Scarves, single gloves, vintage, teak coloured pumps, address books, wedding dress quotes, private member club applications, credit cards, reading glasses, child's scooters, baby's drinking bottle, your mum's favourite brooch, birthday gifts, anniversary flowers, wallets, handbags and umbrellas. Lots and lots of umbrellas. This is an abbreviated list of some of the items that have, either actually or allegedly, been left behind by customers over the past month or so. Seriously, just the past month. Some of these, we never actually found and pretty much 99% of the stuff we did find, still sits unclaimed up in the top floor office. Please take note of how I didn't mention mobile phones in the list. This important distinction will become relevant later.
You, yourself, may have forgotten or mindlessly left behind something in a restaurant lately. Or, maybe, you will in the near future. I believe this post will help you. Not necessarily to reclaim your property, but more so to rise above simply acting in an unconscious role of enacted reclamation. I will enlighten you, by proving an understanding of the perspective of the 'other side'- the venue. You will learn to remain calm, wise and rational throughout the experience. You will no longer get bizarrely threatening nor will you misinterpret the duty of care you're owed. This, in turn, will help the peace of your days, not become a day in pieces. I hope to help you let the gone, be The Gone.
And all of this, for free. Right here, on this brilliant blog, for no charge. What a deal!
To clarify before our little lesson, I instruct here only in relation to Property Reclamation with restaurants and cafes - not bars or nightclubs. As a customer, you have differing expectations of The Food Service Sector, than you do of the Liquor Entertainment Sector. Expectations that require more attentive service, more labour intensive systems, more focus on individual customers and less margin for error. The concentration and skill that goes into maintaining the merry go round that is all of those elements, combined with the personality needs of the fragile minds of fellow staff and shaken up and down by the oscillating whims of the customer, is what I need you to grasp. I need it, for it will help you understand the other-side-perspective I speak of.
Actually, the truth is that you probably couldn’t grasp ‘it’. I couldn't really successfully explain ‘it’ to you. Not here, anyway. The only way to properly understand 'it', would be to experience 'it', first hand. 'It', is the dance of borderline, anarchy and chaos, that is a successful restaurant, in the full swing of a dinner service. 'It' is so many things to so many people - a drug, a high, a platform, a stage, an escape, an empowerment, a release, a shelter, a gateway, a laugh, a cry, a crying shame, a tortuous way to spend a hangover, an inflation of ego, a character expression, a reflection of failed goals, an arena of conquest, a dating pool, a captive market, a fashion statement or, sometimes, just a means to an end; a job. To most people in the game, it’s all those things at once, whilst also being, at the exact same time, none of those things at all.
That last sentence doesn't make sense, does it? That's my whole point: it won't make sense to you. It can't. I'm sorry for initially assuming I could explain it to you. You won't quite understand. Not if you haven't been out here, with us waiters, on this long pier, that runs off and away from the coastline of accepted, decent society. But that's ok, cause all I need you to know, is that 'it' - service in full swing - is intensely, mentally, all-consuming. We may look like we're just beside your table, in the same room as you, but in reality, we're a million miles away. We are focusing on how long the table behind you has been waiting for main courses, whilst setting an internal 30 second alarm, that will remind me to go to the bar to pick up the orange juice, with exactly three ice cubes, that your mum just ordered. At the same time, I'm changing that guy's main course knife over to a steak knife, whilst grabbing his girlfriend's puffy, Prada jacket, so she can fish her smokes out. On my way back from the cloak room, I'm gonna drop the sugar for the coffees table 15 just ordered, whilst finishing to reset table 16. Shit! Those main courses are taking way too long – I’ll go down to check in the kitchen once I drop the juice over to your mum. Sweetener? You wanted artificial sweetener with your coffee? Sure. No problem. Be right back. The hostess just sat someone on 16. I’d better get to them quick, otherwise I'll have that arrogant (yet incredibly hot and extremely funny) Australian manager down my throat. Tap water? Sure. Be right back. Run down to the kitchen. You’re just plating their mains now? Yes, I know you've got a lot of orders in, I'm just trying to get in ahead of them querying where their food is. Here's your tap water. Here's those mains. Sorry? What's wrong with your steak tartare? It's not cooked enough? Um, its steak tartare - it’s not supposed to be cooked at all. Right. Ok. I'm not actually sure if I am wrong about that. No, it’s not a problem, it's just that a cooked steak tartare is essentially a burger. Would you like me to order you a burger instead? Back down to the kitchen for another shouting episode. Haven't got that order for table 16 yet. The Aussie is taking it for me. That's good. Need to remember to go over to computer to check what he put through, so I can upload that information on the display screen in my mind. I need to be able to know all, in order to keep The Flow going.
Phew! That was exhausting just typing that. That was essentially, less than 3 minutes of a waiter working a 5 table section. Now extend that to an 8 table section, multiply it to a full 7 hours of service and you start to get the idea of a Waiter's Flo . START to get the idea - but not really. There so much in that tiny glimpse into a waiter's head that I left out. I don't want your soft brain to crumble and be forced to immediately run to vice for recovery - like we do every night.
Like I said, the true picture only becomes clear, once you're out on the pier with us. What you will notice, however, is that amongst all the crossing and colliding thoughts, procedures, and pre-emption, is very little room for the following thought :
"Gee, I'd better note down a full, itemized, checklist of all extraneous and secondary items, possessions, clothing, electronics, weather protections, toys, and further, sundry general gear that each individual customer has brought along with them, so I can channel the role of their mum and take care and responsibility for their shit, more than they are able to do so themselves."
Do you see where this is going? Do you see the perspective I'm trying to give you?
Now I know what you are shouting at the screen now:
“But what about after I leave, at the end of the night? When its quieted down? Surely then, you'd notice the blue pashmina scarf that my mum gave me on her deathbed? The last physical act she could muster.”
Well, I did notice it. And I did take it up the office and pop it into the lost and found box. Admittedly, I was more concerned with cleaning out the venue, so I could fly off and spend that immensely meagre tip you left me. I should be able to purchase a quarter of a beer with that. But better get down to the pub before it closes. I did see the scarf. I didn't think much of it, though, for there is another dozen, assorted scarves up there, that have been growing dust layers, unclaimed for months. No one ever calls to claim them. Once they take up too much room, we throw them out and begin the collection all over again. So, I wasn't that focused on labelling or notarizing yours, for later collection. How was I to know, that your scarf was different and you'd actually call back a week later?
Look, I'll freely admit that our lost and found system is neither a precise nor foolproof method of keeping track of your shit, but you don't seem to do much better - otherwise you wouldn't have left it in the first place! I have so much going on, that cataloguing the dozens of umbrellas, scattered around the office, is a task that I'd never have the time to get to. It’s not that I'm the sort that doesn’t care. It’s just that I'm so busy caring about other things, that I don't have the room in my total Care Capabilities, to focus on tracking down the envelope that you probably actually left behind in the cab you took home.
I too, forget things. I too lose stuff. But it ain’t nobody’s fault but mine and I never feel the need the abuse and threaten someone affiliated with the location I last remember seeing my front door keys. You know why? Because I understand that my front door keys are my responsibility and not that of the Somalian refugee driving this minicab home. He is too busy searching for his next fare, to focus on the consequences of my vagueness.
I'm not sure if I truly reached the enlightening goals, I started out declaring I would. I tried to use suggestion and illustration to lead you to the fundamentals of the lesson, in the hope that the logical conclusion would be arrived to on your own. However, the whole 'horse to water/make him drink' cliché might be in play here. So just in case and so you don't leave here with nothing, let me give you one piece of literal gospel. Something more direct and less insinuated.
I've worked in restaurants for a long time. So long, that I've been around since the inception of the mobile phone as the ubiquitous carry accessory. I can state, with absolute certainty, that in that time, I could count on one hand the amount of times a mobile phone has been left behind for longer than the two minutes it took for the owner to realise and race back in to collect it or for one of us to chase down said owner and return it. On one hand (that’s less than five, for those of you who’ve never seen, felt or experienced my hand/s). Yet, it would require triple figures to count the amount of phone calls I've received, where some dickhead insists he left a phone behind and begins to make wild allegations against our integrity.
Here comes the gospel, you ready?
Nobody out there, nobody, opens up a restaurant with the aim of stealing BlackBerrys off fat, French, fuckwits. Nobody. We are, in the main, decent, hard working folk, who just want to get paid, laid and made. Sure there are rotten eggs amongst us, but don't you realise that if they are the sort to steal your phone, they're also the sort to steal our money and we'd be working hard to weed them out? If I tell you it's not here, it’s really not here. That's it. It’s that simple. I'm not trying to end this conversation because I just ripped you off. I'm in a rush, because I gotta get the sweetener to table 15.
Class dismissed.
