Restaurant Employees Who Took Their Revenge On Terrible Customers
In DepthWelcome back to Behind Closed Ovens, where we take a look at the best and strangest stories from inside the food industry. This week, we’ve got more stories of restaurant employees pushed just too far. As always, these are real e-mails from real readers.
Kelli Jeffries:
I was 15 and working at a vineyard restaurant. I had been working in food service for three years (yes, I started young), and while I was a fairly shy kid, I’d gotten reasonably comfortable waiting on tables at that point. It was 3:45pm (15 minutes to close, but hey, we were still open!) and a 6-top sat themselves on our patio. The leader of the group was a broad-shouldered woman in beige capris. I placed the menus on the table and launched into the usual jibber-jabber, including the fact that between 2pm and 4pm we offered a delightful tapas menu.
Now, the reason for offering a more limited menu between 2 PM and 4 PM was to give the cook (also my Mother) an opportunity to prep the following day’s menu, and in addition, to make it possible for the both of us to make it to our evening jobs on time. So the tapas menu was a lot of pre-made (but still housemade and delicious) items that could be plated quickly. The leader of the pack did not take kindly to the fact that they missed the full lunch menu. Our conversation went something like this:
Her: “We want the full menu.”
Me: “I’m sorry, but between 2 and 4 PM we offer the tapas menu. It has lots of wonderful items—”
Her: “That’s fucking bullshit. Bring me the full menu.”
Me (stunned, but remaining resolute): “I’m sorry Ma’am, but this is the menu we’re offering at present.”
Her: “That is fucking unacceptable. I boated all the way from [redacted] for dinner (NOTE: we were a lunch-only establishment) and I expect the full menu.”
Anyway, this exchange went on for a while, and I wish I had time to share all of the creative expletives and insults she levied at me. By this point her dining-mates were cringing so hard they had melted into their seats.
Me: “I think if you’d take a look at the menu, you’d see that there are lots and lots of options. Very filling.”
Her: “Fuck you and your tapas. I want to speak to your manager.”
Me: (voice quivering) “I can arrange that, but I’m pretty sure she’s going to tell you the same thing I just did.”
Her: “BRING. ME. YOUR. MANAGER. YOU. FUCKING. LITTLE. IDIOT.”
And then she threw her head back. Horked. And spat on my foot. A BIG, MUCOUSY glob of spit.
Given that a customer had just intentionally spat on me, I started to crumble. The other waitress (who I’ll call Sara) took me by the arm and walked me back to the kitchen, where I started to cry. I sobbed out to the cook/Mom “there is a customer out there who wants the full menu!” Of course, I was about to add: “and she just spat on my foot!” when the customer in question walked RIGHT INTO THE KITCHEN.
Her: “I want the full menu. And you’re going to give it to me.”
Mom: “As your waitress surely explained to you, we offer the tapas menu between 2 and 4pm.”
Her: “You are going offer me the full menu, or I will tell each and every person I meet what a shithole establishment this is. I will write letters to the owners and get you fired. I will make your life a fucking hell.”
Mom (pulling her largest butcher knife from the block): “Fine, I will serve you the full menu, but *stabbing her knife into the wooden chopping block* I AM NOT FUCKING HAPPY ABOUT IT.”
So the worst customer I’ve ever had smiled triumphantly, took the menu my mother offered her, and practically skipped back out to her table.
At that point it was decided that I would not be waiting on the table for the remainder of the transaction. Sara, who was two years older than myself and decidedly one of the most prim and proper teenagers in existence, took over. The table ordered their meals (of course the ONLY PERSON who ordered from the lunch menu is the she-witch—everyone else offered platitudes about “how wonderful the tapas sound”) and a pitcher of sangria to share.
I watched from the corner as Sara took them their wine glasses. And I watch as she tottered over with a large, fruit-filled pitcher of sangria. And I watched as she lifted the pitcher high over the wretched woman’s head…and dumped it all over her.
Finally, that woman had nothing to say.
Larry Kramer:
I worked at a pizza joint for a summer in 94. On a typical Friday night with the 4 phone lines ringing off the hook, I mostly said, “thank you for calling ______, can you please hold?” The manager’s policy was not to wait for a response if more than one line is ringing because customers will abuse that time and weasel ahead of the phone line. As I am going down the lines saying the phrase, I hear a guy say NO as I hit the hold button. He gets pissed and hangs up and calls back 3 times. Each time I hear him yell NO! before putting him back on hold.
He decides to show up, and throws the most epic fit I have ever seen. The typical don’t you know who I am etc etc. Without making this longer, we finally get his order and he says he WILL be waiting in the car. It takes about 20 minutes to make his pizza, and he keeps coming back in, yelling about if his pizza was done. Every 5 min up until the 15 min mark we say “no, sir, it will be ready in a few minutes.” The last time he asked, it was actually done and being carried over to the holder. So he walks in, asks, the girl checks the rack and doesn’t see it, and says no. As soon as she says no I say sir (I had the pizza) but he’s in such a huff, he slams the door before I could get his attention. I have no time to go chase him and I know he will be back in 5 minutes. Meanwhile the guy who placed his order right after him walks in and walks out with the pizza he ordered.
Well, him seeing that must have unleashed the power of 3,000 strokes because he came flying in in a rage talking about how he ordered before the last guy. I told him that we tried to catch him but he left in a hurry. We gave him his pizza on the house. The guy is yelling and cussing and making a huge scene as he walks out and to his car and places the pizza on top of his car all the while yelling and pointing at us all as we stand watching through the huge window to the parking lot. He gets in his car, starts to tear out of the parking lot…and the pizza he left on the top of his car slides off the roof, slides down the back of the trunk, and splats face down on the pavement. As this was happening, my manager is like WAIT FOR ITTTT and then we all jump for joy and yell and laugh. At that point, the guy sits there for 5 seconds, and then just speeds off.
At that moment, I knew there was a God, and he was vengeful.
Meghan Barnes:
Straight out of high school I scored my first job; a pseudo “Crew Leader” Carl’s Jr.
One day had been busy as always, and we were in that magical, near-ghost-town quiet time between the lunch and dinner rushes. I was in the kitchen prepping and cleaning, as was my then BFF. We had one Shift Leader in the office, and one poor girl running the cash registers and drive-thru. After noticing that our small freezer was low on fries, I headed into the walk-in for replenishments. I was jolted out of my snowy paradise by the sound of a raspy-voiced woman yelling over the loudspeaker. “I SAID TACOS, YOU DUMB BITCH!” was the first thing I heard upon re-entering the kitchen. “I KNOW YOU FUCKING HAVE THEM! DUMB BITCH!”
The Shift Leader, meanwhile, was doing the job of all three of our Managers combined, and because of her workload, she was totally oblivious to what was going on. For five minutes or so the poor girl on drive-thru was being hit with a barrage of insults and accusations while she attempted to explain as politely as possible that she was sorry, we were Carl’s Jr. and did not serve tacos, but Jack In The Box was a very short drive away (at the time we did not yet have the Green Burrito menu added). Finally, I had enough of it, and walked up to the front to take the helm. I sent the visibly shaken but still determined to fix the situation drive-thru girl on a well deserved break (of course she just stepped out of view continued to watch the circus unfolding), donned the headset, and told the taco lady to pull up to the window. With a “FUCK YOU, BITCH,” she obliged.
When the woman rolled up in her beat-up SUV, she was clearly three sheets to the wind, and I remember being amazed that she was able to form semi-coherent sentences. I did my best to calmly explain to her that we did not sell tacos, but we did have plenty of burgers to choose from. I was then hit with another round of fuck you’s, dumb bitch’s, and I-know-you-have-tacos’s. It was at this point that my former BFF had the right sense of mind to get our Shift Leader’s attention, and call the police. It was also the point that the drive-thru champion put her hand on my shoulder, and whispered into my free ear that we should probably try to keep the drunken taco lady on the premises until the cops arrived.
To this day, I consider it a miracle that this vile woman was the only customer we had during this whole ordeal, because what happened next was not one of my finest moments; I went from zero to Xenomorph in two seconds flat. After one last attempt to apologize and offer her anything but a taco, shit got real. “SHUT THE FUCKING WINDOW, YOU FUCKING CUNT,” she screamed at me while taking off her seat-belt. “SHUT THE FUCKING WINDOW SO I CAN BREAK IT, PULL YOUR FUCKING HEAD THROUGH AND DECAPITATE YOU! I WANT MY DAMN TACOS!” I took that as a threat, and my head went through the window, sure, but so did nearly my entire body. I just remember lunging and grabbing a hold of the outside wall. I know I was yelling terrible things at her, and she was yelling back. That drunk bitch threatened to take my life over tacos, and I was mad as all hell. I’m pretty sure I broke the headset. I don’t know for how long I was attempting to claw my way out of the drive-thru window; I’m sure it seemed a lot longer than it really was. All I remember apart from the yelling was my Shift Leader grabbing my ankles and my former BFF grabbing my hips. They pulled me back through the window, and I was ushered to the back-room break area by the drive-thru girl, sat down on one of the crappy old chairs, and told to take a breather. I could still hear the drunken taco lady screaming.
After about a half hour I walked back up front. I was expecting to be fired (and honestly, I probably should have been). Instead I found my Shift Leader laughing her ass off with a fellow employee just coming on shift, and one of the Managers of the bank across the way. Apparently, while I was in time-out, the drunken taco lady had pulled her SUV into the bank’s parking lot, and was practicing her drunken “karate” kicks and punches beside it. She was waiting for me to come out to my car so that she could “kick my fucking ass.” The bank Manager saw her, and also called the Police. When they arrived shortly after, they found that drunken taco lady was three times over the legal blood alcohol limit and arrested her on the spot. They didn’t even bother to take a report from us, they just hauled her drunk-driving, taco-wanting ass off to jail.
Mark Etheridge:
I used to work in this trendy east-end Toronto neighborhood in the early eighties, when new wave was all the vogue. Small and narrow, with wooden floors and a hip vibe. A young couple comes in and I give them my normal greetings, “Welcome to X, our specials are blah blah blah, would you care to start with a drink while you look the menu over” (this was before the server told you his/her name and chirped what a pleasure it will be to serve you crap like today).
The guy is okay, but the woman is awful from the second she sits down. Nothing is good enough for her, she’s not ready to order when she says she’s ready, she won’t make eye contact—the sort of completely entitled person who thinks servers are lower than dog shit. It takes her a lifetime to make up her mind on everything.
After hemming and hawing for almost 15 minutes, she gives me her drink order. I drop the drinks off and try to attend to another table, but now she’s ready to ask me questions about everything on the menu. She’s obviously used to having ALL the attention in the room focused on her. Another 20 minutes to explain each and every menu item–now I’m really in the weeds with the rest of my section and she finally, fiiiiiiiinally decides on the pasta. Before she allows me to leave her majesty’s table, she informs me the food better be hot or she’ll be sending it back pronto.
I go into the kitchen and I have a quick chat with the chef. Our kitchen had this top down grill called a Salamander, an upside down gas grill where the flames come out on the top rather than the bottom. It was highly efficient and quick at cooking just about anything. I tell the chef about how this woman has killed my night (I’m running around now like crazy to catch up) and ask him to “bake” her bowl in the Salamander…please make sure it’s piping hot before he drops the pasta in it. Now I’m in total catch up mode and unable to spend any quality time with any other table because her royal highness needs constant attention—no amount of kowtowing to her needs is good enough. My other customers are watching how she’s running me around in amazement.
Ding goes the kitchen bell and I walk in to see the pasta hitting her cooked bowl only to start boiling again because the bowl is about 200 degrees. I can barely pick it up with a napkin. I bring the boiling pasta back to the table (it’s boiling in her bowl when I set it down) and say to her, “Please be careful because the bowl is extremely hot.” I walk away from the table to attend the rest of my customers.
Upon my return to her table, she meekly asks me, “Can I have a glass of ice, please?” Wow, my first please from her. Certainly, I respond. Bring her the ice, figuring she’ll dump it into her drink, but lo and behold, she sticks her hand into the glass. I come back to the table and ask, Is everything to your satisfaction? Oh yes, thank you, she responds. Wow, a thank you, too.
I guess she didn’t believe me when I warned her about the hot bowl and she finally figured out not to screw with restaurant servers. The best part, they left a huge tip too, well in excess of 25%.
Sharon Morales:
At one coffee shop I worked at, one of our regulars was a youngish, obnoxious lady who would order a caramel latte with five shots of espresso in the morning. One day, fed up with her attitude, my coworker on my sly made all her espresso shots decaf.
Another co-worker would routinely steam lattes with 2% instead of skim if the customers were rude about their orders, satisfied that they would leave ever-so-slightly fatter.
Cameron Harker: