Wednesday Riddles & Customers Suck: the Fish Lady
This riddle is a bit elderly, so it should be easy. Here we go: A man kills his wife. Many people watch him doing so. Yet no one will ever be able to accuse him of murder. Why? Highlight For The Answer: He is a hangman and she happened to be sentenced to death.
So, the last two days at the Restaurant Where I Work(TM) have been one big FUBAR. You name it, it went wrong. Monday morning, the power went out — sort of. Part of the transformer behind our restaurant blew, resulting in about three quarters of the restaurant losing power. Nothing in the kitchen worked except the gas-powered steam tables and the ancient old gas prep stove. Since they’d already prepped the food for the planned breakfast buffet just before the power went out, and the hot bar out front (gas powered) was working, they put up the buffet. One of the industrial coffee makers was working. Mary, the morning supervisor, sent someone down to the supermarket to buy a veritable shit-ton of donuts. The back dining room had lights; the front dining room did not. So, since the Owners wouldn’t let them close, customers sat in the dark and ate coffee and donuts, or a cobbled-together buffet discounted to half price.
And, since it was the day after Christmas, the customers came in droves. And sat, in the dark, with coffee and donuts and a crappy half-price buffet.
Oh, and the power outage killed our computer system, so that it didn’t work even after power was restored. This meant the waitresses had to hand write their tickets, and the cooks had to read hand-written tickets. And the dishwasher was late, and one of the cooks went home sick.
I was called in early to help cope with this fiasco, and omigawd, do they not pay me enough to deal with that shit.
But anyway . . .
Due to all the clusterfuckage on Monday, and the continuing clusterfuckage this morning, by the time I showed up this afternoon, we were out of food, out of employees, and pretty much out of patience or sanity. Things were chaos. I was so busy dealing with this chaos, that I forgot to check to see if we had any groups scheduled. Of course, we did, as I found out when they walked in and proceeded to throw a conniption fit over us not being set up for them.
Which is perfectly understandable. Our fault. I apologized and whipped a table together for them in no time, and in under ten minutes we had all thirty of them set up and a waitress taking care of them.
The group showed up in drips n’ drabs, and ordered as they showed up, which made things hella easy on their server and the kitchen. Well, it did until the last third of the group started pitching a fit that the food hadn’t all come out to the table at once. The server explained that since everyone had ordered at different times, of course, the food was going to come out at different times. The group didn’t care, and they bitched and bitched and bitched. There wasn’t a lot we could do about this except suck it up and keep smiling and apologizing, because we can’t do a damn thing about their timing.
Meanwhile, dinner rush has come en masse out in the front dining room, and we’re having quite the rush between the two. I’m busy dealing with all that crap, and I stop up at the counter to refill the coffee guys up there. As I’m doing that, one of the guys from the group comes up and stops me, and proceeds to chew my ass because his wife and her friend haven’t gotten their food yet. Everyone else has their food, he says, but the wife and friend are still waiting. “I’m sorry,” I say. “What’d they order?” I’m thinking maybe they ordered steaks or something that might take a bit longer.
“Fish!” The man snaps.
Well, now, that doesn’t help me much, does it? We have, like, five different fish plates. “What fish? The specials?” I ask. “So I know what to look for when I go back to check?”
“I don’t know!” He snaps at me, belligerently.
“Okay. I’ll check with your server. Just a moment, I’ll be right out.” I head into the back, and their server is shoulders deep in the ice cream freezer, doing up desserts for part of the table. “Is there something going on with fish at your group?” I ask her.
“The fish is frozen!” She wails at me. “They’re yelling at me, and the cooks are trying to get it defrosted!”
She’s mad and upset and generally freaking out, so I race to the kitchen to learn that the table had ordered two of our all-you-can-eat fish basket specials, and we’ve run out of the fish. What we have is frozen, and my boys had it defrosted at that point, and the baskets almost done.
Okay! Now we’re getting somewhere! The server had neglected to mention the whole frozen-fish problem, due to the wife and friend yelling at her, so I go out to the table to explain, apologizing all the while. Not only do Wife and Friend rip my ass off for this — insulting me and their server, telling me we’re incompetent, the cooks are incompetent, the service was awful, the food was terrible — but the rest of the group chimes in like the peanut gallery from hell with their own rude, smart-assed remarks. Y’know, and by this point, I just want to stab Wife. Seriously. I understand that it’s frustrating to be stuck waiting for your food. It sucks, and I’m sorry. But she’s yelled at the server until the server fled for her life, and now she’s ripping me apart. Except I can’t run.
I apologize some more. “I’m very sorry, and I’ll take the meals off your bill, they’re almost ready –”
“Well we’re getting ready to leave! We don’t want them now!” Wife yells, gesturing wildly. Her face is flushed — she’s livid. I’m thinking, Dude, it’s just fucking fish. Come on.
“Would you like me to wrap it up to go?” I ask.
“No. I don’t even want it!” Says Wife. Friend sighs, a sound of great suffering and martyrdom, and says, “Fine, whatever. I’ll take it to go.”
Let me interject at this point: There was more I could have done. I could have comped more off their bill, given gift certificates, plied them with free dessert, stuff like that. But, frankly, both women were being horrible, insulting bitches. I don’t believe in rewarding bad behavior. Their server was caught between flaming pissed and breaking down in tears. They’d insulted me repeatedly. They were, in short, being cunts. I don’t even care that they were mad — they had a right to be mad. But, had they been civil about it, polite, their server might have been there to explain, and I’d have been dishing out free dessert and discounts all over the place. Since they were being rude and insulting to everyone, and the whole table was being a bunch of assholes, they were getting the bare minimum from me. Ladies and gentlemen, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
I wrap the one fish basket up to go, and set the other one aside, because Wife didn’t want hers. I deliver the to-go box, comp the fish off both bills, and exit stage right.
Of course, a half-hour later, the drama continues at the cash register. (I thought they were leaving immediately . . . ? Pffft.) Wife comes up to the register to pay for the remainder of her bill, and now she’s pissed because she never got her food.
“I’m sorry — I thought you said you didn’t want it?” I said, confused.
“You should have given it to me anyway!” She snaps, furious.
Okay, what the fuck. This has escalated into the realm of “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were fucking insane. I’d have handled this whole thing differently if I knew that!” I’ve completely given up at this point. This woman has made it clear that I cannot make her happy, no matter what I do. She has bitched pretty much from the get-go, according to her server. Now I’m just nodding and smiling and repeating that I’m sorry over and over until the transaction is finished and she goes away, and she’s just getting madder and madder and madder. More yelling and insults. Clearly she’s mad because she’s not getting more money taken off her bill, and clearly I am not going to take more money off her bill. She’s having a spazz attack over six-dollar all-you-can-eat deep fried scrod in a greasy spoon diner with delusions of grandeur. Her server is in the back cussing and bawling. My teeth are ground together so hard I’ve got a headache from it. I ain’t taking one more goddamn dime off this bill, and she’s screaming mad. And all this could have been avoided if she’d simply been civil to her server or me when she launched into this whole debacle.
So, the upshot of all this is that she’s calling the Boss in the morning to complain that I was being “sarcastically nice” — direct quote — to her.
Well, duh, of course I was. I just didn’t think it showed, dammit. I’ll have to practice more.
