right shoulder of her shoulder-bladed suit.

“Can I ask you a question?” she snaps up.

You do not say, ‘see above for when I’ll be available’.

“Of course,” you say, smiling.

“So,” she begins in the tone of someone who has no intention of asking a question. “I’d like to order your hummus, but without chips. Can I order raw vegetables instead? I’m gluten free.”

Currently you are working in a burger joint. And on the vegetable level of the food pyramid, that means tomato slices and lettuce leaves.

“Honestly,” you begin, “I’m not sure that we have any raw vegetables we can offer you.”

“That’s funny,” she said, crossing her Button arms across her Columbo chest. “That’s what I had the last time I was here.”

Frantically you rack your brain, picturing some past motherly server trooping over to Kroger to buy pureed peas and carrots for this teething Ben the Buttoness.

“Well, we do have a cucumber relish—”

“Cucumbers are a raw vegetable,” she elucidates.

You are so proud of your little button, but you do not hug her or reward her with dessert. Instead, you promise to have that right out for her.

            If you have never seen a small child eating cucumber relish with hummus, you have obviously never worked in a strictly burger joint where small children naturally come to order this. You have never seen a grown woman adapt so quickly and smugly to the idea of dipping a shredded vegetable into a bowl of pureed chick peas. You have never seen the small intellectual victories of small children who will always know better than the foolish adults in this world who stumble around pretending to know what raw vegetables are.

 

 

1000 year perspective on Food Service

At some point in the future of mankind, approximately in the 3000s, someone will find their calling in a Georgetown 3 credit course on the history of the Why the Hell in American food service. They will go on to specialize in the history of Why the Hell we thought it would be a good idea to invite a baby to a table set with FORKS, KNIVES, and pints of beer without say, arm and leg restraints. The following are a few stories which will be featured in these textbooks.

            Example A: The Destruction Toddler

You couldn’t have seen it coming, and like most things you couldn’t have seen coming when you have complete and immediate loathing for the people you are talking to, you totally saw it coming. Party of 12, parents drinking beers, 4 toddlers all pre-gaming with pints of Sprite, and one in particular catches your eye. In the way that a hamster would if you saw it doing cartwheels on your chicken fresco.

This three year old boy, this small ball of future potential has already destroyed all the crayons and dessert menus on the table and when someone attempts to sit next to him, bellows out a strong, affirmative, NO, YOU SIT THERE, followed by the unbelievable compliance of a woman in a pants suit. Occasionally, he demands more Sprite from you. As his mother orders the $7 Belgian style French fry appetizer obviously required to tame the boy’s wild and free spirit, you watch the boy snatch the wrapped silverware from his mother’s place setting.

Your eyes widen in a shock only masked by the set of questions you now fire at her to prolong your presence at the table. “Would you prefer ketchup or maybe mayonnaise with that? Tell me more about your past with French fries, What are your thoughts on thinking of French fries as a vegetable?” And now the moment you couldn’t have seen coming/have been waiting for, the three year old possible future president of our county finds the fork in the linen roll, wraps his little hand around it and yes, stabs his mother in the face. Your only consolation, you later tell your manager, is that this is the closest thing you could have experienced to a live performance of a Canadian PSA on domestic violence.

You will frequently return to this table, mainly to monitor the swelling three-prong welts growing on the mother’s face.

 Example B: The Toddler who Eats $15 Hamburgers

            Following the trend of experiences that makes you feel like an enabler of gateway drugs or gateway stabbings even, comes the experience with the parents who order food from the Adult Menu for their child. You have learned how to react to requests such as the 12 ounce sirloin or deep fried hamburger for the 3 year old by your experience with people who request hot water with ice or hamburgers burnt until “I could break them like a champagne flute”. Meaning, you do not react. Your face is an unsigned petition. Blank.

            The key here is to not imagine the future memoirs of the pre-congressman toddler, who, much like Governor Chris Christie, will now be destined to mention YOU as one of the landmark enablers of his inevitable battle with obesity and/or temporary resemblance to actor Chris Farley. On the other hand, this memoir would be valuable material in the What the Hell literature of our future. On the OTHER hand, you refuse to be villainized to our future generations, as all Ihop and Country Cookin wait staff are destined to be seen as the Goldman and Sacks pull-the-wool-over-everyone’s-eyes villains that they truly are.

            An interview with one of these irreformable waitresses is quoted in one future What the Hell textbook as saying, “What was I supposed to do? Just tell them no?” Yes. You were. And much like the Nuremburg Trials, the What the Hell textbooks will have these enablers going down in history for their compliance with these outrageous demands for high-caloric food for tiny people. Should have said no. You could have saved yourself many sleepless nights and appearances in Chris Christie’s memoirs. A tip is a small sacrifice to pay for truth.