[quick note- way too tired to proofread what I just wrote, so it may or may not make sense! I'll check tomorrow and change any random grammar mistakes, etc.]
Tonight the entire staff was called in early to have a shift meeting. Manager Tron expressed a lot of things; essentially he was very unhappy about some of the clique-y drama that has been going on in the restaurant lately.
I try to stay out of cliques. I’m pretty friendly with everyone, even if they do some things that make me frustrated. Apparently, on Tuesday night [a night that I did not work, and neither did Manager Tron] one of the host staff said something very inappropriate about Lana, who is not my favorite person in the world. Despite that, she still didn’t deserve to be told “Stay away from the host stand or I swear to god, I will snap you like the fucking twig that you are.” That’s just not… Christ, it’s so elementary-school, I can’t even begin to understand how it got to that point.
So I try to stay out of it. Keep my head above water, keep my mind out of the rushing river of rumor [ooh, alliteration, how complex of me]. I was working on my tables, trying to make a little money tonight, when my phone rings. It’s Boyfriend, who never calls during a shift unless it’s important, so I duck into the linen closet to take the call. He has something interesting, if infuriating, to tell me.
A quick break in the story to explain a certain point. In the restaurant biz, for those who don’t know, there are the casual diners who go out to eat now and then and don’t ask for a particular server– they either don’t care or don’t know that they could cultivate a relationship with the server and become “regulars”. Then you have the regulars. If they call with a reservation and request a particular server, good restaurants will do their best to honor that request; it not only makes the guest happy, it keeps the server happy, both of which make sense to do. It’s not always possible, on a busy Saturday or during prime dinner hours to honor a request; but they should [and usually do] try.
So, Boyfriend had this to tell me: our good friend who is in the area a few times a year was dining at his restaurant tonight, and asked him why I wasn’t working Saturday night. Confused, Boyfriend said that I was. The friend explained that he’d called The Abyss to get a reservation, requested Jane, and the host on the phone told him that Jane wasn’t available, but Jim would be happy to take care of him. The friend reluctantly agreed, and booked the reservation.
This is wrong on multiple levels. First, and most basically, the host’s job in this situation is to simply say, “I can’t guarantee any particular server, but I will make a note that you’d prefer so-and-so.” Secondly, unless the floor-plan for the following night has been made and announced to the host staff in advance [which never happens and probably will never happen, as it's too confusing and complicated for everyone involved], there is no way of knowing what table/section/server will be available; so while they couldn’t tell if I would be available, they also couldn’t know that Jim would be available.
So what this means, when you lay all the facts out on the table, is that a) someone is very, very stupid b) someone is trying to help Jim out because he’s a single parent [which is discriminating against me, as a non-parent] or c) Jim is paying the host staff to mark VIP tables as “requesting” him, even when they are requesting someone else. Option A sucks because no one likes working with stupid people, but it seems vastly unlikely. Options B and C are both completely unacceptable.
The other thing to look at in this situation is that I only caught on to this because Boyfriend called and told me, which only happned because this guest happened to be dining at that restaurant and it occured to him to ask about it. How many times has this happened in the past? How many more times would it have happened if I hadn’t seen what was going on?
There’s still a minute chance that this was all an honest mistake… but as much as I’d like to think no one is doing such shady things, it’s the only thing that makes sense. Sigh. As it stands right now, I sat down with Manager Tron to tell him the facts as I saw it; he said he’d take care of it. I hope that it works out and some of this drama crap can go away.
