c8-conflict

The majority of my weekends and evenings over the past few years have been spent inside of a restaurant. I have spent countless hours serving people in various restaurants around the city of Chicago, and have come into contact with many many people. Some of my experiences have been wonderful; I have met great people, heard amazing stories and experienced great times. But, unfortunately, for as many great times as I have had working as a server there's at least one bad experience to match every good one. Sitting down and thinking about the topic of conlfict and the emotions and experiences that arise out of it, one story jumps out from my memory in particular.

I was working in a restaurant that focused on farm to table cuisine and was (and still is as a matter of fact) world renowned for their extraordinary desserts. With such a focus on desserts, it turns out that the majority of the patrons who visit this restaurant are there for some celebratory event. During the three years I spent working within the confines of this establishment I saw more marriage proposals, birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, and retirement events than I had anywhere else in the course of my career. At each table I approached there was an expectation from the guests that their event should be as important to me as it was to them, and that they should be treated as the most important, if not the only, table in the restaurant. Imagine that you have seven to eight tables to serve that collectively can seat upwards of thirty people, and that this restaurant is so busy that each table is going to be sat three to four times in a night. Am I stressing you out? Because my blood is now up and I already want to step out in the alley for a smoke.

One fateful Friday evening I was waiting on an eight top of friends who were in to celebrate something I was too busy to remember. The guests were enjoying themselves and I thought I was doing a pretty good job managing their needs and wants along with the other tables in my section. I had taken their order, the kitchen was about to put their food up and everyone was happy. However, moments after their food reached the table, the tone at the table took a very sour turn.

I came to check on the table to see if they needed anything else before tuckinginto their dinner and was immediately verbally assaulted by a gentleman who had ordered a rare steak. The steak was "stone cold", as he put it, and he was upset that now he was not going to be able to eat at the same time as his friends. He shoved his plate into my hands and told me to get it away from him and bring him another one that was hot. Immediately. Walking through the dining room I quickly realized the situation that I was now in. The kitchen was too busy to stop and cook the guy a new steak. Even if they had the time, or the grill space, considering the size of the steak, it was going to be at least another ten minutes before the plate would get to him. And with a temperature of rare, there was no possibility of heating up the steak without it being cooked past his liking. It was thinking all this over when I realized how hot the bottom of the plate actually was on my palm. I handed the plate back to my sous chef, told him the situation, and watched the anger roll over his face as he laid a finger on the steak and felt how warm it actually was. "Get him whatever he wants, and get him out of here", was the response of my sous.

I returned to the table armed with a menu and was immediately asked where the steak was. The gentleman was irate, and when I took a second to explain to him that getting him another steak immediately was impossible he became even more irate. A back and forth ensued between the two of us: him yelling about his frustrations and my shortcomings and me trying to rectify the situation. When he finally understood that the only thing he could have immediately was mac and cheese he told me to go get it, and not to expect him to pay for it. When I returned to the table he looked disgusted, and commented that at least because of what had happened with his steak there was not going to be a bill for the table.

Trying to think back upon that aweful night and analyze the conflict I realize that the source of it all was more than miscommunication and misunderstanding. Sure those were sources of the conflict on a surface level, but there had to be something else deeper down. Maybe his blood sugar was low and that made him cranky, like it does to so many of us. Maybe his boss had laid into him earlier in the day and the only way that he could feel better was to turn around and lay into someone he felt he was superior to. Maybe he'd been dealing with a large amount of stress, and the steak being cold was the tiny little thing that finally made him snap.

Whatever the cause of the conflict was on his part, there was a flood of emotion that arose within me on account of the conflict. I can definitely say that I was angry and frustrated. I had been crouched at the table during our banter, and my body was so rigid and tense that I realized walking away that I had torn the leather on my clogs. However, it wasn't just simply anger I was experiencing. I felt belittled, embarrassed and maybe even a little shamed. I was being used as a scape goat for whatever it was that was bothering this man, and it really made me feel small, which then manifested into anger. On top of that I was working. As an employee I represented the establishement, and no matter how wrong the guy may have been, I was expected to make him still feel that he was right in the end, no matter how badly I wanted to verbally strike back.

Thinking back on the actions that I took to resolve the conflict, there's really only two things that I did, as there were only two things that I could do. I was as honest as I could be about the situation and how I could fix it. My course of action was to educate the guy on the situation to let him know why I couldn't get him cooked food at the snap of a finger, and to lay out all the options he had available to him. In the end the server is only a messenger, and I tried as suavely as I could to lay out all the options he had so that he understood that it was up to him to make a choice so the situation could be rectified. The other course of action that I took during this fiasco was to keep engaging the man. He remained aggressive throughout the course of dinner, taking jabs at me and the place I worked at whenever possible. Yet I always responded politely, remained attentive and never backed down from the death glares he sent my way. I knew that at some point, if I remained composed, professional and respectful, it was going to dawn on him that he could have handled his temper tantrum in some other way that wasn't embarrassing to him or the people around him. Maybe the action that I took was the path of least resistence, simply waiting for the guy to come back down to earth and let the conflict really only be a conflict to him.

If I could go back, I don't think that I would have done antyhing different. Well, I definitely would have not crouched at the table, because I loved those clogs, but I am not sure that I could have done anything different that wouldn't have escalated the situation in the end. The guy was upset and he wanted to make a point. So I let him make it, and moved on, hoping that he would as well.

The point that I am taking way from looking back on this one conflict is that emotion can change a person very drastically and very quickly. Whether it was stress, or low blood sugar, or some feeling of insecurity in his life, there was some trigger that switched this guy from a human being into a frothing asshole. There's nothing that I can do about that. There's nothing that his wife sitting next to him could have done. There's nothing anyone could have done to forcibly change the state that he was in. What we all could have done, and what most of us did, was let him have it out. The only course of action that I can think of to take when someone is so intent on engaging in a conflict, is to let them engage in it. Let them blow off the steam so that they can get it out of their system and either move on in life or go back and think about what went on when they finally have a clear enough head to do so. This is not to say that I think all conflicts are one sided or that everyone should be able to thrash out their conflicts against a passive opponent, but honestly, sometimes it's just not worth it to fight.

For those of you who are still here after all this ranting and are wondering what happened with the check, here it goes:

The house paid for the steak, gave him the mac for free and I even managed to weasel out a couple of free beers from the bar for the guy. He never calmed down throughout the course of the night, and he never stopped talking about how he thought it was only proper that the table should not have a check. Keep in mind, there were eight of them, and their bill was well over five hundred dollars, after the comps. His friends remained mortified with his talk and his actions throughout dinner. When someone did finally ask for the check I calmly presented it directly to the guy I'd been having the conflict with. Maybe that was me taking on an active roll of being a jerk, but I think at the time I just wanted to drive home the fact of how rediculous the guy had been by letting him look at a check that had nothing he had consumed listed on it. When the table finally left at the end of the night they all were happy (except for one), said thank you and tipped well.

Thakfully we never saw the steak guy again.

As always, email me with questions or comments. And thank you for taking the time to read this.