This weekend my wife and I were off to a late start. It was early afternoon and we were trying to decide on where you have our first meal of the day. We were hungry!Deciding on where to eat generally isn’t an easy task. We have a few places that we both always agree on, but eating at the same five places gets old so we try to shake things up every once in a while. It was T.G.I.Friday’s this time. Neither one of us could really remember what they served other than burgers and such so we gave it a try. This was the beginning of the worst restaurant experience we had ever had…

We arrived and at first glance, they didn’t seem to be busy at all. The girl at the hosting stand reacted like a deer caught in the headlights at first however and ran to the back after we walked in. A server came back with her and they talked for nearly a minute, giving us several glances in the meantime. It was awkward and we almost felt like having to get us a table was a huge burden on them. The server turned to us afterwards to motion us on and explained that they were training a few people today and she was one of the trainers. Well good!, I thought. We’ll get someone with some experience. I will never make that assumption again.

One thing I want to mention: I have waited tables before. I did it for nearly two years as a matter of fact. I know good service when I see it and because of my past experience, I consider myself to be fairly picky. Probably one of my biggest fears when going to a restaurant is the thought of getting bad service. I know first hand that it’s not hard. Everyone gets in the weeds every once in a while, and when I see that it’s busy, I am very forgiving. Okay, back to my story:

So we’re sat down, and she runs off (later I find that this person is our designated server), while another young lady comes to take our drink order (this is another one of our servers trainees). We ordered drinks and some chips & salsa to munch on while we look over the menu and decide what to eat, and very promptly afterwards, we received our drinks and chips.

My wife and I were talking, not really noticing the time until I look at my phone and realize that it’s been about 8 minutes since we have been acknowledged by anyone. In the meantime, both employees that we’ve had contact with are seating other people and taking their orders. I guess they saw us looking around because the trainer who sat us came by to “see if we were ready yet”. This was the first red flag. Most people (and any restaurant employee) know that if someone is ready to order, they’re usually sitting there with menus laid down flat in front of them. Ours had been like that for several minutes before yet just by the way it was worded when she came to our table, she was shifting the blame on us for it taking so long.

But whatever, right? I’m not going to make a big deal out of it and get our food spit in. We place our order, and that’s that.

One thing about eating out is that you lose most concepts of time, especially when hungry. When you have something in front of you, like chips or bread it helps. In fact for some reason time goes faster like that. But when sitting there with nothing on the table, 5 minutes can seem like an hour. After finishing our small basket of chips I looked down at my phone.

2:17pm. Wow… I thought we arrived around 1:30. Surely we haven’t been here for 45 minutes yet… Realizing that I might have mistaken the time we got there, I try to stop thinking about it. It’s at least been long enough for us to get our food soon.

2:27. Well, it’s only been 10 minutes for sure. I’ll wait a few more minutes.

2:35. I’m seeing tables that were sat after us getting their food, other people are leaving, other people are sat.

2:40. Okay, this is ridiculous. It has now been 23 minutes since the first time I checked my phone (and who knows how much longer before that). We have seen employees go back and forth, including our server and her trainee, but we have not been acknowledged once. No explanations. No apologies. We are invisible.

I got up, went to the front to speak with a manager and the woman I spoke with said she would take care of it and see what was going on. The “trainer” must have seen me and walked up to my wife and said “Oh, have y’all not gotten your food yet?”

“No we haven’t.”

“OHhh… wow…”, she says, with a fake enthusiasm, and then she walks off.

A few minutes later, the manager that I spoke with comes to our table. “We’re sorry. We really dropped the ball on this one. Your order was put in but somehow the ticket didn’t get sent to the cooks.” She then offers to buy our lunch and give us a few desserts on the side. Reluctantly, I accepted her offer, but only if they gave us our food to-go. After all, we’d been at this place for over an hour by this point and still had nothing to eat. She understood and told us that our food would be out shortly.

Even now, they couldn’t get it right. Our dessert was brought out 5 minutes later and set on the table, wrapped up in a to-go bag. We sat there, watching it get cold for another 15 minutes while we waited on the rest of our food. In the meantime, other servers are helping us out by bringing drinks and talking to us, even apologizing for our experience! But the server assigned to our table comes again with a brief, insincere apology, and walks off again to who-knows-where.

With all of that said, my intentions are not to rant about Friday’s and tell you that they suck. No, not at all. There are bad days, and there are good days for everyone. What I do want to say is that our experience could have been 100% better with the same circumstances with not too much more effort. I could have walked away with a smile, thinking yeah it was a bad experience, but I’m willing to give it a try again sometime.

Here is what could have made it better:

  • Communication: Part of what made the wait seem so long is that we were never talked to or checked on. Had some sort of preemptive conversation taken place, the problem would have been noticed early on and fixed. Instead we watched everyone else having a good time but us.
  • Sincerity: If something goes wrong, half-heartedly apologizing doesn’t make it better. I don’t expect any tears from anyone because we had to wait on our food longer, but asking us what she could have done to make things better instead of walking off would have at least made me feel a little better.
  • Truthfulness: Okay, maybe our ticket really did “get lost” but if being on the customer side of things has taught me anything, whether the problem was directly related to our server or not, in my mind it’s still her fault. She did nothing but shift the blame to other people/things from the beginning and it only made her look worse. If knowing what caused the problem could get our food any faster, great, but it doesn’t. Admitting her mistakes would have been the best thing she could have done.

I know people might be thinking Ummm… it was Friday’s man. You can’t really expect much. But after my experience I realized how these concepts can be applied in almost any situation. When something goes wrong, my knee-jerk reaction is to figure out how the problem isn’t my fault. I did it as a server, I’ve done it as a friend, and yes, I do it as a husband. Excuses only make people look worse, and our server’s excuses were worth as much as the tip we left her ($0.00).

Related Posts