The Trick is Not to Take it Personally.

10/10/09 8:35 PM

We servers generally take it for granted, but left without it, we’re up the creek with a paper paddle. The biggest help you can be to making our day run smoothly – at least for a start: Pay your check.   Now, I can understand the motivation behind *eating* the food & then walking out without paying. You’ve gotten something for free. But what was the goal of my table Friday night? A man & a woman came in. The woman was obviously in a horrible mood, but there’s a certain grace period at the beginning of a table’s service during which the customer’s bad attitude won’t rub off on the server. For this limited window of time in the early stages (delivering drinks & getting the order) the server wants genuinely to make the customer...

Murphy's Law

10/3/09 9:52 AM

  First of all, I am not a ‘smoker.’ I have the *occasional* cigarette. And by that, I mean I can nurse a pack for over a year if no one bums. Yesterday, I had four cigarettes.   Ladies & Gentlemen . . . I am now going to *define* for you the word ‘clusterfuck.’ And I actually tell this story less to complain than to share the most unbelievable course of events . . . Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want . . . & when your day goes in such unpredictably horrible directions . . . the first thing a writer thinks is . . . well . . . this post. Feel free to laugh at me. I will . . . um . . . in a while.   Yesterday started about a month & a half ago when I said, “Hey . . . look . . . Elliot, Sean, & Barry...