Dear Waiters and Waitresses,
I must formally apologize for the way I acted as a teenager. I thought your job was easy. I thought all you did was walk food and drinks over to me. I thought that you would sometimes disappear for 20 minutes because you "forgot" about me, or that you would put in the wrong order because of something you didn't like about my appearance. I didn't trust you when you took my credit card, assuming you might charge me incorrectly. There were even times I walked out of a restaurant without paying a single tip, thinking that you didn't work hard enough to deserve one.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that has had these thoughts from time to time. In my own eventual experience as a waitress, I have met multiple people who have acted like this. They have gotten upset because I spilled water all over their table when I just started training. I've been yelled at to my face for trying to help make customers spend less, or have been in trouble for charging the correct amount. Once I had one guy look me in the eye and write a big fat zero on the check for the tip simply because he was having a bad day.
I learned through this experience that it wasn't always your fault. The soda you gave me tasted funny because the machine broke, or you would disappear because you were doing your side-work or going to the bathroom. It isn't your fault that you probably have a boss looking over your every move, or that your restaurant ran out of salmon.
We live in such an impatient society where everything is instant. Sitting down to eat is almost a bother for most people. But then, why did you go to a restaurant, sit down, wait for someone to cook your food, spend way more money then you anticipated, and pay for service? Did you believe that you could just go home and make it yourself? Or, perhaps then just order take out, or get fast food? The generation we live in seems to not understand patience anymore, and they seem to take it out on you. You're only human after all, and everyone seems to have forgotten about it.
We live in a world where we can just type a question for the answer instead of finding it ourselves. If we press the right buttons on our phones, we can get a pizza to our door instantly. We don't even ring on doorbells anymore, we text our friend in the driveway asking them if we can come in ahead of time.Human interaction is slowly fading day by day. It isn't your fault that this is the way things are moving, and people just expect you to be perfect all the time.Because you aren't a machine, and some of us out there need to appreciate that more.
Sincerely,
An apologetic customer, and an even more apologetic fellow waitress
