Tag Archives: flowers

The calm before the storm.

13 Feb

The following day will be one of the busiest the restaurant will ever be, the day of lovers, the day of sub-par service, the day of trying to impress and lastly the day to make plenty of cash.  Today was surprisingly slow, enough to give us some room to breathe for the upcoming waves of couples, the calm before the storm as you can say and imagine.

Starved by the idea that fine food is the sweetest thing that a couple could share in one night without having to commit for 9 months, restaurants worldwide are preparing for the onslaught.  Folding excessive amounts of napkins, making sure everything is stocked plenty, having enough champagne bottles to shower with and briefing the servers about what is going to go down.

I honestly expected that today would be a busy day, busy enough that I wouldn’t bitch about not making any money but that did not happen.  Instead I was dumbfounded by the amount of people who would rather not spend money with their significant other.  I had one table who actually stood out from the rest of these cheap bastards, the couple was roughly in their 50s and it didn’t bother me any.  They spent a miniscule total of $70 and they still found the heart to give me $20.  Nothing was interesting aside that they had given a good gratuity and had given me something to be happy about.

Today is the day to calm down, the day to realize ourselves, to ready ourselves and to memorize the specials to be said.  To servers, Valentines Day is nothing more than a money pit.  Most servers do have lives outside the walls of their restaurant and it’s nothing out of the ordinary to not spend it with your significant other if you are a server.  There are other, better days to eat out so once you serve in this industry, you realize and open your eyes that the only thing and reason that you find yourself at a restaurant on Valentines Day is to impress, not necessarily enjoy.

I expect tomorrow will be quite a lengthy post and I sure hope so.  I’d love to look back onto what I did before a couple years from now.

Time to relax a little, sip on this whiskey and close my eyes.

Sincerely,

Your waiter today.