There are other ways, like saying, hey, could you give us a little space here? And when they don’t work, some people lose their temper.
My sibs and I are all adults, over 50, reasonably calm people. Once in a while someone behaves so inappropriately that it’s hardly a surprise when tempers are lost.
And, as someone posted above, the comedy routine, and the just plain rude exhortations to “cheer up!” may have their place in Applebee’s on Friday night when the waiter is dealing with a bunch of twenty-somethings starting their weekend, but not in the kind of place we were in that night.
Customers have a right to expect a certain standard of service in a restaurant where dinner comes to around $100 per person.
Hey don’t worry. You’d clearly prefer to go to the sort of places where they servers try to “entertain” you. So I guess you’d pretty much be on your own anyway.
Enjoy your clown-faced ice cream with a sad sparkler in it.
I think you can see from this thread that many people think the waiter was not trying to the* right* thing at all. He was clearly intent on doing the wrong thing. If he cannot match his approach to the mood of his clients then he’s in the wrong job.
It isn’t rocket science. Be competent and friendly, by all means inject humour if you think it appropriate but FFS, if it falls flat then revert to plan A.
Jesus, I was using the same word the person I was responding to did! Why aren’t you criticizing them for saying punching in the first place?
No, it was pushy, manipulative behavior, trying to force a laugh out of someone who didn’t want to laugh at the first joke. The intention is irrelevant, because the behavior is obnoxious and inappropriate. Whether it was malicious or stupid is irrelevant to me, I simply don’t want to deal with it from someone I’m paying to do the job of making my life easier.
I have determined that if someone who’s supposed to be making my evening more relaxing tells a joke that flops and then engages in manipulative behavior to force a laugh instead of just moving on, I don’t want to deal with their nonsense any more. And restaurant owners and managers have determined that they would rather know about significant problems with service than have potential customers avoid the restaurant and recommend against the restaurant to friends.
Maybe you didn’t realize this, but I don’t actually work for the SDMB, much less in a customer service position for them. And in the real world, the behavior expected of a waiter serving a customer is different than the behavior expected on a message board. And that’s ignoring that your complaint doesn’t even make any sense in the first place.
Probably because you accidentally left out the part where the waiter ignored one or more requests to dial it back prior to getting cussed out and reported.
I dunno, Novelty Bobble, but I think it my post kind of makes sense. But i did edit both of the posts and maybe something was lost in the either.
These were the series of posts I was commenting on…
It’s pretty damn obvious to me that x-ray was making a joke based on the op’s and Pantastic’s over-reaction to some servers humor and levity falling flat on them. I mean really, “That’s enough of that, sir!” from the op along with Pantastic’s “harassing behavior from the waiter”, “manipulative power trip instead of doing their job”, “I’ll damn well rub their face in it.”, “I don’t wish to follow arbitrary commands from someone who’s supposed to be serving me” strikes me as ‘stick up their ass’ syndrome.
X-ray went with that in reverse, and to the same extreme, jokingly. Which once again completely and irrevocably missed.
In all this I think the people calling for ‘fuck you’s!’ to the staff need to take a breath. Relax. It’s not the threat you perceive.
It might be a good idea for posters to step back and re-examine that concept.
Whenever there are gripes about restaurant servers, tech support, customer service reps etc. on this board, there are sure to be rejoinders about how miserable the service industry is, customers don’t understand and should cut the offenders a break and so on.
Unless the service is an essential one provided by a highly skilled service person (i.e. a plumber fixing a nasty leak, or a urologist doing the same), the equation is tilted towards the customer paying for the service, who can presumably go elsewhere (or decide to do without it) to the detriment of the business that hired the service person, who should bear in mind that his/her employment may be contingent on not unnecessarily pissing off the customer.
This doesn’t mean one shouldn’t show respect for those providing services, however menial they are perceived to be.
But since the balance of power isn’t always equal, it does mean that it’s more important for restaurant servers to be sensitive about not inflicting comedy routines on patrons, than it is for patrons to suck it up to avoid offending the server.
Saying some nonsense, then claiming it was “a joke” when someone points out that it’s nonsense doesn’t magically make the nonsense funny. If it’s really “a joke” and not a sarcastic, hyperbolic rendering of something he really feels, I’m sure he’ll be along to agree that he actually agrees with me that trying to force someone to laugh at a failed joke by singling them out in front of a crowd is obnoxious manipulative behavior, and that he was purely in disagreeing with it. If not, then the post wasn’t actually “a joke”.
That’s reasonable enough, I suppose. I’m just getting a big sense of self-importance here. I too have been a server; I get that the best course is to take your social cues from the table. No one is disagreeing with that AFAIKT. But sometimes that doesn’t happen and some people are acting like they’re the Sultan of Brunei and the houseboy brought noodles with dog shit on them. It’s mountains made out of (possibly)imaginary mole hills.
Oh, please. I described a dinner that probably took around 90 minutes in a few lines of text. So a lack of detail renders the story incredible?
Whatever. This dinner happened, the waiter was annoying, one of our party told him to get lost and send the manager over.
I really have no idea how many times I’ve had dinner in restaurants, but it must number in the hundreds. I’ve had a few bad experiences. This was one of them.
[Moderating]
OK, the management of the SDMB has now heard about this. In particular:
Novelty Bobble, maybe you thought you were dancing around it, but this post is a pretty clear personal insult. This is a Warning: If you want to call another poster an annoying arsehole, do so in the Pit.
And to everyone else in this thread, I’m seeing a lot of rising tensions. Either dial it back, or take that to the Pit, too.