An apology and reasons.

I haven’t been able to write very much due to the fact that I’ve been supremely busy, though this not a reasonable excuse for my lack of tracking my days and keeping a public diary.  Now I’m not necessarily blaming it all on waiting tables, having a fast paced life, sleeping in plenty and the gin-tonics I’ve consumed; it’s mostly just me not having enough energy or motivation to write.  There’s been some pretty big events in the restaurant, getting fired, hired, regulars, reviews, rants and so much more.  Now I’m planning to do a crash-course on what has happened to the restaurant and everything else relating it so I’d suggest putting on a helmet, grabbing some popcorn and beer or your favorite glass of chardonnay or cabernet.

 

Fired.

Now remember that bartender?  The one who was an obvious alcoholic and seems to be facing a relapse every moment that she’s serving drinks?  Yes, Ms. Lindsay.  A bartender who has some obvious drinking problems, to the point of keeping drinks to herself while “making” new ones to serve to the owners.  It was an obvious downward spiral, and it was damn near depressing to watch.  Now enter mid February, around the 16th and she misses the shift which she was scheduled for, two hours pass by and the phone rings and un-surprisingly it was from the devil herself.  Lindsay gives a tone of emergency, a sense of panic and lets the owner know that she won’t be able to get to work for that day and not for a solid month.  She informs the owners that her family had checked her in a rehab for her problems, and for what seemed as a twenty minute conversation it all boiled down to her being terminated from her position as a bar tender.  Good riddance as a way of saying “enjoy your life”.  The restaurant has been operating much smoother and it feels so good not to have a crazy go up to you and bitch about her life that no one really cares about.

Hired.

Restaurants hire people as fast as we fire them, it’s nothing new and we’ve hired a new server.  Enter Phoebe, a strange woman whose sense of humour was as strange as eating a hotdog without ketchup and mustard.  She isn’t exactly new to waiting tables though she is to the world of sushi.  Not much is known about this stranger other than the obvious things, she barely knows the menu, she’s actually fun to be around with and everyone seems to enjoy being around her so I’ll try and update this whenever we learn more about her.  The crew goes to play pool and share a couple drinks every Monday and she’s joined us twice, hopefully this number doesn’t get cut short.  Two days ago we hired a new bar tender, server hybrid since our bar tender has to pick up the slack left behind by Ms. Lindsay.  Rob joins the staff and he is now in training, and hopefully faces the same fate as what we hope for Phoebe.

Now I’ve decided to find a new addiction, it involves Neil Patrick Harris and How I Met Your Mother. I blame not writing actually on this show… now I am hooked and find every way possible to watch it, from Netflix on my iPhone  to me sitting at home and this has taken quite an effect on me writing… So I apologize to you, the person who cares enough to read stories of a waiter, someone who’s mildly entertained if at all by the strange stories I tell.  Thank you if you still happen to come across my little restaurant, I appreciate your patronage and would love to see you more, hell even sending it to some people you know or hate.

Thank you so much dear reader, I do appreciate you.

Sincerely,

Your waiter today.

Sweet Sweet Justice

As I’ve mentioned before in previous posts, I have a coworker who is a major cunt(I know this is such a strong word but believe me, she deserves every single ounce of that) and she has gotten away with all the shit she does and even takes advantage of the owners generosity, in case you didn’t wanna remember her name or are just wondering, her name is Lindsay.  Lindsay was not your generic bartender, she had plenty of issues and it would take me days to write it out for you so I’ll just name a few.

• She is as plastic as my thrash can that is made in China
• She cannot operate without the aid of prescription medication (Bipolar sob)
• She bosses all the staff around, to clean up her tables and her mess
• She takes complete advantage of the owners generosity
• She is just a major fuckin bitch.

Now I’ve named a few lets get on with what happened today.

She worked a double shift and was obviously tired, I walk in the restaurant and she immediately asks me to help her out, so I thought to myself, sure whatever and I clean up a table for her.  I then went about to doing my sidejobs(if you haven’t read yet, servers aside from serving and kissing ass are required to do small tasks before/after shifts) and part of that was to cut lemons, I grab lemons out of the walk in cooler/freezer and she glares at me and immediately tells me to grab more cause we will need them for back-up, so I do.  As I was cutting the lemons she yells at me to hurry up and do my sidejobs so I could help her clean her fuckin tables, this was not gonna happen and I was sick of her so I told her “I’m doing this as fast as I can” but in reality I was thinking, ha serves you right jackass.

The night shift starts at we all started taking tables, all the servers get generally the same amount of tables and for what it seemed Lindsay was getting overloaded and is losing her composure, he looks and tells the hostesses to clean up her table even though that is part of her job as a server.  A sight so unpleasant, her section was on the way to the bathroom and every single table had dirty plates, unfinished sushi and all the sorts still in a unsorted mess of raw fish.  This jerk hasn’t cleaned a single table and was yelling at the other staff to “help” her out because that is what we we’re “supposed” to do.  She gets cut early and immediately leaves after doing her check-out.  ALL of her tables we’re dirty, none cleaned and she had left before anyone could say anything.  We cleaned it up and the night was coming to a close.  When the restaurant finished its closing operation, everyone was sitting at the bar when suddenly the head waitress talks in a thunderous voice how Lindsay doesn’t deserve “that” section because she can’t keep up and how she left with all the tables being dirty (We thought that the head waitress was actually very close to Lindsay to the point were she wouldn’t say anything bad about her).  The hostess speaks up about how she yelled at them to clean up their table because she was “busy” when it showed that she had all the time in the world as she casually talked with her 2 tables.  I then tell them how she was ordering me to clean up after her mess even though I was doing what I was supposed to be doing which was finishing my side jobs and actually following what Lindsay had asked me to do.  She is finally gonna get some kick in the ass that she deserves.

The owner has realized this and is planning on taking action, regardless what it is I’m sure that Lindsay will atleast show some backbone.  Hell after all the things that she has said and done, the least she could do is take the beating.

Finally, some justice will be served.

I cannot wait to see what happens.

Sincerely,

Your waiter today.

When all hell breaks lose

Busiest Friday of the newly opened restaurant, off-course everything goes bananas at this point.  Having only 4 servers on the floor and somehow having a full house from 6PM until about 10.30PM it was fuckin insane, no time for rest breaks and no room to breathe, it was a nascar race track about to have its major wreck, everyone had the patience of an old pissed off man and since we had to show our everlasting smiles we had to front and act cool, calm and collected in front of the customers that we want to strangle.  Speaking of strangle, I almost lost it and actually hit a fuckin guy because of his own idiocy.

In a Sushi restaurant, it is much different than eating at your regular American eatery, we don’t just crank out food like machines, it is more like painting a portrait.  Sushi chefs are one of the most talented people I’ve ever met, they take time to garnish their work with edible art and still end up meeting its time requirement and typically Sushi chefs get flaming pissed at you when they see that their art isn’t being served correctly to the table, hell that’s the reason that the sushi bar is right next to the tables; they want to keep a birds eye view on you.  Yes, there is a way to serve sushi and yes, alot of servers don’t even know that.  I love my sushi chefs because they get my orders out in a perfected, almost machine like accuracy and it even looks pretty to boot, but today was different; the sushi bar collapsed.

Orders we’re being taken and put in the POS, giving the sushi chefs barely any time to respond.  It takes time to put sushi out and the orders we’re just being piled up.  Imagine your house on full capacity, while everyone hassles you for some hamburgers, that alone should instill fear in you and that actually happened to me today.  People we’re waiting on their sushi significantly longer than they did for the kitchen food, it was so bad that it was taking 45 minutes to crank out a fuckin california roll and some salmon sushi, the restaurant was going bananas at this point and there was nothing us servers could do about it.  Our tips we’re significantly going down and it was beyond our control, I would be pissed too had I needed to wait an hour for the 2 rolls that I ordered.  Needless to say, tip percentages wasn’t very high but the sheer amount of volume more than balanced it out, thank God for all those people.

The back of the house was a terrifying scene to see, everyone was yelling and completely disregarding any humanities just to make their quick buck but hey, I can’t voice much cause I really didn’t give a shit about how they did, I needed my food out faster and I was willing to do whatever ass kissing it was I needed to do.  It was the make or break period tonight and thankfully, I didn’t break but I didn’t make much neither.

After this long ass night all servers managed to stay alive, and believe me it was much longer than this and I’ll probably elaborate on this sometime later but since I have a hang over because Adan and I spent the night drinking to celebrate the busiest night, hell everyone in the restaurant was jubilant because the sales we’re abnormally high and that means money in the pockets of everyone.

So I do apologize if I was so slow but try to see where I’m coming from.

Sincerely,

Your waiter today.