28 March 2011

The Best Seat in the House

At Hooters I am trained to take my guests to “the best seat in the house – yours of course!”  No shit.  That’s really what the manual tells me to do word for word.  And as lame as it sounds, I’m all for it.  I’ll pull tables and make money like a champ all day.  After all I’m pretty sure that a seat at one of my tables probably is one of the betters seats in the house.  I might be biased, but I’m also awesome.  So clearly I’m right.

Now as much as I like to force people to sit with me, I’m also a firm believer that in a restaurant that is often without a hostess people should have a little bit of choice.  For example, I’m not going to force an elderly couple to sit at one of my high top tables.  That’s practically elderly abuse.  I’m going to do the right thing and ask if they have a seating preference.  And that is exactly what I do for every guest I great at the door.

So one day I was going my usual “would you prefer a high top, low top or booth” routine when I got an answer that made me squirm.

“How about where we can get the best set of boobs.”

Definitely NOT my reaction.  CREDIT.
It only took me two seconds to realize that he was actually being serious.  I can take a joke and most days I can even take total creep, but this day wasn’t one of them.  A response left my mouth before I could make even the slightest effort to hold it back.

Sauce:  “It’s way to early to be that crass.  Give me a break and at least save it until noon.”

As soon as the remark landed I braced myself.  It was a piss people off sort of thing that easily could have screwed me over for their whole meal.  I imagine I was probably wincing in a way that was likely less than attractive.

Yet somehow things went great.  They loved me and took care of me as well as I took care of them.  I had dodged a bullet of my own making.  Phew doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Just so you know, I don’t condone calling people out on their shit.  At least not all the time.

2 comments:

  1. Yeah, there are days when it's hard to maintain the public, working persona. A friend of mine from work died Saturday and it makes it really hard when I have one of those callers who tests my patience. I held my tongue but there were a couple of times I damned near said some stuff that would have been . . . unprofessional.

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  2. I find your distinction between the guy's statement as "serious" versus a "joke" to be amusing: because, at least to my warped sense of things, if he said it as a "joke", it would be creepy; but if he was truly "serious", it just sounds hilarious. But I can see why that would be more the case from the outside looking in.

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