Out to eat at Denny’s the other night and had been seated a few minutes when another couple got seated two tables away. The man, a heavyset individual, complains immediately about how narrow the space is between the table and the back of the chair. The host offers to seat him at a table but he sits down in the booth anyway – with a warning that he’ll move if he’s not comfortable.
The restaurant is busy and obviously understaffed. We wait patiently and the server comes over and gets our drink order. He then heads over to the couple and is berated for taking over 7 minutes to be greeted and have their drink order taken. He brandishes his phone where he has apparently been timing the event – or, lack of an event.
The server tries to explain that they are short-staffed and he’s actually on overtime to cover until more people arrive.
The man doesn’t accept this and says something else I don’t hear clearly, then they order their drinks. For the man, a decaff coffee and water.
Now, I don’t think that 7 minutes is that big of a deal, but it had enraged that man.
In a few minutes, the server came back over with the water and explained, polietly, that the decaff coffee had been out for a while and they would need to make a fresh pot.
“That’s it!” the man cried, “You’ve just lost a customer,” and he began the difficult process of extracting his bulk from the booth. I think that made him even angrier that he couldn’t immediately storm off.
When he did free himself, instead of heading for the door he marched over to the kitchen area where a haggard-looking manger was trying to do about 8 things at once. The man’s wife waited at the table for him to return. She was pretty quiet the whole time and even though I didn’t have enough data, I suspected that this was not the first time she’d been dragged along into a mess like that.
“Mr. Manager! Mr. Manager!” the man yelled, “We had to wait too long for our drink order to be taken and now you’re out of decaff – this is unacceptable!”
The manager, taken aback by the amount of crap suddenly dumped in his lap, tried to apologize and said something about if he’d known he would have…
But the man cut him off, “Too late!” and then followed up with a wildly insincere “good-bye!”
He then left the restaurant with his wife in tow.
There’s no way the guy would have been happy. If the server had stopped and said he would be with them in a minute, the man would have been upset that they weren’t being waited on instead. If he had brought over the old decaff, the man would have complained it tasted terrible. And booth vs. table… they tried and he still wasn’t happy.
I felt terrible for the over-worked server who just wanted to be done with the day and go home. He handled it as well as he could have and we tipped him well – but that was all that could be done.
Makes me wonder how being terrible to each other got to be a thing that we do. I think the world is difficult enough as it is and the idea of making things worse for someone frankly makes me sick to my stomach.
And how do we fix that? How do we make it terrible again to be terrible to each other? What happened to the civility in civilization?
[editor note: Did I just use the writing pattern of Carrie Bradshaw?]
Pretty deep thoughts for a geek who just wanted a plank of fish, some fries, and a quiet meal.