Guest Blogger Month is Here!

As promised...

I've had a fantastic response to my request for anyone in the business that wants to vent about waiters, tell a funny hospitality story or just get their frustrations off their chest. For the rest of November, I'll post some of the best stories that were submitted. I hope you like them.
P.S. It's not too late to submit your great story...

The 1st guest post is from Don from "Get a Room"
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Chicken and Wishes

Long before I found my way into the hotel industry, I did some time in the restaurant business. In fact, the first place I worked was a small, family-owned restaurant in the tiny town I grew up in back in West Virginia. The restaurant was considered the "nice" place to eat, complete with cloth napkins, smoked mirrors, gold and black velvet wallpaper, and stemmed glassware. Usually, when locals were looking for a nice evening out, they would choose this restaurant.

By the time I was 16, I had worked my way up from dishwasher, to busboy, to waiter. At 17, I was one of only two people waiting tables in this fancy room. One particular even from that year stands out as one of the most unusual nights I'd ever had working as a waiter.

We had reserved a ten-top for a woman's 70th birthday party, and had the table ready for the group when they arrived. I generally hated waiting on this particular table, not because of the people sitting at it, but because of the way the table backed into a wall. It was always a struggle to efficiently serve the four customers seated in the chairs backed against the wall, so I was always forced to try to improvise by reaching either over the table and risking setting my shirt sleeves on fire, or attempting to squeeze in behind the chairs to properly serve their entrees.

I took their orders, carried their drinks, delivered appetizers, salads and breads--all without incident. When it came time to serve the main course, I approached the 70 year-old birthday girl, who was seated at the head of the table (which was NOT one of the seats backed against the wall), and as the plate passed in front of her, the broiled half of a chicken that she ordered rolled off the plate, bounced onto the table, and continued rolling until it landed squarely in her lap.

I swear I heard it make a "splat" sound.

I could have died. I looked stood there frozen for a second while she looked at me, then my hand, then her lap, then back up at me.

I always had a towel with me, so quickly handed it to her so she could begin blotting while I ran to have her dinner replaced. Before I could finish handing her the towel, she looked at me, shook her head, and said, "No. You clean it up."

And she wasn't kidding. With her family and friends watching, I had to hoist the bird from her lap, and begin wiping the greasy mess off of the legs of her pants. I tried to move quickly, but she was old and the mess was huge so I wound up having to take a good few minutes to mop her up. The room was dimly lit, so I had to get pretty close to her to see what I was doing, but I blotted her pants and offered to pay for any additional cleaning they might require. Fortunately, the pants she was wearing were black, so the stain wouldn't be too noticeable. In the meantime, the other server had jumped in to serve the other entrees while this woman's dinner was being plated up.

This was probably the most embarrassing situation I'd ever had in the years that I waited tables. As if the clean-up task itself wasn't embarrassing enough, when I delivered her birthday cake to her table she insisted that someone else blow out the candle.

When one of her guests asked her why she didn't want to blow the candle out, she simply said "Don't need to. I just had a young man's hands all over me. I got my wish!"

Don Meador
"Get A Room!"
http://getahotelroom.blogspot.com

Great post Don, thanks.
Please visit Don's blog and support the people that support THIS blog!

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