Why PG13 is not G-rated, Big Brown Eyes Gets Employee of the Month, and the Truth about Tips

My favorite waitress at PG13--I'll call her Big Brown Eyes--just got employee of the month. It was the first time they had an employee of the month at PG13. They've set up an elaborate point system for the next time around with a hefty minimum number of points required to qualify. I'm betting that nobody wins next month or they change the rules. We'll see.

Big Brown Eyes is a short, chunky ball of fast-talking energy. She is unfailingly kind, hard working, always ready to lend a hand, and as sweet as they come. But I keep a friendly, professional distance--she has a mean-looking, tattooed ex-Marine for a boyfriend who drops by almost every shift.

My other favorite waitress is Spunky, a svelte and petite woman with a great big voice in a little body and a big, toothy smile. With a mercurial temper she can be sweet one second and telling you to f--- off the next. She has made a point of mentioning to me that "she's single" several times but I haven't decided if this was just a ploy on her part to get me to exchange shifts with her (which I did).

Once I walked back to the server area to hear her say: "I've only got one tampon left and it's inside me."

"Uh, Spunky," I said, "I could have survived without having that knowledge."

"Timmy! I'm so sorry!", she said, "I didn't know you were standing there!"

"No worries," I said.

This just confirmed something I had learned years ago. If you are a man with half a brain and are past the age of thirty, you have come to realize that women are far more coarse and direct in speaking about certain matters of their personal biology than men ever will be. I just didn't expect to hear about it in close proximity to the food-service counter.

Thus derives my justification the restaurant's pseudonym--PG13. The menu, the guests, and all of our official behavior is G-rated. But the staff, well, some of the staff, struggles to keep their back-room behavior below an R.

This is nowhere as harshly tested as in dealing with certain customers. I waited on a couple with a child the other night. The woman--porcine but otherwise very attractive--smiled sweetly at me and asked could I please bring their food as quickly as possible because they were very hungry. So I knocked myself out, running back and forth to their table, making sure they everything they ordered within seconds of its preparation, bringing multiple sauces of this and that, and making a hot-fudge Sunday with extra nuts and hot-fudge exactly as requested.

I rang them out at the register. My sweet, porcine friend paid the $35 check in cash and then carefully counted out two dollars for me before closing her purse and turning to leave. I barely allowed the door to close behind her before I uttered some choice, X-rated phrases.

There is an interesting, petty, power-play that I suspect some customers engage in. My large, swinish customer may have felt that I should have been pleased to have been the object of her kind attention and that made up for the egregiously small and rudely displayed tip. Now if she had come in without husband and child, and made a point of leaving her phone number, and ... oh, let's face it, A MEASLY TWO BUCKS STILL WOULD HAVE BEEN A LOUSY TIP!

DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE AVERAGE TIP

I have been asked, what is an average tip? Unfortunately, there is no such thing. Certain classes of people do tend to tip in predictable ways--the elderly almost always tip with mathematical precision--15% to the penny. Young couples in love usually leave $5 unless they've had very little to eat, or a great deal. Then it's a dollar less or more.

The bible-groups that come in occasionally tip very well. Give me a large party of bible-study folks any day, even if half of them are only getting water with lemon. I don't know if they are imbued with the happy knowledge of their eternal salvation or they fear their omniscient Lord's punishment for mistreating those who serve them. Either way, they tip 20% and up.

In general, I have observed little correlation between the amount of the check and the amount of the tip. While my largest tip ever ($20) was on a large bill (over $90) I have received $3 tips on $70 checks and $5 tips on $10 checks. The tip, with one important exception, is far more determined by the nature of the served than the quality of the service.

The exception is when service is dramatically bad. If food is not delivered, or the customer has to wait, say a half-hour for their food, or you spill food or drink on them, then you can kiss that tip goodbye.

Fortunately, I have worked past most of those kinds of mistakes. But you can only get tips if you have customers, and customers have been harder to come by recently at PG13.

But more on that on my next posting.

What's Missing

Recently PG13 has been running out of one or more essential supplies. Tonight's "86 list" (AKA - what we don't have ) included shrimp, rice, ice-cream, and bananas.

Last week we were out of strawberry ice-cream, but since we had strawberries we could generally get by. But no ice cream? Since servers at PG13 are judged partially on how many deserts we sell, this is not insiginficant. I had to disappoint two customers who wanted deserts and another who wanted shrimp.

But that doesn't bother me as much as the other item, not on the menu, that we are out of: server-order pads. That's right--PG13 is out of the order pads the servers use to write out customer orders.

Now I'm a writer so I've got pads of paper lying around everywhere. I chopped up a few 8-1/2 by 11" half-used note-pads and made workable substitues. Other servers are making do with stapled-together quartered sheets of notebook paper.

This strikes me as beyond incompetent. I mean, couldn't our GM walk over to Staples and buy a box of order pads? How hard could that be?

One of the managers is just comming off of vacation and he may have been the cog that kept the order process running smoothly. He just got back this week and maybe it will take a couple weeks for the pump to be primed and everthing to get back to some more reasonable approximation of normal.

I haven't posted in the evening before and perhaps I'm being grumpy due to a poor night of tipping. But there is something else at work here.

I was raised in a reserved, Lutheran household. We we taught to make sure that we took care of our responsibilities so as not to inconvenience others. And when others don't do what they are supposed to we find it distasteful and hard to accept. I was raised with an ingrained reluctance to criticize, prefering to look first to my own flaws and my own need to adapt to challenges and changes.

But when those in a position of responsibility fail to meet basic, simple requirements--when matters persist and get worse, I find myself unwilling to be quiet. And this is bad because there is a meeting scheduled next Tuesday and I'm likely to skewer management for these inadequacies in front of the whole staff.

That typically is not a smart thing to do.

It would be easier if I didn't respect the managers. I have come to like them, even the Grey Witch. If I didn't respect them then I wouldn't expect them to do their jobs. It seems that I either need to let go of my respect for them or my lapsed, Lutheran convictions of propriety and rectitude.

The truth is, I tend to be far too serious about things. Each day is another episode of the continuing soap-opera that is PG13. To the customers, we present a smiling face and the official illusion that everything is fine. Every day we wade through the placid waters of boredom and then surf the waves of chaos and back again.

Everyone complains, everyone has their histrionics. But I have the kind of careful, biting intellect that can lead others to skewer themselves. It wouldn't be hard to do. All I have to do is pose a couple of simple Socratic questions: Is it the management's responsibility to ensure that the servers have the materials they need to do their jobs? If someone has a responsiblity to do a job and doesn't do it, what does that mean for others that work there? How should we judge another worker that doesn't fulfill the responsiblities of their jobs?

In fact, I recently recieved a letter asking if I wanted to file a claim with a class-action lawsuit against PG13 for not getting proper breaks or not being supplied with the necessary materials to do my job. I threw it away.

Maybe I should have kept it.