Having a job, I deal with various types of people. At restaurants we deal with all sorts of guests, such as the bad: the complainers, the ditchers, the campers, the messy, the large families, and the cheapskates and the rare good: the tippers. Unfortunately, we also have to deal with much more than one of these a day. So if you deal with all of them in one day, you have one crazy shift that you will never forget.
The complainers are one of the worst to deal with. Recently, one guest came into the restaurant and complained about almost everything in the restaurant. She complained about various points of the meal like temperature, taste, and time. She also complained about the table we sat her at (which was the largest one in the restaurant), the fact she didn’t get a sample while she was waiting to be sat (we only hand them out when the wait time is over 30 minutes), and that when we opened the door for her when she was leaving the restaurant, we didn’t open the door she wanted. We didn’t even have to open it for her, and then she complained. These are the incidents that make us shake our head and wonder what has gotten into these people.
The tippers and ditchers can either make or break our day. The tippers are revered by all servers, because they are the guests who leave a large tip on small checks and even larger bills on larger checks. Tippers ensure their server is taken care of if they were treated properly, so it is greatly desired to have people who look like great tippers. The ditchers on the other hand, will absolutely ruin the day. Ditchers are the “dine and go” guests. They eat their food, and then when their server is busy, they make a getaway and leave an unpaid check behind. It sucks because first we are losing money for our restaurant, and second it isn’t fair to the server who worked so hard for this.
Then we have the campers. These guests just sit and sit for three hours while we all walk by, glaring at them in a feeble attempt to usher them out of the restaurant. This may sound mean, but when you have a wait, or it is closing time and the couple has been sitting there for two hours, you want them to go so you can move on and get another table of go home. It especially peeves the employees at a restaurant when we know the campers can see we are on a long wait but instead continue on with their conversations like there is nobody waiting on them. In my opinion, the campers should instead go home and cuddle up by the fire or on the couch instead of at a booth at Olive Garden.
The messy ones are the ones who have the little kids who plan on being all star pitchers later in life. Food fights seem to break out around little children, and as the food flies across the table and across the room, the parents ignore the child and don’t do anything to stop them. We must then, after the guests have left, clean up the cereal, salad, pasta, breadstick chunks, mints, crayons, and wrappers scattered across the floor like stars throughout the sky to the best of our ability.
Next we have the family that is about three times the size of the Brady Bunch. When a party of 15 comes in and expects to be sat almost immediately, that’s like asking all of us to run across the freeway during rush hour and avoid being hit by a semi! It takes time to set tables up, and it also depends on how busy we may be. These families, like Italians, are super loud, obnoxious, and sometimes very inconsiderate of other people like the hosts or the other guest around them. These families have 13 kids, three grandparents, and all kinds of relatives joining in on the merry fun throughout the restaurant. We have had families of thirty five come in, and become very angry when we said the wait would probably be about an hour since we were busy.
Last, we have the cheapskates. Cheapskates don’t plan on spending a lot of money when they come to eat, and they always end up trying to find ways to make their meal as cheap as possible. They use coupons, complain to the managers until they get a free meal, share a small plate between two people, and buy the cheapest things on the planet. We have even had parties walk out because they were “unaware of how expensive our menu was”; despite the fact they had in fact come into a classier restaurant.
In conclusion, if you are in the restaurant business, you are most likely going to run into these various categories of people very often. Sometimes it will make your day, and other days it could ruin it. Unfortunately we are never able to tell when it is going to be a good or bad day.