Five (very early 20s) (South Asian from South Asia) (undergraduate or young graduate student?) types, all (male), one of whom is particularly fervent and has a fairly open shirt, and who talk all over each other and who ask how big the entrees are if they share and who say they will pick two and maybe a third once they see how good the food is, and several of whom ask what is vegetarian and about this one item in particular, and when I explain the name and nature of that one textured gluten meat substitute that vegans love, the fervent one is like “We are vegetarian, no egg, no fish sauce, no oyster sauce, not that,” and even after I explain to him what it is, he shakes his head and is like, “No, not like that, not like that” with his eyes somehow all glassy and open and staring like he is dead set against having even imitation meat entering his body, and they go from ordering apps to an entrée to back to apps, so I have to stop, ask what the appetizers are, repeat their order back to them, and then do the entrées list that, and confirm it -- – and they were only ordering 2 appetizers and 2 entrees in total, no drinks even, yet somehow they were able to make just that that confusing! – and then when I go over to the register and send the order back to the back, as I’m turning to leave, one of the (fatter) (meat-eating) ones scurries up and tells me to add extra chicken to the chicken fried rice that is one of the two entrees and four things total that they ordered, so I kind of lose my cool a bit and stride over to the table, tell them that I can do that but I will now have to go back to the kitchen and stop the cooks, at which point they all hang their heads down and the (fervent) (kind of open-shirted) one is like, “No, it is okay,” but I am like, “No, I will do this for you, but I want to make sure that this is your final order,” and I ask very emphatically and severely can they please confirm that everything that they ordered is indeed what they want, because at some point it also becomes hard to stop the kitchen and make modifications when the order is already in progress, which their order is.
. . .
(After I go back to the kitchen, I tell the cooks to add in the extra chicken, I figure out a way to key it in without deleting the first order since that’s a pain and I don’t have the right keypad authorization codes, and then I tell my one [chubby] [Thai] coworker that I’m not dealing with that table anymore and can she please serve them, and she just shakes her head and says, “No tip, that kind leaves no tip,” and at the end of the night, you know what, they don’t, and who knows if they would have even if I had kept my cool…. This is the second time a large group of all men comes in, chaotically orders stuff, makes mistakes, and expects you to change it, only to leave no tip or a very bad tip, that very same thing happened with that big group of [grad student-age] [South Asian] people who made us stay open late and left like $3 on a $142 or $143 bill, if I remember correctly, after they wanted two orders of the same thing and I thought they were talking about the level of additional chili and they didn’t catch that discrepancy when I read back their order to them, and then when they were getting served they wanted another dish of the fried rice made up, but the kitchen was already closed, and we had to shrug and be like, “It’s too late now”… It’s like this type of person that even if you confirm their order to them, which I do with every customer in order to minimize mistakes, they don’t listen to it or take it seriously, they expect they can change things at the drop of a hat. It’s like a[n Indian] guy who I follow on social media was saying, -- and I’m roughly quoting him here -- his country could do a better job of encouraging everyday people to possess interiority.)
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