Just passing along the rant I just received (Ranting about bad customers)

The BBQ Pit
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Just got off the phone with a good friend. She’s a nice woman, truly. A life-long devout Catholic, the mother of four children, the grandmother to six children (and at least one more due to pop any day.) The soul of kindness, charitable, helpful, all that wonderful stuff. Not the type you expect to hear ranting about ‘demon spawn’ and ‘imps from hell’ and their ‘misbegotten shitty excuses for parents’ and a whole load of similar invective.

But that’s what she was reduced to.

See, she’d been retired for a little while. She thought comfortably, but with the way inflation is going and some of her children needing help due to covid-related work difficulties she decided that picking up some extra pocket money while she’s still pretty fit and healthy would be a smart move.

So she took a job as a waitress at the local Denny’s. (I refuse to get cutesy over their name, not that it really matters in this case. It’s not the restaurant’s fault, I guess.)

Anyway, she hadn’t been a waitress since a part time job back in college days, but how much can it have changed? Take orders, haul the plates from the kitchen shelf to the tables, collect money. Right?

She knew it was physical labor, near constant walking and carrying heavy trays, but she was prepared for that. She knew newbie waitresses don’t get assigned to ‘good’ shifts at first, having to put in the hours on the slow shifts and such. What she had no idea was just how awful Sunday brunch hours are. Nothing but clumps of fresh out of worship people, all newly convinced in just how perfect and wonderful they and their children are, and how their shiny halos entitle them to instant groveling service from these godless heathen servers who clearly hadn’t spent the last couple hours being basted in religion.

Most of her gripes concerned the stuff you’d expect, the stuff all too many waiters suffer through regularly.

But then she got what must be the pinnacle of entitled, oblivious parenthood. Man and wife couple, with four kids, age maybe seven down to carrier level. The next to youngest girl was fussy and unhappy. She’d just had to sit through a worship service, and now she was stuck in another place where she was supposed to sit quietly and nicely. Well, she wasn’t having it, with loud yelling and complaints and whining about being bored and there was nothing to play with or do. (Why don’t parents bring toys with young kids?) So Mommy had a bright idea. She took all the little packets out of the holder on the table, the yellow and the blue and the white and the pinks ones, ripped each one open and poured the various white crystals all over the table in front of the girl. “See? Now you can finger paint!”

Picture this for a moment. A typical Denny’s table crammed with silverware/napkins/menus/advertising cards, and whatall. And now with a mound of white ‘sand’ and a mother encouraging her kid to stick her hands into it and spread it around, draw lines in it, push it into hills, create faces…

And, of course, the next oldest child wanted to join in, and the little girl didn’t want to share, and it quickly became a battle of them trying to grab more of the pile for themself, or at least shove it so hard it sprayed over the table and your opposing sibling.

While momma continued talking to daddy as if neither of them could see anything unusual happeing.

Mighod.

Friend said it took almost a half hour to clean the area when they’d finally left. And guess what they said to her near the end of their meal? “We need some sugar for our coffee, honey.”

And guess what type of tip this group left? One buck, and a crumpled “Come to XXX church, Jesus misses you!” leaflet.

Are we SURE murder is always wrong?

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Bastards.

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I’ve read one theory that people who are leaving church on a Sunday feel like they just put in their labor, hours, attending something and doing a holy deed, so now that they’re in a restaurant or anywhere else, they feel they can behave badly to compensate or offset the goodness they just did - or so goes the psychology.

I spent 3 hours being good, so I can spend 3 hours being bad. etc. Either that, or they genuinely don’t even think of themselves as treating restaurant staff badly, and would be shocked if someone told them that.

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That’s the worst part.

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I think everyone should be required to do a year of restaurant work early in their working life. Okay, so not legally required, but maybe through the pressure of “social engineering” or some such thing.

Aw, who am I kidding. The people who most need to learn the lessons one might learn from the experience are exactly the same people who are least likely to learn them.

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I worked at the college snack bar when I was a student. I was hired as a busboy, and there really couldn’t be a much crappier job. People stubbed out cigarettes in their food, left snotty tissues on the tables, threw food on the floor, loosened the caps on condiments, etc. It was an education on what I never wanted to have to do in life, and also what not to do to people who have no choice.

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Not just Sunday morning church customers. Friday and Saturday late night “after the show” customers.

Back in my Punk days, we used to invade a Denny’s around midnight and behaved horribly. Table condiments were fair game. Little packets of marmalade spread on a napkin was what you ate if you were broke and your friends wouldn’t treat. I remember a guy who had a collection of those stainless milk creamers he’d stolen from Denny’s, one at a time. He just displayed them on a shelf. I haven’t been to a Denny’s in nearly 35 years, but I should go and leave a $100 tip in hopes that a bunch of pissed off waitresses aren’t awaiting me when I shed this mortal coil.

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So, they acted like asses, left a shitty tip and THEN left a clue where they were going to be next Sunday gathered with all their friends in a nice quiet room?

Man, your friend could just show up on a Sunday, stand up in the middle of service and call out their unworthy asses. It’s not a crime, you can just walk right on out after dropping your mic. Unfortunately, she might lose her job as lowest waitress on the totem pole at Denny’s.

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Assholes.

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That’s a dollar better than the $20 front with Bible verses on the back. That’s just deliberately cruel.

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I worked in restaurants from the age of 13 to much of the way through college to meet expenses. I was never a server, mostly a cook, but I worked closely and was friendly with servers, so I understand very well how hard they work, and always treat them with respect and tip well. My first restaurant job, at 13, was as a busboy, which is very much on the front lines, and I saw and cleaned up a lot of shit, not all of it metaphorical shit.

The worst thing I ever had to deal with as a busboy- spoiler-blurring it because it is NSFL (not safe for lunch):

The manager came to me with an apologetic “bearer of bad news” aspect and said “sorry solost, but someone threw up in one of the bathroom stalls, and ya gotta clean it up. Prepare yourself-- it’s pretty bad”.

I opened the door, and it was an unbelieveable scene: someone had apparently projectile-vomited everywhere: all over the toilet, walls and floor. But even stranger, it was all bright red. Not crime-scene blood-red, even as a kid I could tell it wasn’t blood. It looked like ketchup but reeked like vomit. It was a weekend morning, so my best guess is that maybe some drunken teenagers had been there late the night before, maybe one of them downed an entire bottle of ketchup on a dare, and not being able to keep it down, unloaded in the stall.

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Right. First of all, how presumptuous to think the waitress didn’t attend church regularly (and that Jesus was missing her? WTF?) Jesus only attends that particular church? Second, how presumptuous to assume the waitress was interested in Christianity at all. This woman was working on a Sunday so these people could enjoy a meal after church, and they fuck with her because she’s working and not at church?

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Same here. I still pass that same Denny’s on Hwy 41 all the time and cringe at what we teenage stoners put those guys through at 3 a.m. Can 30+ years of overtipping ever atone?

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Perhaps I’m oblivious, but Denny’s has a cutesier nickname version now too? We pretty well beat cutsie nicknames to death in the “Veggies” thread, but this, if I’m understanding you rightly, is a new low.



As to the actual topic of this thread, I’d totally go to those jerk’s church and unload on them.

The only problem is that every day the waitress is going to be encountering more equally entitled clueless morons and vandals. You can’t upgrade the slice of humanity you’re dealing with unless you get away from Denny’s. Although entitled fatcats and their spoiled entitled offspring aren’t much better is some ways.

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I worked retail for years, I also worked at a movie theater. Those are thankless jobs and people will shit all over you.

If you’re lucky you’re not dealing with literal shit.

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Wow, what assholes. They couldn’t be bothered to give their kids some time to run around between church and lunch? They couldn’t be bothered to bring their own toys? They couldn’t have suggested a non-destructive game to play (you can draw a lot just moving flatware around, or use whole sugar packet which can be neatly put away after. You can also play non-physical games – we used to talk about the geometry of the tiles on the tables at the local pizza place with our kids. What’s the area of this? How long is that?)

Bad enough for the waitress, those kids get to live with them every day.

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They say boorishness is hereditary. You get it from the people who should’ve been your parents but couldn’t be arsed to do the job.

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[Moderating]
Edited title for clarity.
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I, for one, certainly am not sure.

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I spent a summer working at Cracker Barrel back before med school, so I’ve seen some shit. The after church crowds were as bad as you describe and worse.

They’d come in with the entire fam damily, including 14 kids that have had to sit still all morning, and the adults all feel super entitled because they’re dressed nicer than usual and they had to wait a long time because the preacher ran long and the Methodists got there first.

There was always at least one shy kid who clearly didn’t want to talk to a stranger who they would make order on his own, which meant staring at the kid for five minutes while he had a panic attack over what side he wanted with his chicken fingers. I imagine those kids are telling their psychiatrists about those moments to this day.

Grandpa was usually paying for everyone and he didn’t believe in tipping, or if he did he grossly misunderstood the concept and thought that allowing me to keep the $1.58 in change would suffice. Sometimes an embarrassed daughter would press a fiver into my hand on their way out as I cleaned up the wake of their howler monkey-ass children.

A buck a person was about what you could expect in tips there at the time, but more often than not it was a buck per adult, even for the Shiite Catholics filling up the whole corner table with their unruly brood.

And yes, the religious tracts. I didn’t mind so much if they also left cash. We kept them in a pile in the break room. Between that and doing med school and residency in large Southern hospitals I had a nearly complete set of Chick tracts at one point.

If I were doing it today I’d reach out to those churches and tell their preachers to remind the flock that Jesus would tip 20%.