...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
They make a decision, set everything in motion, then change their minds a little while later and come tell you to do something different than what they originally told you, expecting everything to change at the drop of a hat, no matter how much trouble and extra work it causes...
This has happened any number of times, and then it's happened again a couple more times these past few weeks.
Like, during the graduation rush madness, a (South Asian-accented) woman calls over the phone and says that she placed her order through a third-party delivery app (an entirely separate payment system!), and she says that she now wants two pad kee maos, a second one exactly like the one on her order, can we add an extra one to her order and charge her for that.
And, I locate her receipt and I had to be like, that's tough because it's not done through us, it's done through a vendor and involves a separate layer of computer systems with orders and payments, and then on top of that we are in the middle of the graduation weekend rush and I don't know where her order is in the massive queue of orders and if they've already started it, and to interrupt the cooks now could cause all sorts of difficulties with other orders since we're interrupting the very organized system we have and they're multitasking in the middle of multiple, multiple orders involving many other customers at a very high-volume time, so.... no, and then I add that that request would be tough even during a normal period of time, but now it simply is not possible.
(Often, I find myself acting like a teacher and explaining how restaurants work to [South Asians], to show the logic behind why their demands are difficult or not possible.)
"Okay, I understand," she was like, a bit nonplussed, and then there was just some silence that hung in the air over the phone-wires, and then that was that.
(Honestly, have these people ever been told "no" in their lives before?)
A few weeks after that, too, a big table of (younger-skewed) (wholly vegetarian) (South Asians) came in very late at night in the last hour that we were open and they had to wait for others and they dawdled on orders a bit even though we had told them it was starting to get late, and then they ended up ordering ahead before the others arrived but not as quick as they could have as they waited to start deciding and even then they haggled and rehaggled small details among the 4 who had arrived as I was standing there taking what they said was their final order, and ultimately they kept us open for like 20 minutes after kitchen-close when usually we can take off, but, when it came time for bills, they said separate checks for all 8, and then I asked if there were any internal groupings among the separate dishes like multiple people being on one bill, and two said yes so I confirmed that I'd group their items and then issue individual bills for the rest, and everyone in the group said yes, so I did that and created 7 separate bills, but later when we were all trying to clear their plates and run their credit cards and whatnot I get to the end of running the credit cards my coworkers had brought from the table, and somehow one credit card is missing because one of the bills isn't paid for, and I go to the table, and you know what I find out?
Two had decided that after all, they wanted to pay together, and they had slipped the bills together on the little black plastic tray, and since the receipts for the previously-separate bills were right on top of each other, I didn't notice what was happening, and I just ran the credit card for the receipt that was on top and that was hiding the other one that they now also wanted on that same credit card!
"Oh," I was like. "I can re-do this and cancel the credit card charge and combine the bills and re-pay, but I am confused. I asked once how everyone wanted to pay, and I confirmed that only two people were paying together, but now two more people want to pay together. Now, we have to cancel out the charge and combine the bills again, and this is extra work."
And, the (young) (bearded) (bespectacled) (mildly dark) (South Asian) guy started saying something something something, and I just responded firmly and began firmly talking over him a little and I was like, "I am confused, because I received different information earlier about how everyone wanted to pay, I had confirmed with everyone that I had received the correct information about how everyone wanted to pay, and now I am hearing something different."
Then, I turned around and went to go do the extra work, and later when I returned the bill with the re-done charge to that one guy he said "Thank you" a little uncertainly, but I pretended not to hear him as I turned to go do something else, to leave him wondering.
(Honestly, it's like you have to establish firm boundaries and show them what customer behavior is or is not appropriate, though I do have to wonder what happens when they go to other restaurants, do the servers there just let these people walk all over them?)
(Also, these people had a small baby out in a high chair and it got past ten o'clock at night and that baby was still out and awake, and the one woman at the table ended up [slowly] scraping the two last dishes into to-go boxes, first the one and then the other, though her husband who was sitting right next to her could have done one too and helped her, his arms didn't seem broken.)
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