EXPECTING REWARD FOR FOUL SERVICE, ENABLING LAZINESS AND MORE RANTING- column

By Coey Carroll

Last night, my sister, my boyfriend and I went to a popular Italian restaurant off Archer Rd. A slow Monday night, we figured, would bring at least decent service. And boy, were we wrong.

Let me begin by saying that this place was INSANELY slow, so much so that the hosts were only seating one side of the restaurant. With less than ten tables in one half of the restaurant, and with our server, Oliver*, only having three of those tables, what he considered “service” was appalling.

At the beginning of our visit, he was quick to bring our sweet teas and ring up our appetizer, but what he was missing was my sister’s drink and all of our silverware. After staring at our stuffed mushrooms for fifteen minutes, we had to ask another server to accommodate us.

He wasn’t anticipating his customers’ wants like most servers are trained to do—when you notice that drinks are empty, fill them. When the breadsticks and salad are running low (especially when one of the people at your table is having UNLIMITED SALAD), ask if they would like more. I hate to pull a cliché, but it’s really not rocket science.

When my boyfriend again asked Oliver to refill his drink, instead of Oliver NOTICING he needed more, he replied that the tea was dumped and that he was sorry. Excuse me?

Though I am currently employed at a 24-hour restaurant that is always brewing tea, I used to work at a place with a closing time, and never did I tell a customer that “we just got rid of the tea;” I would keep the tea until the tea-drinking portion of the restaurant was empty. In the rare event that the last table decides to have tea when they were having water until that point, I would brew another batch even if it was for only one glass.

The customer is putting food in my mouth and paying my bills; they’re doing enough favors for me. The least I could do is accommodate their wants during dinner. What really disgusted me was something my sister noticed as we were waiting to ask Oliver for to-go containers and the check. He was sitting at the bar, talking and texting. We had spent an hour and a half there; 30 minutes of that was collectively spent waiting for Oliver. Isn’t he the “waiter?”

I know quite a few people, myself and my sister included, who would love to have a job like his given the theoretical “big money.” I guess if someone is used to doing the bare minimum and still getting paid, they’ll continue putting in half the effort.

The fact that I’m a server makes me more inclined to leave excellent tips, given that servers in Florida are paid less than $5 per hour and you never know exactly how much or how little your server made that day (or that week), but what I did end up leaving for Oliver was out of my personal rule that SOMETHING should always be left, no matter how crappy my server was.

The drive home really made me think about the parallelism society has become. I realized that America is getting severely spoiled, more than she has been in the past. While I’m more than happy to help those around me struggling, I am not for leeches, and it’s apparent that society has become ridden with them, inside and outside of the on-welfare population.

Servers like Oliver, that person at the soup kitchen complaining about their meal, the salary-paid manager who rarely shows up for their shifts, or the person wearing Abercrombie & Fitch and playing on an iPhone while still having Medicare all have one thing in common: being spoiled rotten and spoiled lazy. (I have met half of the above, and I’ve heard of the other, for the record.)

My grandmother applied for welfare twenty years ago just after she’d had a divorce and was working 70 hours per week to support herself and one minor, and the person she spoke with told her she was not eligible unless she quit her job. Insanity. And it’s only gotten worse today.

Through landfills and dumpsters, from paper mills to stables, nothing smells worse or stronger to me than the smell of the spoiled batch of citizens I unfortunately call my countrymen.

*Name changed to protect the guilty