The restaurant I work at is located in a coastal town overlooking the
water. Our summer weekends are especially busy thanks to our large
amount of patio seating and beautiful view. And we often draw in large
parties down for the weekend, renting out beach houses.
You know the ones? Mutiple cuoples with an equal amount of young children.
Well one night I was waiting on a 16 top; eight adults and eight
children. I don’t mind big parties, they’re easy to take care of and
they usually produce a nice tip. I greet this table and get their
drink orders. They immediately start joking around with me and i join
in on the laughs joking back. I knew this was going to be a fun table.
As I brought kids drinks for the children and alcoholic beverages for
the parents I am informed that I should go ahead and grab another
round when I head inside. They order apetizers and food. While
ordering food they tried to group the checks together, but the kids
moved around so much it was hard to keep them straight so we agreed we
would sort it out when they were ready to pay.
The whole night procceded with them ordering another round of drinks before I could
even get the current drinks off of my tray. They had me running back
and forth to the bar inside all night. Well on top of the running
their eight children were feeling adventourous and decided jumping off
of the stairs to the deck was a good idea, especially with servers
coming up and down them with heavy trays of hot food and drinks.
Multiple servers had to tell the children it wasn’t safe to play there
because the parents were too busy getting sloshed to care.
Then servers began saying something to me about it. At one point I’m coming
up the stairs with a new tray of drinks and I see one of the little
girls standing in the corner tearing up a napkin and throwing the
pieces on the ground where I’d have to clean them up later or they
were going to blow into the water.
As the adults ordered more drinks I jokingly asked who was driving
home since I knew they had kids and they’d all had a subsistaial
amount to drink. They told me, “Don’t worry, we’re taking a cab home.”
“With the children?” I thought to myself. After we got the checks
sorted out, and their cards ran they told me how great the service was
and that they were going to let the owner of the restaurant know how
well I took care of them blah blah blah.
I was excited to see the tip I ended up with on this $330 tab they had run up only to find out
after all of their praise I wasn’t even worth 18% (which is very below
average for me).
- Savannah
