I work at a sushi restaurant that is family owned and relatively small. Our entire restaurant consists of 10 tables and a tiny sushi bar.

Our restaurant is usually pretty packed for lunch and does decently well on weekday dinners while we have a line out the door on thursdays, fridays, and saturdays, It’s a 5-6 hour shift of running around with plates. To make matters worse, since we are so small, the owner believes that it’s not necessary to have a hostess or a person to man the phones for carry out. Somehow we servers always manage, but at the end of a friday or saturday we are always burned out.

A friend of mine asked me to cover her Sunday shift. Sunday’s are half days so its only from 4 to 9 and due to the small window of hours that we’re open, its not usually busy at all. I was told i would be working with a relatively new server, but I wasn’t concerned because if we were lucky, we would get more than 2 tables each. Also, the main chef was out sick so the owner, who does cook but is mainly just a ”over-seer”, figures it would be ok for him to manage the kitchen

This particular sunday was extremely rainiy and the winds were blowing very hard. Just as it happens to be on these types of days, carry out was ringing off the hook. after about 5 or 6 orders, i could feel that we were going to be backed up and began to give carry out customers more than a half hour to come in and pick up their food. after taking about 15 orders or so…….

THE LIGHTS GO OFF. Our card machine, telephone, all the kitchen lights except for 2 very small overhead lights, all of fridges are down.

Amazingly our gas burners and the grill and fryers were still working.

And then came in the flood of customers. Apparantly some of them had their power go out and that was the reason why they had ordered carry out. Most of the customers were very understanding because they were going through the same things. I felt very bad because obviously it was taking much longer than i had promised them on the phone, due to the fact that we had an inexperienced chef who was working with a tiny overhead light, and an inexperienced server who was running around red-faced with only 1 table while I managed over 15 carry-out orders.

There was however one lady who just could not understand. She had ordered a vegetable tempura appetizer, which comes with peices of mushroom, squash, broccoli, onion, and sweet potato. However she wanted it specially ordered to have only peices of broccoli and nothing else.

At a time when everything is hectic, specialtie orders are always a pet peeve, but as servers, we just have to bite down and do it.

This is when she started yelling about how she couldn’t believe a business would operate this way and how she should call the better business bureau about the lack of customer service.

I calmly asked her (all the while about to explode in my head) to wait just a little longer and that I was really sorry for the inconvenience and that the blackout has made it nearly impossible for the chef to cook because there was no light.

The lady sat down but then i guess she thought of something else to gripe about because a minute later she came back and asked if the order was finished yet, Again i told her it wasn’t and that I was really sorry about the delay. To which she replied, well if I had known it would take this long i would have gone somewhere else. I replied by asking her if she wanted to cancel her order but she said that she was already here and might as while wait, all the while rolling her eyes and putting her hands up in frustration.

After another 30 seconds she comes back to me, and in the loudest voice imaginable, starts yelling about how this is the worst service she had ever seen and that she should be able to call the police. I was literally at the end of my patience, but once again i said, Im sorry, its due to the blackout. TO MY UTTER DISBELIEF, the lady then says, well you s houldn’t be taking carry out orders if your power isn’t on………

And i lost my cool. I told her that when she called the phone was obviously still working, and the blackout had not occured yet. I also reprimanded her saying that a lady of her age should realize that when a girl at least 30 years younger than her can keep calm while being yelled at that she should also have learned to be a bit more patient. I told her i had apologized to her more than 3 times and that i thought it was about time for her to sit down and stay there until her broccoli was finished.

I admit it was probably not the best thing to do, but this lady was by far the worst i had ever seen. She did stay sitting down with her face turning bright purple and red for being told off but i made sure to put her broccoli to the front of the line just so i could get her out of the restaurant and not have to see her face anymore.

It was not a nice sunday.

Submitted by: Kay