I waitress in a delightful little cafe on a station in a forest.
So most of the customers are muddy cyclists and families with carloads of screaming brats. I've worked there a very long time (read: two years), so I'm used to them now, and the messes they leave, however bad they are - mud and dirt and spillages galore. And believe me, some of the stuff people leave on their trays is vile: used plasters, and hair anyone? (the hair is worse when it manages to get unnoticed into the sink and ends up twined round you fingers).

However, sometimes I still get shocked by the bomb sites people can create in such a short time. There used to be a girl worked there, same year as me at school, called Zoe. Oh, what a slag she was. She got fired for not turning up for work one day, then ringing an hour or so later, claiming she couldn't come in that day, as she had been out boozing the night before (this was a very regular occurrence)and her drink had been spiked. Quite unfair to fire her for that, surely?

Nope, not when she'd used the same excuse at least twice before. Oh, and she was generally lazy and rubbish anyway.

Anyroad, a few months after she was fired, she came into the cafe with a couple of her friends very early on a Saturday morning - quite clearly straight from a night on the town, quite clearly still drunk, and generally looking like death warmed up and poked with a stick.

They ordered their full Englishes and station batches (a full English breakfast on a bap), sat down and made a screaming, giggling nuisance of themselves (Luckily, it being so early, there were no other customers). When they finally left, another waitress and I ventured over to survey the damage.

1 broken teapot
1 full bottle of strawberry milkshake spilt everywhere: table, floor, chairs, sugar bowl, walls, etc.
The majority of two breakfasts and a station batch strewn all over the table
Several handfuls of napkins in a pile. Unused, but in the milkshake trajectory.
30 or so packets of salt opened and poured into a neat mountain.

The shoulders of the other waitress and I slumped visibly. It took a ridiculously long time to get that corner presentable again.


Pretty Strangers and Promises: we get people like that too. There are large signs in both the cafe and the adjoining ice cream parlour that, "Due to a number of forgeries, all notes will be checked"

I get at least three people per day saying something along the lines of "There's nothing wrong with that one, I made it myself this morning, lol!"
Thanks. Because it just wasn't funny enough the first thousand times I heard it.

More tales shall be forthcoming.
(Applebite Uh! A cow!, Thu 4 Sep 2008, 21:05, 1 reply)

enough already woman

( the RAND corporation a.k.a. Kevin Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Thu 4 Sep 2008, 21:17, closed)