[QUOTE=Elret]
I see what you’re saying too, but I disagree that it’s a stupid question. Say her boss asked her to call and order enough pizzas to provide two slices for each of their 60 employees. She likely assumed (as would I) that an employee at the pizza place would know how many pieces their pizzas are generally cut into, and so assumed she could find out and then do the math to determine how many large pizzas she would need to order.
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If this, or a similar circumstance were the case, then she would need to STATE this. How hard is it to explain what you need and why to someone rather than falling into some ridiculous “Alice and the White Rabbit” conversation.
I agree, a semi-astute partly mind-reading pizza employee might have been able to de-code her question as what you’re saying. But if he’s got 5 other orders on hold and a line out the door, his ESP might be on a break.
I haven’t worked in a restaurant for about 15 years, but I did a bartending stint at a chinese restaurant while I was going to college. A lady called up and basically wanted ME to tell HER what she felt like eating!
I was pretty busy, but I tried to accomodate her by naming off 5 of our really good standbys. She kept saying “naaah, no…what else?” To each “no, not that” I gave her another suggestion. And I kept having to put her on hold to wait on customers who were actually present and knew what they wanted.
It was getting busier and busier and finally I politely suggested that she might have better luck if she just came down and had a looksee at the menu (we didn’t deliver anyway, so she’d have to come and pick up her order). She didn’t want to do that either, she wanted to order something ahead of time so that she didn’t have to wait.
Then, in the nicest way possibly, I told her that I needed to take her order, or possibly have her call back when she had a better idea of what she wanted, and that because of the in-house customers it wasn’t possible for me to read the menu to her (as she seemed to be wanting me to do). At that point the bar was pretty full of dart night regulars and overflow from the restaurant. I explained that if she wanted to, she could come to the bar, get a menu and then I’d expedite her order, also it would be quicker (the cooks tried to put bar orders ahead if possible since dine-in customers generally aren’t in much of a hurry) and less crowded in the bar.
At that point she said “just a minute” and put her HUSBAND on the phone. He said “You made my wife cry”! Once I explained what she was trying to get and that she had no idea what she wanted (other than none of the several popular items I’d already named) he finally confessed that she was pregnant! SHeeesh!!! Buddy, get your ass in the car, come over here and YOU read the menu to your wife and help her decide what she wants.
Sometimes idiot customers are idiot customers and frankly I don’t believe that they’re owed mindreading and mollycoddling because they can’t clearly and concisely communicate what they want!
In my NOT so humble opinion, if the pizza clerk had babied her along by trying to figure out that she wanted to know how many people a certain size of pizza would feed, that it just encourages that sort of person to be even more helpless and unintelligible the next time!
Grrr, sorry, off my soap box.