The Patio is a Pain in the Ass

This is a re-post of something I wrote last summer, but it being summer, its time has come again.

Let me tell you about waiting tables on a patio: it sucks. My restaurant has a patio in the summer and people knock themselves over to get one of those crappy little two-tops next to a busy Manhattan street. It's not relaxing out there, that's for sure. Sirens, buses, homeless people watching you eat french toast? Why bother? But people love it. But what really annoys the fuck out of me is when someone complains that it's too hot or too windy. Oh okay, let me stop the wind for you, lady.

Someone today waited twenty minutes for a table on the patio/dirty sidewalk. After they rearranged the tables to suit their needs they called me over and said the sun was too bright. I asked the sun to stop shining, but that bitch didn't want to cooperate so then they wanted to move. I reminded them that we are in fact outside which tends to have sun and told them that the entire inside of the restaurant was shaded if they wanted to move their gloober-globber asses inside. Of course they didn't. They wanted to move the table somewhere else making it almost impossible for me to walk around them, but sure. Whatever makes my customers happy is what I want. Uh huh. They also tipped me $7.00 on $62.00. Assholes. I hope they get a touch of melanoma from their three minutes in the bright sun.

Another time a lady freaked the fuck out because she saw a rat on the sidewalk. It's a sidewalk. In New York City. That's where rats live. Be thankful the rat didn't pull up a chair and order a Bloody Mary and ask for separate checks.

Another time a lady called me over because a gnat had flown into her mimosa and she wanted another glass. This very thing happened just a few days ago. I personally think that drowning in a mimosa is a pretty good way to go, but whatever. It's a gnat. Who cares? Fish it out and continue drinking. I read somewhere once that we eat about a pound of bugs a year and don't even know it because they get in our food all the time. I told her this, but she didn't like that factoid. I took her mimosa inside and pulled the bug out of her drink with my impeccably clean hands. I then poured her drink into a new glass and gave it back to her. She should have been more specific and asked for another drink and not just another glass.

I hate working on the patio.


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