After a particularly stressful night at the restaurant last week, I sent my co-worker a message that read, "I'm going to go to bed now to have nightmares about work."
Well, I doomed myself to a night of tossing and turning to visions of miserable customers and unhelpful co-workers. The serving nightmare is a real and frequent thing, most notably memorialized in memes like the one below, dealing with forgetting a table's ketchup (or frequently, their ranch dressing. Stop requesting ranch dressing with everything).
If you've ever asked for something from a server that you never received, I'm sure it's not because they didn't care. I promise you that the majority of times the server remembers it with a jolt 3 hours later and feels badly about it. We move on (because hey, it's just a side of ranch, and America can cool it with the ranch obsession as far as we're concerned) but still, we're sorry.
Anyway, the serving nightmare I had last week involved a table of 8 guests who only ordered one order of fries and a pat of butter for the entire party. A co-worker hid the water glasses from me, and I searched the restaurant high and low while my table waited impatiently. As soon as I found the glasses, I broke them. I didn't have time to take care of any other tables, and the tip on one order of french fries was less than $1. I broke down at the table and rudely asked them why they even came to a steakhouse if they only wanted butter. Finally, my supervisor looked at me coldly and said, "I don't know why you can't handle this."
To a server, that is some Wes Craven-level terror. Cheap customers, bitchy co-workers, unsupportive management, OH MY!
I would be interested to hear if people in other professions have such intense dreams regarding their work. Of course, I don't think that serving is the only stressful job out there. But there must be something about being put through a high-pressure situation that close to bedtime that leads to unrest. Forgetting a sauce or a soda refill may seem like a trivial matter, but when people are paying good money at an expensive restaurant, they expect perfection, and they're rough on us if they don't receive it. It doesn't stop there, either. If we feel bad about leaving your extra ketchup in the back, imagine how much worse we feel when we spill red wine on your Louis Vitton. Or accidentally trigger an allergic reaction in your child. The beauty of this job is that for the most part, we leave the bad days behind us when we clock out and can come back the next day with a fresh slate. It's just that sometimes, the stress sneaks out in our aprons and follows us right home into bed.
Not scary. Unless he's on his third request for ranch dressing.
Terrifying. I can't look!