What Price Prosperity?
One of the skills that anyone in customer service must have in order to succeed is the ability to create a dynamic "to do" list in one's mind. This list, not unlike the stack in a computer's memory, may contain the simplest little items, e.g., "check on table A3; the wife has a scowl on her face," or "ask table F3 about new grandson." Yet as simple and easily achieved each of these items are, when looked at as a list, they can become overwhelming. It goes without saying that when managing this kind of "to do" list; a restaurant worker hasn't the luxury of the yellow stickies that our peers in offices utilize to manage such simple tasks. A PDA would merely be a cumbersome waste of time. The restaurateur's "to do" list is one which is committed to grey matter..
Last night, my "to do" list became so large some of the items vanished into thin air. Suffice it to say memory-related tasks are not my forte. I'd hazard a guess that my forehead shone in bright green letters the "out of memory" message that those of us familiar with the original IBM PC had become intimately familiar with.
The reservation book showed that we'd basically reserved nearly every seat in the restaurant for not two, but three seatings. It didn't occur to any of the employees cheerfully assuring the customers that their table would be ready at 8:00 that there were, perhaps, 40 or so other customers who'd already booked for that time (but staggering reservations, time-wise, is another story).
It was about 8:00 and the restaurant was filled with happy couples and foursomes enjoying their food and drinking cocktails, beer or wine. There was one particularly annoying table of two adults and two children, and about every five minutes the youngest child would let out a scream nearly high enough to break glass, and loud enough to be heard in the next County. The parents, God bless them, seemed completely fine with this behavior, and talked on as if nothing was happening, until my barmaid, in her infinite wisdom, suggested that the offending youngster be taken outside the next time he decided to imitate the howl of a banshee. This was met with applause from the table across the way, much to the chagrin of the noisy child's parents.
At 8:00 there were 40 college students in the banquet room (a few of whom tried to foist phony identification cards on me and were so very surprised when it didn't work). The overflow (it was this college's weekend to celebrate, I guess) occupied tables of 10-18 persons in the main room. The building maxed out at its capacity of 280 and there were people waiting in the foyer and the bar for tables.
A rite of passage for these college students is to order "umbrella drinks," potent potions based on rum and various other liquors mixed with lemon and lime juice and topped with pineapple juice. Now, these cocktails are very profitable. However, profit be damned when one must come up with, literally, hundreds of the complicated, labor-intensive beverages in the course of an evening.
At one point I looked up from my bartending chores and discovered a man who wanted to make my acquaintance. He was "Frank, The Jazz Horse," a good friend of our very own The Dead Guy. I'd asked this gentleman to see me on Sunday but he came on a Saturday night, assuming that a restaurateur, no matter how busy, would not be in the trenches with his workers but rather looking on and grinning with each ring of the cash register. He couldn't have been more incorrect in this assumption.
The good side of this story is that I begged an audition immediately, and sure enough, after a quick-change in my office, out came the gentleman, with Frank, an ingeniously crafted puppet of very large size, propped up next to him. He proceeded to elicit squeals of delight from co-eds, children and adults alike with his cheerful banter.
This is when the evening began to morph away from reality and become what some would've called a surrealistic black comedy. I, however, decided that I'd do my best to look like I knew what was going on, and just go with the flow.
When I was backed into by one of my very own staff, flailing around with a bottle of Heineken and a bottle opener, the surrealism began to resemble a bad acid trip. You see, I was carrying a precariously-loaded tray containing eight of the 22-ounce exotic cocktails, and despite my cries of "Ben, move- MOVE! he backed right into me. The glasses all fell toward me; saturating me with ice cold alcohol and all manner of sticky juices. After the contents of every glass (seemingly) had poured in my direction, the glasses scattered willy-nilly in an area of about 15 feet, all but one breaking to smithereens.
Applause and cheers from the college students erupted at the crash, the sound of which would be the envy of any Hollywood sound-effects artist. I ran to the kitchen, took the dish-sprayer and used steaming hot water to rid my clothes of the icy, sticky mess. So now I was still soaking wet, but warm and no longer smelling like a one-man cocktail party.
I guess that Frank the Jazz Horse took that as his cue to leave. I waved goodbye and he assured me he'd be in touch.
The icing on the cake, literally, was when a food fight broke out in the banquet room. One of my lovely waitresses said "I think they're getting married in there." I wondered why. It became obvious that she'd mistaken the throwing of cake for the disgusting custom that's emerged on the wedding scene of late. We've catered a number of affairs where the bride and groom cut the wedding cake and then proceed to smash the first two pieces into each other's faces. This is not the time nor the place to discuss my feelings of contempt for those who choose to spend their first married moments assaulting each other with baked goods, however.
When informed of my waitress's mistaken conclusion, this only served to heighten the verve with which the revelers hurled birthday cake at one another. Things settled down when I informed them that a $50 charge for overtime to steam-clean the carpet was going to be imposed on their bill.
By 11:30 the last few college students were making their way out the door. The regulars in our bar, who'd borne witness to the mayhem, looked at me as I entered and sighed "thanks to God for giving me the strength to endure this peculiar evening." The barmaid handed me a scotch, which went down like nectar, warming every corner of my tired body and aching joints. That glass of scotch (4 ice cubes only) tasted like the finest quaff I'd ever experienced.
It was at that time that I decided that we'd have no more thunderous evenings like this one. There was no use in trading my sanity for a few dollars.
As the relaxation poured over my tired soul and I handed my wife the keys to the car, I told her, "Honey, I know we made a lot of money today, but for our collective sanity I do believe that we'll have to put a limit on reservations in the future." She heartily agreed.