Many of you know I've been working as a waitress for a couple of years now. All things considered, right now my job sucks.

Servers, see, are cheap. They pay us a grand total of $2.63 an hour. Servers never get raises, either, because they're likely just to complain and whine about how low their hourly wage is anyway, and say something to the effect of a sarcastic "Oh, thanks a whole lot." One could hire four or five servers for the same amount he'd have to pay one cook or dishwasher.

The general mindset at the Applebee's* where I work is that paperwork is way more important than actually making good food or providing good service. I don't ascribe this attitude to the company as a whole, because I really think that somewhere higher up someone really cares about the business in a sense other than what goes into his pocket. But they way they implement things leaves much to be desired. So ends the prelude to why my job sucks so hard. Continuing with the complaining:

For example. The store-level managers get yearly bonuses based on certain numbers. The turnover, for example. Now, firing a genuinely awful employee hurts the turnover number. As such, we hire more and more people, without getting rid of the useless ones, because it makes the numbers look good. This is why we end up with eleven servers on the floor on a Friday night- because half of them suck but just won't be disciplined. So those of us who actually do our job well get punished by having fewer tables to work with, and make less money.

Of course, we also put more servers on the floor because of the aforementioned "server-to-back-of-the-house-employee" ratio. Why pay a dishwasher, or an expo, when we can put three or four more servers on the floor and make them do it? Of course, they won't make as much money, but we're not really concerned about our employees, just about how much we can line our own pockets.

Another thing that affects bonuses is "ticket times." The Applebee's goal is to be fast food you have to sit down for, I guess. The big push right now is to have most of our ticket times be under ten minutes, and to have absolutely all of them under 16 munutes. We have a little screen on the expo side that keeps track of how long the tickets are, and you have to "bump" off an order when it leaves the kitchen so you know how long it took.

This translates into one of two things. First, the cooks learn to prepare food as quickly as possible, with all sorts of shortcuts, because some items just *can't* be prepared properly in the short amount of time allotted. A piece of chicken will be thrown on the grill with some skillets tossed on top of it to make it mark quicker. Then it will be cut up and microwaved. Does this sound like something you want to eat? The other thing that happens is that the food isn't actually ready when it's supposed to be, but we pretend like it is and bump the order off the screen to make the paperwork look good. What it boils down to is that we're far more concerned about numbers on paper than about actual good food in a reasonable time, which is what I think the higher-ups are aiming toward.

Another thing that bugs me is the way our stores are rated. We have these things called "Customer Satisfaction Inquiries." Sometimes a table will randomly get a check with one of these printed on it. The customer can call the number and do the phone survey, which asks him to rate various things on a scale of 1 to 7. Now, when we see our scores, we only see the percentage of people who gave us 7s. The rest of the numbers don't count at all. So if they tell us that our CSIs are at 50%, that means that half of the people who responded think everything was perfect. And yet that's not considered a good score.

The other thing with those is that they cut off the responses at 44 per month. So not only are they results remarkably unuseful, but they're statistically irrelevant to boot. I figure that the CSI call-ins represent *at best* 1% of the people we serve every month. How did these people in upper management, who *must* have taken a statistics course sometime in their lives, get the idea that this is a good way to rate your stores?

Working in a place like this drives me crazy. I *want* to give good customer service. I want my guests to have good food in a reasonable time. But I hate dealing with all the crap. I work in a numbers factory, not a restaurant. And the trouble is that usually it's good enough money that it's not worth going somewhere else. But goodness, how I dread going into work some days.

Heh. Originally this was going to be a rant about waitresses who don't claim all of their tips like they're supposed to, but I kind of got sidetracked. So I'll save that for another day, I guess.

~Mina"tip your server!"moon

*Perhaps it's unethical to say *where* I work, but you know, they haven't been very nice to me lately, so I'm not too concerned about giving away trade secrets or anything.