Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg Read Free Book Online Page B

restaurant and demand justice. I watched a waitress do this once. It had been a very busy night and she’d been waiting on a group of ostentatiously wealthy young women who seemed determined to give her a hard time. The check was high and the waitress really worked hard. In the end, however, the women fled without tipping, taking the credit card receipt with them. The waitress followed them outside and began a heated debate. My coworkers and I watched from the bar, which had a large picture window facing out on the patio where they stood. We stood, bemused, until we saw one of the customers actually attack the waitress, pulling her hair and punching her.
    “Hmm, catfight,” mused the bartender, who disliked the waitress and refused to get involved. Finally, the managers pulled the waitress and the customer off each other. The end result? The lovely ladies got their dinner for free and the wait ress sued (and lost) for assault and battery.
    There is, too, the case of recurring bad tippers. Regulars who tip badly don’t usually last very long. For one thing, one waiter after another refuses to wait on these people until they run through the entire staff. A couple who fits this profile comes into my restaurant now. Waiters scurry like rats off a sinking ship as soon as their faces appear at the door. Lately, these two have been forced to order from the chef while whatever sorry wretch has been assigned to them grudgingly fetches their bread basket. Tip-challenged customers who frequent the same spot get not only the worst service but leftover bread, dirty glasses, and plates that have been prodded at and sometimes eaten off. When a regular is high maintenance and a bad tipper, servers really lose it. And yes, I have seen servers spit in food and drinks. Occasionally, some kind soul will straighten the bad-tipping reg ular out as a public service and then adopt the customer as his own. The customer, believe it or not, is usually grateful and will reward that server (but only that server) accordingly.
    My favorite bad-tipping memory, however, comes from Mar-cello, a waiter I worked with several years ago. Marcello claimed to be an Italian (although other Italians claimed that the way he spoke their language was barely intelligible) who grew up in Switzerland (there was very little proof of this) and had made his living largely through “import/export” (slang for just about any thing illegal). Nobody could tell a joke worse than Marcello, and his punch lines were often so mangled that the humor would be in how badly he screwed them up. Well into the 1990s, Marcello showed up for employee meetings dressed like an extra from GoodFellas, wearing white jeans, shirts open to his waist, and white patent leather shoes. He was built like a very squat brick house and plowed through the dining room arms akimbo, mowing down just about everybody in sight. Marcello once slammed into me as I was carrying two mixed salads. He hit me so hard that the salads went flying, smashing on the tile in an explosion of glass, lettuce, and tomatoes, and knocked the wind out of me so completely it took ten minutes for me to catch my breath. At the time of Marcello’s fall from grace in the restaurant, he claimed to be studying law at a school nobody had ever heard of. We assumed it was some sort of mail-order scam that would be exposed, sooner or later, on a weekly TV newsmagazine.
    Marcello had been developing something of a bad attitude over a period of a few months. He was getting burned out and venting his frustration on whoever happened to be in his path. He started stealing desserts that other waiters had ordered and giving them to his tables in order to enhance his tips. He pre tended to make mistakes on his drink orders at the bar and imbibed the results. He became very aggressive at the table and began getting complaints from the few customers who weren’t afraid of him.
    One night Marcello went through his usual drill, free desserts and the