Bad Weekend
Trip Start
Mar 10, 2007
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97
188
Trip End
Jan 08, 2008
Auckland,
New Zealand
Sunday, August 26, 2007
After five hours sleep I was back in work to find that my boss was not. A phone call later, it turned out that he had accidentally switched off his alarm instead of putting it on snoooze and was still in bed, but he promised that he would be in by eleven so it was okay. When he arrived however, we discovered that just about every electronic item in the bar was broken and that we could not process food orders or tabs, which meant handwriting everything (twice in the case of food) and adding it all in at the end - only a little thing but a pain in the arse if you are busy.
So, when a party of ten came in I took their order by hand and then repeated it back to them to be told that it was correct, so I put it in the kitchen. As I write the orders in a slightly different way than the computer prints them the chef misread it and not all of the dishes were made when it came to the time to take the food out. we noticed it before serving every meal but it was not quite enough time to get the missing stuff ready. I went out and explained the situation to the table, and as they could see we had been messing with the tills all morning they said not to worry and that these things sometimes happen. The rest of the food was with them within five minutes, but despite having read their order back to them and being told it was correct, one woman complained that it was not what had been ordered, even though it was only one portion of fries that were wrong, and I had been told that the whole order was correct at the time of ordering. At the end of their meal, when the other nine had left, one woman (the same one) came to the bar and demanded the name of the manager as she was going to make a formal complaint "about the appalling service, from start to finish, given by the waitress, who had not taken the whole order, brought out the wrong things and made excuses involving computers." This from the very woman who had verefied my written order as correct, had told me she didn't want a drink, before getting up and going to the bar to get one for herself, and who had asked for a jug of water only to complain about being given a jug and glasses rather than just glasses of water. And I am not a waitress.
In short, we had done the best we could in a bad situation, with no working machinery, and had gotten everything right according to the customers order amd requests and yet she felt that this was appalling service. There is no pleasing some people, especially those who do not listen in the first place. By the end of the day I was more than ready to go home.
Sunday morning was much the same and more, as on Sunday the gas was not working in the kitchen, and as such we could not feed the gang of rugby fans who came into the bar first thing as we could not get the kitchen working in time for them to eat and leave for the game. The ywere not happy - not that there was anything that we could do about it. Later on, a group of four customers who I had been serving, walked out on their bill - an eighty dollar tab that would have been deducted from my wages if it were not my first one. We did not notice because they were sitting outside and out of view, and because they come in fairly regularly we did not expect such treatment (they do not however come in regularly enough to catch them before they can claim otherwise.) Needless to say we were not happy.
Like I said, it was a bad weekend.
