Approximately 45 seconds before the computers crashed I had volunteered to pick up a 13 top that had to be sat in a closed station. I didn’t actually want to do it but someone had to. Had I of known what the future held for me I definitely would have made these assholes wait at the door until a table was available elsewhere. I took the table to benefit them, not me. I am not a table whore.

Half of the party arrived first. The second half arrived right after I had finished closing my other tables out. The party already had water and a few ordered drinks. One lady insisted they order right away since her child was falling asleep. She also wanted to make sure that her child’s food came out first. I rang in the food, requesting the child’s food to come out first. Three minutes later the woman demanded to know where her child’s food was. To her “first” meant “immediately.” I politely explained the difference between the two.

Note: When the computers go down the kitchen automatically crashes. This is an unavoidable and often unexplainable fact.

Five minutes later the lady asks about the meal again, at this point all the children are asleep (and had been asleep since 14 seconds after I took their order). I return two minutes later with the child’s food and she replies “She’s asleep now so just forget it.” The bitchiness in her voice was completely unnecessary. Also, her fucking kid had been asleep for 10 minutes. Two of the times she asked about the food her child was asleep. Why put me through the trouble of begging the kitchen for your sleeping child’s food if you are just going to refuse it when I get it? This is when things with this party quickly started to unravel.

Several minutes later the entire table’s food arrived- Just in time to avoid a riot. Everyone was getting pretty surly. I instructed the food runner to verify everything before placing the food in front of someone since they decided to play musical chairs once their order was placed. He verified each item as he placed it. Some people switched food around. Others just didn’t pay attention and got burgers with wrong cooking temperatures. They complained once they had started eating them and didn’t want to wait for new ones. A couple of people complained that their food was cold – It was. No one had been happy with the wait for the food. All of these complaints were voiced to the manager. None of them involved me or was related to service in any way what-so-ever. I was nice, polite and apologetic. None of this mattered to these fuckholes who were getting ruder by the second.

The manager took $90 worth of food of off the $200 check. I knew these people would only bitch if I added gratuity to their check (even though the service wasn’t the problem) so I opted to leave it off and knew I was screwing myself. Most of the people paid with cash, after being instructed that each credit card would take 5-10 minutes to process because the cashier had to call for authorization. One guy didn’t have cash so he had to pay a portion of the bill with a credit card. It took 5 minutes or so to bring the credit card slip back. He didn’t leave a tip and neither did anyone else.

My advice to parties who arrive at a restaurant where the computer have just crashed:

You should know what you are getting in to.

Take your sleepy fucking children to a quick, fast place to eat – Like a fast food restaurant in one of the many food courts located on the strip and within hotels. Be considerate – just get them some food and put them to bed already.

It’s not my fault that you didn’t have enough common sense to feed your child at a reasonable hour or to pick a dining establishment that specializes in fast food. I know your kid has only been alive and in your care for 9 years or so – It’s completely understandable that you still don’t know when to feed her.

Don’t penalize your server for things that are simply out of their control. Take your free food and shut up already.

BTW, you should really consider not ordering burgers extra well done if you want them to come out in a reasonable amount of time.

One particular advancement within the industry is the “course line”  key.  In most places, servers are required to use this to indicate to the kitchen the order in which the food is supposed to arrive at the table.  For instance, if you ring in a starter you would then hit the course line key.  This would place a line on the screen that says course 2 and indicate to the kitchen that everything above the line should come out first.  This feature prevents servers from forgetting to fire courses and puts the expo in charge of making sure the food is appropriately spaced.  Like all systems, this works out most of the time and fails others.  Here is an example:

An older couple came in this evening.  They both ordered wine and some food to share.  Their food consisted of a salad, which was requested to arrive first with an extra bowl.  They also wanted to share a rare burger, cut in half, and some fries.  Upon completing their order, the woman said “The salad will come out first, right?”  I assured her that it would and then rang their order in.  Their salad arrived a couple of minutes later and they began eating it.  About 10 minutes later they had eaten 75% of it and the remainder of their food arrived.  They looked outraged.  I went over to the table and the nice couple had been replaced with two raging fucking lunatics.

The lady looked at me and said “Well… they brought the burger out.  I specifically asked for my salad to arrive first.  They messed up BIG TIME.”  I explained that the salad did in fact come out first and that normally burgers come out 10-15 minutes later (depending on cooking temp) and sometimes there might be a slight overlap.  I then asked her if she wanted me to remove the burger until she was finished with her salad.  She replies “Why? So you can put it under a heat lamp until I am ready.  If I wanted to eat at McDonald’s I would have.”  She had previously been so nice that I was astounded by her transformation into a mega-cunt.  I offered to have another burger cooked from scratch and she just glared at me with such disdain that all I could say is “What is it that you would like me to do to resolve the situation?” The husband replied “There is nothing you can do. We will be fine.”  He then shooed me away.

I walked by a couple of times to make sure their drinks were full and once they had emptied some of their plates I offered to remove them.  The woman looked at me like I had just fucked her dead husband’s corpse right in front of her and said “What you can do is stay away from us.”  Having immense PMS forced me to begin laughing out loud and I walked away.  I told my manager how pissed the table was and he replied “Why, did you queef on them?”  I waited to go back to the table until the guy flagged me down for the check and requested a box.  When I returned with his credit card slip he said “You tell your kitchen they messed up BIG TIME and they know it!” I told him I would pass the message along, smiled, and told him to have a wonderful night.

Some people are just rude cocksuckers and nothing you do will ever make them happy but if you want to make them really unhappy be overly nice and cheerful to them while they are pissed off over something minute, inconsequential, and ridiculously fucking petty.

Today began innocently enough but soon turned into a cluster fuck nightmare – and remained so up until I was walking out of work.

I was in a large station (actually two stations made into one) by myself with no one to drain my resources (steal my full water pitchers).  My station was almost full when I got sat a party of 7 women who were in a hurry because one of them was headed to the airport.  Just as I finished putting their order into the computer a dreadful message appeared on the screen – “Kitchen printer error: Could not print to kitchen. Print Locally? Retry?” Shit. Maybe one of the printers in the back is offline, so I hit retry.  Just as I do I notice that the normally green button in the top left hand corner of the screen turns red. FUCK. The computers are down.  My easy & stress free day is about to turn into a chaotic mess filled with people yelling and screaming at each other over dumb shit that no one has any control over.  I have no choice but to brace myself and prepare for the worst.

The first thing I must do is tell the party of 7 twats (who were already impatient to begin with) that it will take a bit longer because now I must hand write their check and turn it in to the kitchen.  The hostesses haven’t been told to stop seating yet so in the meantime they seat me two new tables as four of my tables want to pay right this very second.  I have to greet the new tables, write their orders out, and then hand them into the kitchen.  Then I have to figure out what the hell the tables that want to pay ordered and manually write their checks out, total them up, and collect payment.  It sounds simple enough, right?  While I am doing this a woman from the party of 7 comes up and says “Are you seriously still writing our order down, it’s been like 10 minutes?”  To which I say “No, your order was turned in a while ago and they are preparing your food now.”  The twat rolls her eyes at me and sits back down.  I decide to go to the back to finish writing out the checks because the glares from all my tables are burning a hole through my skin.  I run through my station refilling sodas & waters and then I drop off the four checks – reviewing the items listed and telling everyone their totals.  I also make a point to tell everyone that I can accept credit cards but it will take at least 20-30 minutes since the cashier has to call each credit card company individually to get an authorization code.   The wait is due to the number of people with credit cards.   I swing by the table of 7 difficult ladies to tell them I will be in the back for a couple of minutes.

One of the 4 tables happened to be 6 people who now inform me that they want four  separate  checks.  GRRRR…   Why are people so fucking annoying and inconsiderate?  I stop by the 7 ladies to tell them that their food is coming out next and to check and see if they need more refills.  One lady at the table said “Um… our friend left, we couldn’t find you and tell you until now because you disappeared and were no where to be found.”  I replied “No problem, I will cancel her food.”  Her reply “You do that.”  Bitches.   But I do just that.   I finishing writing the 4 separate checks for the 6 guests and give them their checks – everyone pays in cash except one lady whose check is $15 – the entire table now sits and waits while her credit card takes 25 minutes to get processed.   Seriously people – Can you not loan your fucking friend $15 plus $3 for a tip instead of sitting for 25 minutes to wait for a credit card to be processed?   Fucking losers. While I was taking her credit card to the back a table of 3 cholos donning wife beaters and low riding jeans gets sat in my station.   I ask my manager to greet them and get their order if possible, which she does. I swing by the other 3 tables – 2  insist on paying with credit cards and the other gives me exact change.  I drop the credit cards off in the back (the poor cashier was on the phone her entire shift with credit card companies).  There are about 15 cards in front of theirs – I advise them it will take even longer because of this.  One of the tables yells at me because apparently all the computers in the entire hotel are down – including the front desk.  This means they were not able to check in.  She says “What am I supposed to do? sleep in the street?”  My reply is “It’s only 1:30, I’m sure by the time you go to sleep the problem will be cleared up.”  She didn’t find this amusing.

The table that my manager took the order from was pretty low  maintenance  other than needing three refills of water and soda each.  I offered to get them more beer but they declined.  I also tried to pre-bus their table but they insisted they weren’t finished.   As they finished their meals they signaled for my manager to come over and told her that after her taking their order no one had ever been by the table again.   She asked me if I had checked on them and I loudly said that I had and said “They are just riff raff trying to get something for free – DO NOT give them anything because I have been over there at least 7 times.”   She ignores their complaint.   I give them their check, stand there to collect their cash, & send the cholos on their way.   The ladies who were in a rush wound up having a leisurely lunch.   Another lady joined them and ordered also.   When the new lady arrived the conversation I overheard went something like this “Oh my god, it was a fucking nightmare in here.   Like, it took 40 minutes for the server to put our order in.   I went over and asked if she was still writing it out and she said no but I know she was.   She also disappeared for a long time and we have no clue where she went.   You would have just lost it.   We almost died.”   Not only were those bitches liars but they were also drama queens.   They eventually left, almost 1 1/2 hours after their food intially arrived.   At least the twats had the decency to leave 20%.

Once the first round of tables left the new tables were much easier to take care of – knowing you don’t have a computer to rely on before beginning a table is fine.   Starting a table, ringing everything into a computer,   and then later trying to recall what people ordered from memory really sucks.   Needless to say a lot of people got a lot of free shit today.