Skip to main content

Sorry, what?

Tonight has been weirdo night at work. Okay, when you work in catering you get fairly used to dealing with one or two oddballs every now and again, it's one of the joys of the job (and an enormous help with writing), but we've had loads tonight.

First up there was Michael. He's a nice guy in a don't ask him what he does for a living and be polite kind of a way. he lives in the flats next door and treats us as an extension of his living room. Keeps his spare keys, wandering in and borrowing stuff unannounced, that sort of thing.
Tonight, before we'd actually started work he'd sauntered in with a couple of his mates, ordered his food (none of which, needless to say, bears any resemblance to what's actually on the menu) by going in and telling the bewildered chefs (who rarely meet Actual Members of The Public) and sat himself down. He then couldn't be bothered eating, threw some money down and left. But not the front door for Michael, oh no, he wandered off through the kitchens and out the fire exit, when the front door would have been quicker. He then popped his head back round and asked if I wanted to buy any pheasants.

Other weirdoes we've had in tonight:

The couple who ordered two coffees, took a couple of sips and then ordered two more, pushing their barely touched cups to me.

"Everything alright?" I asked

"Oh yes, this is just what we always do." They replied, before handing me all their sugars, explaining how they "hated waste"

Thene there was the man who came in and sat at the bar, after two minutes he beckoned me over and said "I've been sat here for HALF AN HOUR"

"No you haven't, you've been sat there for two minutes" I replied

"You're right!" he cried, before turning to the restaurant at large and crying "This lad's great! I love that, mate. Two minutes!" At intervals for the rest of the evening he'd greet me with a cheery "Ha! No, you'r alright mate! Two minutes!"

I'm not even going to start talking about the old woman who saw worms in her pasta. I'm going to bed. People are weird.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

To all intents and purposes, a bloody great weed.

I absolutely love trees, and I get quite irate when they get cut down. One of the aspects of life with which I most often find myself most at odds with my fellow man is that I'm not really a fan of the tidy garden. I like to see a bit of biodiversity knocking about the gaff, and to that end I welcome the somewhat overgrown hedge, am pro the bit of lawn left to run riot, and, most of all, very anti cutting down trees. I love the things, habitat, provider of shade, easy on the eye, home to the songbirds that delight the ear at dawn, the best alarm clock of all. To me, cutting a naturally growing tree down is an act of errant vandalism, as well as monumental entitlement, it's been around longer than you. So, this being the case, let me say this. The public outcry over the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap is sentimental, overblown nonsense, and the fact that the two men found guilty of it have been given a custodial sentence is completely insane. Prison? For cutting down a Sycam...

Oh! Are you on the jabs?

I have never been a slender man. No one has ever looked at me and thought "oh, he needs feeding up". It's a good job for me that I was already in a relationship by the early noughties as I was never going to carry off the wasted rock star in skinny jeans look. No one has ever mistaken me for Noel Fielding. This is not to say that I'm entirely a corpulent mess. I have, at various times in my life, been in pretty good shape, but it takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of vigilance, particularly in my line of work, where temptation is never far away. Also, I reason, I have only one life to live, so have the cheese, ffs. I have often wondered what it would be like to be effortlessly in good nick, to not have to stop and think how much I really want that pie (quite a lot, obviously, pie is great), but I've long since come to terms with the fact that my default form is "lived-in". I do try to keep things under control, but I also put weight on at the mere menti...

Inedible

"He says it's inedible" said my front of house manager, as she laid the half-eaten fish and chips in front of me, and instantly I relaxed.  Clearly, I observed, it was edible to some degree. I comped it, because I can't be arsed arguing the toss, and I want to make my front of house's lives as simple as possible. The haddock had been delivered that morning. The fryers had been cleaned that morning. The batter had been made that morning (and it's very good batter, ask me nicely and I'll give you the recipe some time). The fish and chips was identical to the other 27 portions I'd sent out on that lunch service, all of which had come back more or less hoovered up, we have have a (justified, if I do say so myself) very good reputation for our chips. But it was, apparently, "inedible". When it comes to complaints, less is more. If you use a hyperbolic word like that, I'll switch off, you've marked yourself as a rube, a chump, I'm not g...