115. Don’t Mess With My Servers
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A while ago, I was working for a popular restaurant chain. I was a bartender there but frequently picked up serving shifts. Often, I was responsible for training our new employees, and honestly, I preferred training them, so they knew how to do the job properly.
Anyway, one particular server that I had was this sweet boy who was great with customers and would literally bend over backward to please someone.
I don’t know if I’ve met anyone who cared about others like this since. As such, I felt particularly protective over this boy. One particular shift, I was bartending, and he was serving a larger party that had been sitting near my bar. I could overhear everything that was happening while he served them.
The lady, who I assumed was the head of the party, would not give this kid a break and was constantly talking over him, asking for things that we have never had on the menu (of course, claiming she’d had it last time), giving him attitude for these non-existent items, basic entitled customer nonsense.
I could see this server was visibly becoming flustered with the table, but unfortunately, in food, that’s what you have to learn to deal with. The turning point for me was when she snapped at the server over a birthday song.
Our establishment does not sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to tables. However, we do offer a free sundae. The server explained this, but she was not having it. He even (very politely) offered to sing but warned her it would only be him singing as the other servers likely wouldn’t join in. She was incredibly rude to him about this, and I was behind the bar, fuming.
As he finally goes to ring in their entree order, she (rudely) asks him for another mojito, saying that he hadn’t made it properly. Another thing to note is that our location is next to a hockey stadium, so based off whether we have a game or not, we’ll prepare drinks in different glasses. I hadn’t been thinking and had made the drink in the wrong glass.
Apparently, she thought she deserved more alcohol since I made a ‘mistake.’ She sent the drink back and ordered my server to tell me to give her more liquor.
One thing you never tell a bartender? Make my drink stronger. So, of course, I remade her mojito with zero alcohol, except for two drops of rum down her sip straw. She certainly enjoyed her ‘stronger’ drink and even ordered two more.
Hope you enjoyed paying almost $30 for three drinks with maybe a quarter ounce of liquor altogether. Don’t mess with my servers (or insult my drinks).
