Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  She stalks off to join her three lovely daughters at their table while Caitlin rolls her eyes at me with a mixture of sympathy and bemusement. ‘Suck it up, honey.’

  I leave the salad greens in the sandwich when I slam it into the press so they collapse into a whimper, depleted of even the memory of moisture. I stick the steam wand in the milk for so long the steel pot is near smelting point. I put so much caramel flavouring in the milkshake the recipient is in danger of developing Type 2 diabetes on contact. I deliver the order to the table, but this concession is not enough for Outraged of Brighton. She demands to see a receipt before handing over her money. Back to the counter. Print. Back to the table. She watches with smug satisfaction that I have bent to her will, while the lengthy Boxing Day queue shifts restively. ‘Why does that table get special treatment?’ says the thought bubble above their heads. ‘Why not us?’ Violent revolution has been fomented on far less.

  But Outraged has unwittingly exposed herself. She has handed over a $100 note. A serious tactical error. Why, you ask? Because it makes it all too easy to short-change her. Not with the intention of getting away with it, mind you. That would be stealing, and I don’t steal—well, not except for that wheel of cheese incident, which I can explain. I’m playing to a longer revenge script. A script that begins with feigning amnesia.

  Feigning amnesia is the one all-purpose tactic I can thoroughly recommend to any waiter. It’s remarkably useful. Cast your eye over any arena of power, from parliament to the courts, and you’ll see it being used daily for a dazzling array of purposes. Misused your parliamentary car? Facing a broad-ranging inquiry into the media’s abuse of power? Accused of corporate fraud? I forget, I forget, I forget. Feigning amnesia is like donning a cloak of innocence, size XXL.

  When feigning amnesia it helps to become very, very polite and apologetic. Obscenely, obsequiously polite. So polite that no one could possibly point the finger of blame at you. Except, of course, your victim, who knows exactly what’s going on BUT CANNOT PROVE A THING in the face of your barrage of niceness.

  True to form, Outraged has calmly and respectfully reported her short-changing to the relevant authorities—actually, she stands up and screeches, ‘You! You! Young lady come back here this instant!’ Her daughters squirm in embarrassment, which is excellent: already you’re accruing bonus points for collateral damage. This is your cue to tell her, so very sweetly: ‘I’m really sorry but I think you gave me a fifty, not a hundred. I mean, I’m sure of it.’

  There are plenty of super-snazzy, eye-wateringly expensive till systems on the market. They’re not actually called tills anymore; they’re point-of-sale solutions, which is about as sexy as a till can ever hope to be. But however many bells and whistles they come with, they’re only as good as their human operators. If you don’t record how much money goes in, it’s ridiculously easy to create an unholy accounting mess.

  Of course Juice Out staff were meant to record how much money went in. Company policy and all that. But when it was busy, those three extra seconds on the till meant more furious glares from the line. Everyone dropped the ball from time to time, even the managers. That’s the golden rule about long-form revenge: keep your story believable.

  By now Outraged is feeling the sting coming. She’s being politely but implicitly accused of attempted theft. She bites. Rants about incompetent staff, puts on a full matinee of eye-rolling theatrics. ‘So you cannot take my word for it that I paid with a $100 bill?’ she asks Caitlin who has hurried over to investigate. It’s rhetorical. She means that in a situation of her word against mine, the unspoken laws relating to age, money and power means that she must win. Without it, her world collapses into meaninglessness.

  Breaking down a till is a time-consuming process. Do it after service when it’s quiet and calm and it takes a good half-hour. Do it in peak hour when there are a couple of dozen people waiting to be served and myriad other distractions and it could feasibly take triple that. Every cent in that till has to be counted, down to the five-cent pieces and the foreign coins that slipped through the currency defences. It’s satisfying work, knowing that you’re keeping your victim from doing whatever she likes to do in her spare time—smiting the poor, or sucking the blood of the international students detailing her car. But wait, there’s more. Counting the till means the Juice Out is down a person. Not only have you succeeded in further outraging Outraged, you’ve also managed to hobble the Good Ship Enterprise on its busiest day of the year. You look up and note with satisfaction that it resembles a war zone, where the enemy attacked mercilessly with pineapple chunks and watermelon rind and no one survived to tell the tale.

  The taste of victory is sadly short-lived, however. You might win the battle, but you will not win the war.

  Revenge tactics are a necessary part of the modern waiter’s armoury. As well as remembering to upsell mineral water and pronounce ‘zabaglione’ correctly, it’s imperative to have at least one sure-fire method to redress the power imbalance between server and served. Let me repeat: imperative. The health of your psyche depends on it.

  I know what you’re thinking. So what if one over-entitled woman wants me to walk 20 metres to her table in defiance of the no-table-service policy? Why get so steamed up about it? What’s the big deal, sugar-chunks?

  Well, here’s the deal.

  It’s a bit like the story of the Native American tribes who believed photographing them would steal their soul. Only in this case it’s for real. Some diners will suck your soul right out through your ears if you let them. They’ll then burrow into the soul-sized hole and set up an internal dialogue on loop. An internal dialogue that stealthily assumes the sound of your own voice. This voice will accuse you of being somehow less than the people you’re serving. A fetch-and-carry girl. A table-swabber. A loser.

  The reason this voice gets away with it is because it knows, and you know, that waiters are direct descendants of the servant class. The window-dressing has been modernised, to be sure: there’s probably an open kitchen and air-conditioning and a Chill Out Session playing on the stereo, but the standard uniform remains a maid-like black and white, and a tinkling bell is still used in most places to summon staff to the kitchen. Except for the chicken vindaloo pizza on the menu, the Dyson Airblades in the bathrooms and the notable absence of Maggie Smith, it might as well be an episode of Downton Abbey.

  The worst kind of diner responds in kind to the fact that he or she—arsehole-dom is an equal opportunity employer—suddenly finds him-or-herself in brief possession of servants. For two hours, three hours, the restaurant provides the perfect forum to play lord of the manor. These are the kind of people who enjoy their meal more knowing others are hungry. I don’t mean to j’accuse the majority of diners, who are well mannered and appreciative and abide by the unspoken rules of social engagement. It’s a highly visible minority who make the acid build up in your stomach. The man who clicks his fingers to get your attention. The woman who answers her phone when you’re halfway through reciting the evening’s specials, then becomes irritated when you walk away instead of waiting for her to finish. The simple yet significant verbal dereliction of saying ‘Get me . . .’ instead of ‘May I have . . .’

  I have an as-yet unproven theory that people who are rude to waiters are predisposed to road rage. Road-ragers are a special breed of emotional narcissists and control freaks who live by the dictum ‘Me right—everyone else wrong’. The sealed bubble of the car mostly quarantines their antisocial excesses. It allows the rest of the world to see them as red-faced idiots madly gesticulating and swearing soundlessly behind double-thickness glass. The restaurant is the unfortunate venue for letting that aggression off the leash, into the real world and onto real people forbidden by the terms of their employment to fight back. Tally ho!

  There’s something known as the Waiter Rule that originated in the United States via a corporate titan named William Swanson. He proposed it in Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management thusly:

&n
bsp; * * *

  PAUL

  It was an award-winning restaurant run by a couple of chefs who put out an equally award-winning cookbook. It was amazing how often people would come in carrying a copy, point to a recipe and say, ‘We’ll have this.’ Umm, we have a menu? ‘A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person.’

  * * *

  Being on the top rung of the corporate ladder, Swanson was accustomed to people being deferentially nice to him. But he noticed that sometimes his dining companions would be less than nice to the people serving them. He called it a ‘situational value system’. ‘Watch out for people . . . who can turn the charm on and off depending on the status of the person they are interacting with,’ he wrote. ‘Be especially wary of those who are rude to people perceived to be in subordinate roles.’

  Swanson was at the time CEO of Raytheon, a giant defence contractor that manufactures the Patriot and Cruise missiles, among other cuddly things. He was later busted by the New York Times for copying large chunks of his Unwritten Rules from other sources. The inconvenient facts of plagiarism and weapons of mass destruction did not fatally injure his thesis, however. On the contrary, other bigwigs followed Swanson’s lead and jumped on the let’s-be-nice-to-waiters bandwagon. They were falling over each other to display their man-of-the-people credentials. For example, former CEO of corporate empire Office Depot, Steve Odland, revealed to USA Today how, as a teenage waiter before becoming America’s King of Stationery, he once dumped purple sorbet all over a diner in a fancy French restaurant.

  So there’s another lesson for any wannabe dining room despot: that waiter you’re calling an imbecile might one day be a Fortune 500 CEO able to fire your arse ten times over.

  It’s probably important not to overlook another elephant in Swanson’s room: if anyone earning several million dollars a year is still so cantankerous they need to push around a waiter, they deserve to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But still. It’s nice to know he cares.

  A wise restaurant elder not dissimilar to Pat Morita in The Karate Kid once told me there’s nothing servile about serving. He was absolutely right, of course. Waiting is an art form. Never more so than right at this exact moment in history, when the erstwhile ideal of the stuffed-shirt ‘Yes, sir; very good, sir’ waiter has gone the way of the landline. Expectations are so much higher. Good waiters these days must be informed yet informal; conversational without being chatty; telepathic yet discreet. Think of a cross between Marcel Marceau, the Dalai Lama and Batman’s valet Alfred.

  At the end of the exhaustive list of expected waiterly traits, the best waiters also need to have emotional resilience. Meaning: they can let people aim their shit at them without taking it personally.

  I’ve witnessed many times over how the best operators do it. Whichever way they choose to personalise the job—the cheeky type, or the subtle flirt; cool with a flicker of wry amusement, or garden-variety cheerful—they always approach the craft with a Zen-like denial of the self. Don’t make the mistake of confusing that with low self-esteem. In fact, it’s anything but. Their sense of self is unimpeachable because they refuse to let any angry, small-minded, petty dickhead ruin their vibe. They know they’re performing a valuable community service that falls somewhere between priest, therapist, psychiatrist and boot camp commando. It’s not me, these well-balanced individuals think when confronted with a finger-clicking misanthrope complaining that the crusty bread hurts his mouth; it’s you. Plus they know any behaviour deficit will be put to good use later that night at knockoff drinks. One of the principles of any martial art is harnessing your opponent’s energy and using it against them. That’s precisely what a good waiter does.

  Even those not born a great waiter—and I honestly think being a really great waiter has something to do with DNA; genome sequencing will reveal all in due course—can hope with application and perseverance to become one, in time. But the vast majority have waitering thrust upon them and they, I promise, are going to chip away at the joy of your evening until you realise you would have had a better time sitting at home eating burnt chops and watching a re-run of Taggart.

  How does a restaurant owner expose these Waiter Undead who walk among us, cunningly disguised as normal people? All the Myers-Briggs-type personality tests in the world won’t reveal even half as much as sticking someone on a dining room floor in the heat of service for precisely one hour. Maybe the Rorschach blot gets closest to the truth: do you look at Outraged of Brighton and see someone stretched to the absolute ends of human endurance by the tyranny of a stocktake sale and the pressure of maintaining a lacquered bob in humid conditions? Or do you see a pampered woman whose sense of self feeds upon the relentless assertion of her desires at the expense of all others?

  You should be fairly clear by now where I sit on the temperament scale. If a bad attitude could be subject to copyright, my ten years as a waiter would have left me obscenely wealthy. Working the floor, I was the Kerry Packer of passive aggression. Sullen insolence was my personal trademark, diligently honed and perfected over time. For a long list of perceived diner slights—ranging from ordering the tomato sauce separately to the fries, to calling me ‘dear’—I could perform a Jekyll and Hyde switch into the most perfunctory, robotic and joyless server the world has ever seen. If I didn’t like a group of people I would endeavour to do my very best to ensure that the only thing left of their night was a cold, dry husk. That I regularly used something I privately referred to as the ‘Dead Eyes’ should reveal plenty.

  Whatever gets you through the shift, right? When talking about job satisfaction, however, nothing can beat a real, honest-to-god act of revenge.

  First, a disclaimer: a waiter’s revenge is rarely sweet. A waiter’s revenge is, by necessity, curdled and sour. Why? Because the victim needs to be none the wiser. A customer aware they have been bettered in an unspoken game of wit and skill—that’s a one-way ticket to Unemployment Town.

  I know, I know. Where’s the fun? It certainly raises an important philosophical question—something along the lines of the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. If an arsehole diner doesn’t know they’ve been one-upped, did it ever happen?

  In a word: yes.

  The temptation is to be Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained and orchestrate a gleeful massacre in which all the bad guys are shot to pieces. But let me assure you, you really want to be Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects. Remember the tag line? ‘The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.’

  Nothing good ever came from exposing yourself. Be secret, my friends. Be safe.

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that ‘CONFIRMED: POO IN ICE-CREAM’ is not a desirable headline for anyone in the restaurant game. Following the edict that revenge is a dish best served cold, a family enjoying an afternoon at Sydney’s Coogee Bay Hotel in 2008 were served a complimentary dessert after complaining they couldn’t hear the NRL grand final over loud music. Shortly afterwards, mother of three Jessica Whyte discovered in the worst possible way that the chocolate gelato in the bottom of the dish was not, in fact, chocolate gelato.

  It was a field day for the media, which ran polls (‘Would you eat ice-cream at the Coogee Bay Hotel?), streamed video (‘Watch the moment unfold on CCTV’), and published everything from laboratory documents (‘See scientific analysis that proves it’s poo’) to special sections (‘Full coverage of the Coogee poo scandal’).

  As the Daily Telegraph opined, ‘The only question remains: who put poo in the gelato and why?’ Sadly, we will never know. The settlement, which saw the hotel pay $50,000 compensation to the Whytes, gagged all parties. Tish-boom.

  One can safely assume, however, that more heads rolled over the incident than Madame Defarge witnessed during an afternoon’s knitting at the guillotine. Messing around with faecal matter turns revenge into an extreme sport. Extreme sports attract extreme consequences. To any disaffected kitchen or floo
r staff inspired by this incident out there, may I politely suggest that winding up on the nightly news is not the best way to make your point.

  Popular culture prefers stories of waiters spitting in the food but, honestly, I’ve never seen it. I haven’t seen chefs spitting in food, either. A good thing all round. There’s a certain gaucheness to the act. No one wins points for subtlety, sophistication or sheer sinister effect by gobbing on the steak. If it does happen, it’s the restaurant equivalent of slipping on a banana peel to get a laugh. Totally old-hat.

  There are other ways a bad customer gets their come-uppance. Think about it next time you’ve been snippy with the service staff. There’ll be plenty of time to think about it, because everything will have curiously slowed to a glacial pace. In fact, the polar icecap might have melted before you get your dirty martini. Your food order? Oops, forgot to give it to the kitchen. So sorry. So terribly sorry.

  And even though restaurants are packing their tables closer and closer these days, it’s uncanny how often your chair leg is being kicked. Every time the server passes through; an inconsequential little tap-tap-tap that develops into a kind of Chinese water torture effect. How unusual.

  Look around the room. Are other tables enjoying prompt service, a steady flow of food and drinks, and no accidental chair kicking? Has a sluggish vortex descended on your table alone? Now look inside. Tell me the truth: is it your fault?

  There once was a young woman who never looked inside herself to discover why it’s so hard to get good service in restaurants these days. Her name was Hector’s Girlfriend. Hector was a restaurant regular with a revolving door of female companions. There was no point getting to know their names as they were: a) more or less interchangeable, and b) likely to have the shelf life of a Jennifer Aniston movie. Anyway, this particular version of Hector’s Girlfriend was a piece of work. A stripper—not that there’s anything wrong with that—used to having men falling over themselves for her long boots and short shorts, her swish of blonde hair and her come-fuck-me attitude. Let’s just say she wasn’t a girl’s girl. She was the sort of woman who views all other women as competition for a scarce resource—the scarce resource being in this case complete idiots like Hector. Her raging sense of entitlement, her inability to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, her sneering contempt, managed to alienate the waitresses pretty comprehensively, but she wasn’t bright enough to figure out why her bourbon and Coke never materialised with the other drinks. It was almost endearing, the way she’d sit there surrounded by her adoring man-crowd, her mouth hanging open in shock that it had happened yet again. Gosh, what are the odds?