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GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE

Guest post by: Deborah Kimmett

Article Overview: I could just tell by the look of them they were going to be difficult. There were going to want to split their meals, order a half salad, half French fries. They were the type that when they ordered a strawberry sundae it they would make some ridiculous request for a dab of whipping cream. Not a dollop. And God help her if one of them orders a milkshake. She’d be at the milkshake maker up to her elbows in chocolate ice cream.

GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE

WAITRESSING BUILDS CHARACTER

The other day stopped in this mid sized café for a small snack and was admiring the cheeriness of the teenage waitress cleaning up the booth beside me. She made eye contact, wasn’t sullen and chatted to me about saving up for university.

Then all of a sudden she looked out the window and stopped talking. Her face darkened. She held her cleaning rag in mid swipe. It was as if she’d seen aliens land on the sidewalk. I turned quickly to look and saw something far worse than green skinned men with probes.

There in the parking lot was a bus.

A bus can strike terror in the most experienced waitress’s heart. And this was not just a busload of tourists taking pictures. It was a busload of tourists taking pictures and wearing red hats.

She looked at me. I looked at her. And then she blurted out,

“I’ve never served an entire bus before.”

I wanted to warn her, say the next hour is going to be brutal. You have to be prepared for the chef to go mental. Good chefs are like purebred dogs that way, a little high strung. I wanted to say, breathe. A bus load of customers descending is kind of like giving birth, Once they barge through that door you can’t turn back. It’s damn the torpedoes and every man for himself.

I could just tell by the look of them they were going to be difficult. There were going to want to split their meals, order a half salad, half French fries. They were the type that when they ordered a strawberry sundae it they would make some ridiculous request for a dab of whipping cream. Not a dollop. And God help her if one of them orders a milkshake. She’d be at the milkshake maker up to her elbows in chocolate ice cream.

See, I knew what was going to happen because I was a teenage waitress.

And a twenty-year old one.

And a twenty-nine year- old one.

When I was sweet sixteen, I heard there was a waitress job at the Wayfare Restaurant in Napanee. I was the oldest of six kids so I was used to waiting on people hand and foot and thought if I was going to be screamed at I might as well be paid for it. Plus you got tips. Tips irked my grandmother. She had gotten it into her head that only hookers got tips. Who knows why she thought this. Perhaps because she thought it was a service industry. I don’t know. The only similarity to the ladies of the night and me was we worked about the same hours. Five pm- three am.

Customers ran us off our feet, but there was something far worse than being busy. It was when it was slow. Then you had to look busy. Restaurant managers and mothers are a lot alike that way. They can’t stand it if you’re sitting around enjoying yourself on their dime. During the lull they would make you d exciting jobs like clean the lids of the ketchup bottles.

But being a waitress built my character.

Or in my case it built all my comedic characters.

People didn’t tip automatically like they do today. It’s like Halloween. It’s called trick or treat, but lets face today the kids don’t have to do a trick. You can stand there and do nothing and you still get a mitt full of candy bars.

But when I started out you had to work hard to get a tip. At the Wayfare, the bars would close and my section was swarmed with obnoxious drunk people. Okay lets not mince words. Obnoxious drunk relatives. Relatives that seemed to think it was hilarious to put the sugar container upside down and have the sugar spill all over the booth. Week after week it cracked them up and they gave me no money.

That’s when I created the character, Vera. I started chewing gum and talking like a woman from Kaladar. I had more nerve as Vera. I told my cousins I wouldn’t serve them until emptied their pockets of all spare change. They did and insured proper service.

After that job, I went west to waitress at the Lake Louse CP hotel. There I developed a fake British accent. A snotty Cynthia character. I found people would believe almost anything you said if you said it with a mid-Atlantic accent. I would tell many a Japanese tourist. “Yes, the mountain there weighs 500,000 tones. The lake has 13 million gallons of water. They took my picture and stuffed my apron full of Japanese Yen which paid off my hefty student loans.

When I moved to Toronto, to be actress I said I took waitress jobs so I could have time to audition. But I starred in more restaurants than shows.

First, I worked at Smokey’s Bar and Grill across from the Maple Leaf Gardens. I was good time Judy there, the jokester. One customer actually asked me “ What is this cockroach doing in my soup?” As a comic and as a waitress you wait years to give the response, “The backstroke!”

Then I worked at vegan restaurant. I found crying works with herbivores. And I started being able to well up on demand. I pretended I had been a soap opera star.

Then there was the reggae place where I got dreads. Which was what I was filled with having to work until four in the morning. In the blues music café I worked at I started smoking French cigarettes and dating musicians who played reed instruments.

At the Duke Of Wellington I cultivated a Cockney accent so when Footballers lifted me up and tried to guess how many stone I weighed, I’d say “ Blimey mates! Now put me down before your kidney pie’s getting cold.”

At twenty-nine I cut the waitress apron strings for good and got full time work as an actor playing a waitress.

I wanted to pull her aside and tell her my war stories. But waitress stories are kind of like childbirth stories. Best left untold.

As I sat there I watched her in action. When the customers changed their order three times she smiled and asked them how their trip was. When they talked about their gout and plastic stomachs, she heated up their consommé to just the right temperature. She laughed at their jokes, which trust me weren’t funny. And she delighted in giving them separate bills. She did it all with her county accent and no one tear fell on her cheeks.

It was a very unique character. A waitress that believed the customer was always right. That providing good service with a smile was a given. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. In fact I was bowled over by her performance I laid down a twenty-dollar bill and said in my best mid-Atlantic accent, “Brave dahling. Bravo.”

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Article Tags: CUSTOMER SERVICE, HUMOR, NUMBER ONE WAY TO GET TIPS



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