:: Life on Planet Dan-E ::

:: Saturday, January 12, 2008 ::

:: Server Stories: Restaurant Blues ::

It gets busy every year during the Orange Bowl since Miami becomes overrun with college football fans in town to support their teams (playing in one of the many anonymous, meaningless, BCS-mandated Bowl games. Seriously, what's the names of these Bowls? Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl, Konica Minolta Gator Bowl, San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl. It's only a matter of time before we have the Tampax Bowl Presented by Valtrex... but that's neither here nor there). However, the kitchen managers seemed to forget that little detail this year since during a busy Friday night, we started running out of fish. If you work in a seafood restaurant, this is a problem. We have twelve different fish on the menu. By 10:00p.m. we were down to four. Our introductory spiel, which normally consists of rattling off specials, was reduced to telling everyone what we had left:

"Welcome to Seafood Grill. About the menu, there are a few items are currently unavailable. They are grouper, red snapper, swordfish, tuna, whole yellowtail snapper, mahi mahi, lobster, and whole pompano. The fish that are available are trout, salmon, tilapia, and wahoo. Wait, I'm sorry, we just ran out of wahoo. (This is where I try to avoid eye contact and force a smile to hide my abject embarrassment. And not just because I had to say “wahoo.”) Oh, and our soup of the days is New England Clam Chowder. I think we have some left. Now, can I get you some drinks?"

Most of my customers were good natured about it, even the ones that walked out. A few found it funny (especially after I mentioned that someone was getting fired that night.) This happened a couple of times before and it was actually worse ("welcome to Seafood Grill, would you like steak, chicken, or shrimp?") and I try to laugh it off but my buddy Chuck wasn't as amused. After his third table walks out on him, he walks up to me and says "people have written bad country songs about shit like this."

I had a "oh, what the hell" moment and started making up lyrics for a bad country song (is there anything more redundant than “bad country song?”), sounding like Willie Nelson on acid (as opposed to weed). Chuck thought it was funny and contributed a few words here and there. It got funny enough (or perhaps we lost our minds) that I had to write it down. This is what we ended up with that night:

I'm workin' in a diner and we're runnin' out of food
The customers are cranky and they're acting kinda rude
The waiters are all angry, the cooks are all pissed off
The busboy says he'd rather watch a porno and jerk off

CHORUS:
I got the blues, the blues, the restaurant blues
I really hate this job, but I don't know what else to do
It sucks the life right out of me
I drink so much I always pee
The blues, I got the blues, the restaurant blues

The manager is looking like she really wants to cry
Bartenders are drunk, the hostess has gone bye-bye
The owner's on a rampage, he's steamin' from the ears
All I wanna do is go home and drink some beers

Chorus

That's all we have so far. It's a little rough, there's room for editing, but I think we have something.

Labels: anger, drinking, humor, music, rants, server stories, songwriting, waiting

:: Miscellaneous Ramblings by Dan-E at 1:03 AM [+] :: | 0 comments
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