Considering how demanding restaurant work is, it’s amazing that we have as many options for going out to eat in our cities as we do.
And while each member of staff has their own stresses in that high-pressure environment, there’s something about being a server that comes with a perfect storm of unpleasant variables.
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Not only do loopholes in minimum wage laws all but ensure that they have to rely on tips to survive, but it’s not unheard of for their restaurant’s management to dilute how much of those tips they actually get. And that’s when managers aren’t outright pocketing the tips themselves.
Yet even if we lived in an ideal world where all of these problems didn’t exist, there’s still the matter of dealing with the customers. And while we can certainly see some unruly patrons who take their obnoxiousness to a whole new level, it doesn’t take long for servers to start noticing annoying patterns among them.
And today, we’re going to hear about some of the patterns that servers hate the most.
Be advised that the videos featured in this article contain explicit language
On January 22, a server from Columbus, Ohio named Bobbi Swan uploaded a TikTok asking her coworkers for their biggest customer pet peeves.
And we can quickly see that many of them involve the customers just flat-out not listening to anything the server is saying.
For instance, one noticed that when he says he’s going to take orders from around the table, he often just gets everyone at a table saying their orders at once. For another, this is apparent in customers who ask for Coca Cola after she’s already established that only Pepsi products are available.
But the pet peeve for Jeffrey here must really sting as he said, “When they say ‘keep the change,’ but the change is like $1.”
There’s nothing like getting someone’s hopes up before disappointing them.
The full video is available here, and it has some other examples that will likely make anyone who’s been in the business nod their heads.
As it turns out, servers don’t like it when customers expect them to do everything at once like they have as many arms as an octopus.
But if you do watch the whole thing, you may notice that Swan doesn’t actually share her own pet peeve.
Well, that changed five days later when she uploaded a second part.
And that second part begins with a big example that you’d think would be obviously rude, but that obviously doesn’t stop people from doing it.
As a server named Elizabeth said, “Being snapped at. We are not dogs.”
But while we can see that most of these gripes have to do with customers, one person mentioned that the management doesn’t “cut” him — which means to end his shift early — when there’s essentially nothing for him to do.
We can also see that one unfortunate server named Tyler had a smorgasbord of pet peeves as he got snapped at when his hands were as full as hands can possibly be.
Again, I’m sure it would amazing to go to a restaurant staffed by trained octopi, but that’s not the kind of world we live in.
And as this second video ends, we finally get filled in on what Swan hates the most.
As she said, “When the table says they’re ready to order and they are clearly not ready because it takes 10 minutes to order and you have to read the whole damn menu to them.”
