We always complain about the bad ones and sometimes the nice ones get overlooked.

Submitted by: Chris

“I literally have server nightmares. Yes i have had a number of awful experiences of being a server, but i literally have had nightmares. One summer while serving, the nightmares were so vivid and awful, i would wake up breathing hard and felt like i was actually really in my nightmare. All the stresses and strains, fears and anxieties from being a server, such as ringing in the right order, not falling behind, not spilling and etc, would catch up with me in my REM’s. It was terrible, i would never get a good sleep i talk to all my friends and they seem to have them too. My most repetitive nightmare is falling behind, and no matter how fast i tried to catch up to my tables, i just couldnt get out of the weeds ” – Cassie

This one afternoon, a smallish group came in to celebrate a toddlers birthday. There were two couples and five kids under the age of five. Now, anyone getting this table would think ”oh shit”. You’re looking at a bunch of kids meals, which means getting a bunch of drinks and refills for barely any cost and therefore barely any tip. But I figure, I’ll make this a fun party for them and maybe they’ll leave a nice tip out of gratitude.

Yeah, right.

The moment I get to the table, one of the women thrusts a bottle at me, saying it’s breast milk which she wants me to heat up with hot water. I smile and say no problem. Hungry babies are crying babies and it’s not like I’d be grossed out by breast milk, especially when it’s in a bottle. I’m sure she wants the milk quickly, so I hand the job off to my supervisor while I get the other 9 drinks for the table.

When I get back to my section with the drink tray, the lady stands up and YELLS at me
”If you have a problem with someone why don’t you say it to their face?!?”
It took me a moment to realize that she thought I’d handed the milk to my supervisor because I was grossed out by it.
”Oh, no!” I said, ”There’s no problem, ma’am. I just knew I’d be a minute with these other drinks and I figured I’d get you the milk sooner, so-”
”I don’t want to hear it! This is TERRIBLE customer service, I am just disgusted!” Turning to her friends, she told them (still yelling) ”I can’t even BE here anymore! I’m sorry but this party is ruined. I’m leaving!”
And she marched out, dragging her (now crying) children and leaving both my shift leader and I standing agape in the middle of the section.

The worst part was, her friends had to try and finish their poor child’s birthday party after this! The birthday boy was crying and his parents looked like they might want to join him.

And, of course, no apologetic tip or words were forthcoming.

Submitted by: Simka 

Anyway they get seated in my assistant managers section. I could tell from my section that they were incredibly rude to her. she was walking by with five hot plates and one of them had the audacity to bang on the table with her butter knife and yelled out ”WAITRESS I NEED MORE COFFEE NOW!” as if no one else were in the restaurant but her. So I’m in the back of the house about to run some hot plates to one of my tables when my assistant manager comes in and just starts crying her eyes out.

At this point I felt sooooo sorry for her and i told her I would take care of the table the rest of the time they were here and I would give her the tip. So i run the plates out to my tables and I comeback to the counter and the table with the two very rude older women’s plates are ready to be ran.

So i take a deep breath, put on as good a smile as i could and bury my head and run the plates to the table. As soon as I arrive to the table, to my utter disbelief, one of them says ”well aren’t you a good looking young man” and winks at me (yeah I’m a dude). So they are super nice to me the rest of the time they are there, which I was kind of creeped out by. They leave me a $10 tip for a $20 bill (wow). and they even wrote thanks for the great service on the receipt.

my assistant manager let me keep the tip on top of it too!

Submitted by: Chris

The server who was waiting on them attempted to give her the Heimlich (which the woman had asked for herself) while she was sitting in her chair. My guy was the shift leader that night, and he rushed over to the table to assess the situation. As he got tableside, another server (who had some military training) grabbed the woman by her head and shoved his fingers down her throat. When asked immediately after by the SL why he did that, he snapped into military mode and responded with ”Drill Sergeant always says, if someone is choking, you stick your fingers down their throat to dislodge the object!” To which the SL replied, ”Did your drill sergeant also tell you to assess the situation first, because if she’s talking, that means she’s able to breathe.”

The SL began to ask the woman if she had any allergies that could be causing her throat to swell up. She jumped up from the table and started yelling to the restaurant that she needed the Heimlich (the whole time this was going on, her dinner companion was calmly sitting there, like he’d seen it all before). She ran over to me (I had left the bar to see what all was going on), grabbed my hands and put them around her waist. I told her I was not going to give her the Heimlich if she wasn’t actually choking, because you can do more damage than anything else at that point. She began to try to thrust my hands into her ribs, and I tried to wrestle my hands away from her.

Just then, the cops showed up, and one of them came running in, shoved me aside, and lifted the woman up off of the floor with her Heimlich before we could let them know about her ”situation”. The woman began coughing and wheezing, probably due to the ribs that had just broken. The cops checked her out to make sure she was ok, and we then told the cops about how she had been talking and screaming the whole time. They had a little bit longer of a chat with her after that, and told us she seemed stable (they were talking mentally), but to keep an eye on her.

Since she felt slighted that we weren’t helping her in her moment of need, she demanded that her meal be comped. She and her dinner companion proceeded to spend the next 2 1/2 hours hanging out and relaxing. As the night went on and cuts were made, the couple was still sitting at their table when it was down to just my guy and I. They flagged him down (they hadn’t ordered anything in 2 hours) and asked for a dessert. He obliged, brought them their sweets, and dropped the check off while clearing the empty plate. The woman expressed disbelief to him that she was getting a check for the dessert, ”I thought that the bill was on the house tonight for all that I went through!”. To which he responded, ”Your bill with your other server was taken care of, but she has been gone for over an hour now, so you began new with me. Sorry.” The bill was paid (with no tip, of course), and we never saw them again.

Submitted by: M

I dont generally drink but I figured its always good to have an owed favor from your bartender so I said sure. I should have known that that was a bad sign but I didn’t; boy did I learn My lesson.

The man seemed nice enough as he ordered a glass of red wine and the rodizio ( side note: At the restaurant where I work we Tipout 10% of our total rodizio orders to our Gauchos. at forty dollars a head, that’s four dollars of tip I have to give to my gaucho per person who orders rodizio).

I get him the wine, and engage him in some light conversation while my gaucho makes his way to the table, the first cut arrives and this seemingly nice hispanic man turns into The Biggest Jackass I have ever seen. He starts bitching about the cut saying that its too fatty and to get my gaucho over to his table with another cut, I let my gaucho know.

We serve 17 different cuts of meat on the rodizio including but not limited to: Wild Boar, Buffalo, Filet Mignon, Lamb, etc, etc, and he found something wrong with ALL of them. Somewhere in the middle of this clusterfuck of psuedo-preadolescent whining he orders a coke, which being a good server, I deliver quickly. He then says that the coke is flat and to get him another, I go and refill from the same fountain where I got the first and tell him that I changed the co2 ( which i didnt; because really, c’mon, you’d lie too) . he tastes it and says ” yeah much better”.

He finally gets full and tells me to bring him the check. I print out his bill, and drop it at his table. He slides in his credit card and hands it to me. after running his card I drop it at the table and he says ” You’ve been a great waiter, Drew. I’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

I leave the table and breathe a sigh of relief thinking that at least I would be compensated for an HOUR AND A HALF of this douches bullshit. He leaves and I go over to grab the check as my busboy clears the table. I look inside at the credit card receipt, the bill was 67.36 ( Rodizio , two glasses of the Townshend T3,and the Coke) the tip line read, 3.00.

I was and still am LIVID. As I went in the back and used every curse word I knew, and a couple I didnt, My bartender comes to me and says ” He did that to me a week ago.”

note: He came back in last night, and was sat in my section. I gave him to the new girl. She got Four dollars.

Submitted by: Drew

Anyone have any good stories from yesterday to start this Monday off with?

(Leave your story in the comments)

During one the ”buffet” nights (read we need to get rid of stuff that’s expired the next day) we had a VERY full house and the waitresses were running around like crazy doing their collective best to serve the pizza we were pushing out at an insane rate.

At one point one the waitresses came to the back crying that some customer kept grabbing her ass and had had enough. The manager told her to stick it out.

The head cook was her boyfriend and made it clear to the manager if this was acceptable he would be grabbing the manager’s wife’s ass.

Suddenly enlightened the manager proceeds to tell the customer enough is enough. The customer pulls a knife in a crowded restaurant. Being the brave soul he was the manager ordered the waitresses in the back and told the kitchen staff we need to defend the restaurant.

Fuck that.

We grabbed the waitresses went out the back and called the cops.
We may swear, act tough and be surely in the kitchen but owners don’t pay us enough to take a blade for the place.

Submitted by: S

If you’ve ever been a server, what was your least favorite task for side work? (Leave some comments!)

-The Waiter @ Server Nightmares

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Thanks,

Dominick @ Server Nightmares.com