howdy sir witty-waiter! this is a great post and thought-provoking as well, love the Mark Twain quote and of course the Bible quote is very true and proven out by medical science.
It's interesting that part of your actual job is to make people feel good and that many times turns into laughter so you could say that you get paid to make people laugh!
Laughter is definitely a benefit of the job. Sometimes it's just about trying to give great service like tonight. My comments were a little bit more reserved because from reading the situation I could tell they were more about the food than hearing me joke around. I have to be able to read the customers
yes sir witty-waiter, very interesting. and how long does it normally take you to read them, probably immediately?
Most of the time it's fairly quick. I had a highly functional autistic child tonight and I could tell the noise was getting him a little agitated so I pushed the kitchen to get his food out quickly to give him a distraction. It worked pretty well and I could tell the parents were able to relax and ended up enjoying their meal a lot. Just have to stay alert to these kind of things. I hear other servers complaining over a poor tip and my first thought is could they have done things differently. I keep my mouth shut but I'm keeping a mental tally
oh how interesting sir witty-waiter...excellent work there. But in regards to the other servers, you are keeping a mental tally for what purpose? just to know who is doing their job best?
One of the servers got a bad tip the other night and started this big to do over it and the MOD became involved. I often want to tell the server that I think she could try a little harder. I've worked with her for several years and I really have great affection for her but her table-side attitude seems quite lazy and uncaring and she's often complaining about poor tips. She's a really hard worker but her demeanor could use an adjustment but how do you go about putting that to her without hurting her feelings and creating a rift between us.
Long story short (ha ha), because of the situation of how the bill was paid by someone else, it came to the managers attention that the customer thought the service was awful and I was able to tell her to look at what she could have done differently and to think of it as a teaching moment and maybe her demeanor could be adjusted when approaching a customer.
This is why I'm keeping a tally. LoL.
howdy tonight sir witty-waiter! wow ..well did she react ok to your advice then? she should trust you by now I'd think. what is a bad tip? I want to be sure to know how much to tip.