…what rubbish. If a customer is being a jerk, saying “Excuse me sir, I don’t appreciate you speaking to me in that manner.” is an entirely appropriate and professional response.
Maybe it was in obviously having a friend.
Respectfully, that’s naive.
And then what? Daddy Warbucks waves over your boss and they have a little chat. Maybe DW is good friends with the owner and upon receipt of my little speech he decides that perhaps the owner doesn’t know how to select the best staff and now he’s having second thoughts on that investment they were going to share…
Situations like that arise all the time. No manager or owner want a “trouble” server. It’s “Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir”.
Have you ever serves millionaires before? They’re not receptive to plebian assertions.
A vigilante, huh? We had one of those in The Pit once before. He liked pissing on other people’s stuff, too: you might spell better than he did, but there’s still a definite resemblance.
I’d guess then that whatever the previous ring owner did was something emotionally hurtful?
It’s really up to you, in the end, and presumably you must have felt it was approprate. My own view would be that it isn’t equivalent, since while the mental factor will probably fade with time, the emotional hurt could last for a good time depending on their connection to the ring, and the practical loss is permanent. Compared to your own mental and emotional hurt which are impermanent.
I’ve suspected all along that Shamozzle is some teenage kid trying to stir up shit. The fact that he’s posted for 12+ hours straight just adds to the mounting pile of evidence.
I doubt he’s a sociopath at all, but rather a bored kid who has too much time and not enough responsibility.
I suggest taking out the trash for starters. Your parents would appreciate it.
Sooner than you intend, one would hope.
Actually, this is the word that works well and this one works best.
Hey, don’t include me in your criminal behavior. I’m of the law-abiding and treating my fellow human being as a human being type. I’m not into tampering with people’s food or stealing their stuff.
So your excuse is that you know it’s wrong but you do it only because you can’t stop thinking about it? I guess the mental incompetence defense is out of reach then when you get arrested.
By the way, is anyone else here wondering how often ol’ Sham’s mistaken in his appraisal of his customer’s treatment of him?
So throwing away the ring was an act of civil disobedience?
And PunditLisa, I was thinking that the story no longer holds up under scrutiny. When you go to Customerssuck or whatever, revenge stories have a beginning as well as a middle and an end. Anyone posting on those sites would have gone into great detail about the customer’s offense, because the story’s not complete without it.
Plus, I would think that any manager would make someone on staff go through garbage if it came to that, not the customer. Unless the customer was so horrible she even offended the manager. In which case it would be quite a story! But if he can remember the revenge but not the provocation, methinks there was neither. Just a fantasy.
I was also thinking that the above quote sounds like the younger sister in Forever, who said, “War and kill are bad words but fuck isn’t.” Anyone remember that? I was :rolleyes: at that, too.
Oh, most likely. I don’t recall her punching me…
I feel it was appropriate. It’s very difficult for me to find compassion for those who project unsolicited cruelty as sport, for example. This is something servers encounter from time to time. As such, I doubt I’ll change.
It’s true, I’ve been online for quite a while now. But no, not some kid, just a guy on his days off. Must sleep now.
I see more posts there, I’ll get to those later
Apropos of nothing maybe, but this story was amusing. It seems a 17 year old boy contaminated the salad dressing in the school cafeteria with semen. Link.
Quoth the 17 year old:
Well, that’s ok, sonny, we all feel bad after we do it. :o
Yet another troll, mashing the F5 button like a monkey flinging poop. VCO3’s got some fine company to keep.
“Honey, does the salad dressing smell like chlorine to you?”
I suspect most of the extravagant claims of covert revenge on customers by waiters/waitresses are fantasy.
Rather than being “vigilantes” in even the most watered-down sense, the people who spout off about this stuff mostly strike me as passive-aggressive sorts who hope to gain satisfaction (and only peripherally to change others’ behavior) by warning of dire consequences if they are not respected, however they define that. The “thinking” goes that if they can create some consternation on a message board, it’ll make up for petty slights on the job.
Manifesting outrage feeds their sense of importance.
…naive?
I’ve been in the hospitality trade since 1994. I’ve washed dishes under the shadow of Mount Cook at the Hermitage Hotel, surpervised banquets at the Auckland Park Regency and the Stamford Plaza, waited on tables at Fortuna Restaurant and the Airport Hotel, managed conference centres at Sky City and the New Zealand Parliament, co-ordinated events for Te Papa and my own catering company.
I’ve managed at least seven State level functions for visiting Heads of State, including the Rt Hon John Howard and HRH the Queen. I am Papa Bear of the Sacred Order of the Banquet Bears, and it is particularly galling to be called naive about what goes on in the hospitality industry by somebody who considers it good form to throw away their customers engagement ring and can see nothing wrong with serving food picked up off the floor.
“Excuse me sir, I don’t appreciate you speaking to me in that manner.” is an entirely professional statement for a waiter to say to a guest who is behaving like a jerk. I’ve said it before, and when my staff have said similar things I have backed them up.
The hospitality industry is all about illusion. Its about not having to worry about cooking dinner for the night. Its about having that perfect evening with your partner. It is about going to a pizza place and ordering the greasiest most unhealthiest pizza possible. Its about spending a last night with friends, not knowing whether or not you will see them again. Its about sitting alone at a bar, enjoying the company of a Glenfiddich 40 Year Old Scotch. It is sometimes about escaping from the real world for a while: and it is our job to provide that illusion.
The good waiter knows that the person on table 12 is in a bubbly mood and wants to engage in flirty banter, but also knows the lady on table 6 has had a rough day and just wants to be served their meal and beverages and be left alone.
The good waiter knows that when Mr Smith in the corner table was abrupt when he gave his order seconds ago, he had probably just lost a major business deal, had just had an arguement with his girlfriend, or somebody had run over his cat. The good waiter will conduct himself with the utmost professionalism, serve the food with a smile, and walk away to take the next persons order.
But there is a line that can be crossed, and just like this message board that line is crossed when the guest acts like a jerk. Intoxication, swearing, abusive language, sexist behaviour, are all deal breakers. The smart waiter will talk to the jerk’s colleagues, and ask them to calm their friend down. But that doesn’t alway work. So the professional way to deal with the situation is to be direct and up-front.
In all my time in the hospitality industry I have never seen anyone spit in guests food, pick food up off the floor and served it, or any of the other horror stories talke about in these two threads.
I have no doubt that it happens on rare occasions, and it upsets me because what we essentially have is a few dickheads tarnishing the reputation of millions of servers, cooks, chefs, waiters managers and kitchen hands for the sake of their own over-inflated egos. I’ve worked bloody hard to get where I am in the industry at the moment: I’ve worked 60-70 hour weeks (I once worked a 25 hour day with no breaks!), worked nearly every single weekend up until 2002, and spent the better part of my working life going to bed at 5 in the morning. The life of this Banquet Bear has been absolutely brutal…but would I trade it in?
Not on your life. What you are missing out on Shamozzle is the natural buzz you get out of doing a professional job. For every jerk that walks in the door of your restaurant there will be a hundred absolutely fantastic individual people. If you are surrounded by jerks at work, be the one to stand out. If your boss doesn’t back you up if you have to tell a jerk to treat you with respect, then its time to look for a new boss.
My advice? Embrace your job, work to your own high standards, do the absolute best that you can, treat every aspect of your job (including the jerks) with the utmost professionalism, and when it comes time to go home, leave work at work and go and enjoy your life. Commit yourself to doing that, and I guarentee the motivation to seek “revenge” against customers will grow weaker every day.
In my experience with restaurant work, it was never the customer who was the asshole, but the assistant night manager treating the rest of the help like shit because he’d gone to 10 minutes more of “the Harvard of local vo-tec colleges” than the rest of us and had a couple of 1/2-day sessions of company “management training” more than us ,to boot.
Never retaliated, though. Just quit and continued my quest for the asshole-free restaurant management.
Eventually, I just quit chain restaurants altogether. It always seemed that the humanity of 2-out-of-3 or 3-out-4 good rotating night managers never quite outweighed the assholery of the one bad manager.
I eat mainly at local places where the help, even the ones who aren’t related to the owner, seems to never turn over. Much less chance of encountering people like VCO3 in those places.
Honestly, I thinking making something up is what you have been doing the whole way along. You saw the ring, and later you sat there and thought what a really cool thing it would have been to have thrown it away. Now that has become reality in your mind.
As I said earlier in the thread, I worked for 9 years as a bartender and never saw any of this stuff happen. I don’t know a single bartender or waiter who, if they had seen you, would not have stopped you doing that. People like you, with their pathetic little revenge fantasies, justify the assholes who refuse to tip and treat servers badly. That’s why in the real, non-fantasy world, you aren’t tolerated by the overwhelming majority of good servers. Because you take money out of their pocket on a day to day level.
Thank you kindly for the compliment, but the truth is I don’t even know what a Level 5 Logic Problem is. 
I very occasionally do not follow laws or regulations where failing to follow them puts some risk on me but little or no risk on others – things like exceeding the speed limit or parking illegally. The point is, I never violate laws to intentionally damage others. You do, so long as it satisfies your own pathetic little need for anonymous bitchery.
And using your own personal definitions of “cowardice,” “laws,” and “justice,” when your defintiions obviously don’t jibe with the real definitions, only makes you look self-deluding and even more pathetic, if that’s possible. Not only do you behave like a person completely lacking in personal integrity or common decency, you justify your actions by casting them in a positive light, so that you can convince yourself that these petty little actions don’t make you a petty little person. But they do, of course.
And that’s the reason people with self-worth and any degree of courage don’t do this sort of thing: Because such actions say volumes more about you for doing them, than they do about your victim and whether he or she “deserved” them. When you have a sense of self-worth, some things are simply beneath you. Once you have stooped to the level of small-minded anonymous viciousness, you are for the rest of your life the kind of person who is small-minded, anonymous (i.e., a coward), and vicious. You can rationalize it to your heart’s content, justify it with whatever spin you can put on it, but at the end of the day you are what you do, and your actions are small and mean.
Not to mention the most obvious way to deal with a customer who is truly getting on your tit, which is to switch tables with another server or get an assist from another server, who hasn’t had the asshole biting his/her ankles for the past half hour, and therefore can step in and give you a break from taking the customer’s shit. Or explain to your manager what’s going on and have him or her assistn.
Managers that don’t back up their wait staff appropriately are shitty managers. A good waiter who knows the restaurant, knows the customers, does a good job, does it fast, never misses a shift, is worth his or her weight in gold, and managers know it. A decent manager will never stand by and let good waits be savaged by shitty customers. If your manager doesn’t back you up when you really need it and in justice have asked for it, then either he’s a crappy manager or you’re a crappy waiter, or both. And I would certainly assert that Shamozzle is by definition a very crappy waiter.
Another thing: I was thinking about this last night, and here’s another reason not to be the petty vicious little shit who fucks people over anonymously: You live in the world you create. What I mean is, I can breeze through life pretty confident that people are not fucking with my food or otherwise looking for ways to do me dirty without me knowing, because I would never dream of acting that way myself. If I was the sort of person who operated on that level, I would assume that the people I dealt with in my daily life operated on that level as well, since human nature surely would not allow me to admit that they were better than I. So because I let myself be an asshole, I must walk through life continually suspicious that everyone else I meet is an asshole too. No thanks.
Actually, the cat analogy is perfectly fine. But he’s proving your point. He thinks he’s fucking with the cat, but the cat is enjoying himself. He thinks he’s fucking with the patrons, but they are enjoying themselves.
::standing ovation::
Very nice, indeed. Based on this thread, you are my new SDMB hero.
N. B. this post and Pundit Lisa’s post #245.