Rant

Like most students here at Mount Royal, along with school I also have a part time job. I work at a Boston Pizza near my house as a host. I deal with a lot of people on every shift and most of the time, there are little to no problems with customers. On Thursdays, everything changes.

As anyone who has worked in a restaurant job before knows, any time there is any sort of special event going on, you get a flood of people.  At my job, this is Thursday nights, which are also known as kid’s night. This means that to bring more kids into the restaurant, we advertise a magician who is there from 5 until 8 pm.

Chaos ensues during that time 3-hour period of time.

Every Thursday night that I work, I feel like I never stop; by the end of my shift, my feet are aching, my back is sore and I’m just exhausted. There are endless amounts of families walking through the door and more than a normal amount of phone calls. This is presumably because no one in their right mind (who doesn’t have a child who enjoys magic tricks and balloon animals) would want to endure the level of noise and mess in the restaurant. I know I sure don’t want to.

Children could possibly be the messiest beings to walk the earth. Table after table after table I find crumbs, bits of crayons, paper left strewn everywhere, napkins and disgusting leftover food on the ground, left behind for me to pick up. It doesn’t help that the servers are so busy with their tables and customers; they don’t have time to clean up the gigantic mess left behind. So of course I am the one who is left to deal with it.

Without cleaning these tables, the people arriving would have nowhere to go and would have to wait, resulting in some not-so-happy families.  Even some people when I ask them to wait so I can go clean a table for them give me some sort of unhappy glance as they sigh and take a seat in the small waiting area. All I want to say to these people is, “would you like to sit a dirty table? I don’t think so” or “sorry that we’re incredibly busy right now, which you can clearly see, and there’s only two of us working tonight and we obviously can’t be everywhere doing everything at once”. Those thoughts always flow through my head when I deal with annoyed customers, but I understandably keep my mouth shut, smile sweetly and do what I have to do.

Another thing about work that kills me, especially on Thursdays is when people call and complain about a take out or delivery order being wrong and then want nothing done about it. I’ve had several people call and yell at me, even though I wasn’t the one who messed anything up and when I suggest they come back in so we can make it right for them, simply refuse and hang up the phone angrily. Sorry that we’re not perfect and sometimes, people make mistakes! It happens.

After working with people in this sort of setting, it makes me a lot more conscious of how I act towards the waiter or waitress at a restaurant. I think everyone should have to have at least one experience of dealing with these crazy people so that I don’t have to deal with them anymore.