#65 "Happy Campers" In Color!!! June 27, 2013

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Oof. That last post stressed me out!

I was inspired to write a post in the style of a short story instead of a blog post, and for some dumb reason I decided to write about being in the weeds. Well, it was like I was reliving being in the weeds, and the customers were real! Even the guy who tugged on my apron was a real person and I can see his face now! Argh! That is one of the challenging things about this project: I am forced to think about work while not physically at work. One of my favorite parts about being a server and bartender is that when you leave the job, it doesn't go home with you. I don't ever have to work from home. If I am not at the restaurant, I don't have to serve people. It really is a great thing. However, with this project, a little bit of the restaurant is with me all the time here on my computer. I am sure I have mentioned that I rarely draw people I know on these pictures because I don't want to have to think about them when I am at home. Don't get me wrong, Tim and I have inadvertently drawn customers and friends on these drawings before and probably will again, I am just saying that I don't usually do it on purpose. I would feel bad if I drew someone I like on one of these drawings and then all of a sudden, the drawing progresses and that person that I like finds themselves in some crazy scene like the one pictured above. On the other hand, if we draw someone who we don't like very much or who is a difficult customer, then I have to see them, color them in, and make them fit into the crazy scene like the one featured above. That means that I have to spend time with them that I usually would not do. I try to avoid difficult customers. I do not want to hang out with them in my own home in my free time, and they probably feel the same way about me. 

When we do get difficult regular customers at the restaurant, we usually will trade them out. For instance, if you are a problem customer for me, but Mike doesn't mind you, then you will usually have Mike as your server even if you are not sitting in Mike's section. The same goes with me. I will take Edie's problem customers and vice versa and on and on, amen. This makes the night better for everyone, including you. I mean, you don't think that you are a problem customer! You think that you are Cafe Loup's best regular and life of the party! But I am here to tell you that you are someone's problem customer. I think that I am probably someone's problem customer. I walk into a certain bar on a certain night with a certain someone behind the bar and they roll their eyes and say, "darn, that guy is back! Why can't he come in here on my night off?"

It's just part of life. You think you are a good person, a generous person, and a person who is liked by all people and babies and small animals. But you're not. Someone thinks you suck. And I think this happens a lot in restaurants because people who are problem customers don't know that they are being obnoxious a lot of the time. Sometimes it's the alcohol that makes them difficult. Maybe that one night they had a couple too many and started talking crazy to their server. Maybe they were just really hungry that one night and weren't in the mood to small talk and so they got a little snippy with the waitress. Well, whatever it was, your server remembers. 

Being a server is a hard enough job as it is without difficult customers. When I have a full section, which is 12 tables with up to 36 people in my section AT THE SAME TIME, I do not have time to have difficult people. That is 36 people all needing something and all at different times, so I am trying to figure out the timing of getting 36 people one thing at a time. A lot of the time, I have half of those 36 people being regulars who know me, and see that if I do have a full section, they'll be more patient than usual. And yet, with 18 people on my side, all it takes to throw the whole night off is one problem customer. Since the job is all about timing, and making sure everything is landing in the right place, one person making crazy demands or keeping me at the table longer than necessary is a formula for throwing off the entire night. On the other hand, if I mess things up on my end, the same is true. There is a very delicate balance and if as little as one thing disrupts that balance, a good night can turn into a bad night in a matter of literal seconds. 

That is why when you are a problem customer, your server will never forget you. There are people who have been coming to the restaurant for years whose face gives me a visceral reaction of dread and yet I can't even remember how they spited me. They may have done something 10 years ago, and yet, when I see them, I hand them over to Mike or Edie. Yet, even as I say that, I am looking down the pike at future T&J drawings and see more and more real life people making their way into the drawings. However, as you will see in future blog posts, the people who do make it into the drawings come with an interesting story. So, even though they might be awful, at least their story is interesting. Maybe it will be about YOU!

#64 In Color!!! June 19, 2013

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When Tim and I started this project 5 years ago, we had no idea how far it would go. We were essentially just messing around, drawing pictures at work like we had been for years before that fateful day where we liked a picture enough to take it home and work on it outside of the restaurant. That first picture that I took home is pretty simple, but has all of the insanity of later drawings in it. Take a look at it here.
Tim and I would draw on the Triple Dupe Pad nearly every day we were at the restaurant, always adding (and sometimes subtracting) to the whole thing. We would draw on them while we had our evening coffee before the rush, and then again at the end of the night while sitting on Table 8 drinking beers and talking about the evening that had just recently ended. As time went on, Tim and my schedule became less and less intertwined. We used to work three out of four days together, and so we were working on these drawings a lot during that time. As the years passed, our schedules changed so much that Tim and I only work together for a couple hours on Friday evenings when I come in to wait tables in the evening and he finishes up his shift as the dar bar tender. I am not sure if that fact of not working together has slowed down our output, but we have certainly slowed down the production of T&J drawings.
 I rarely draw these days during the pre-shift coffee break. This is usually because I am much better friends with the bar regulars now, and so instead of turning my back to them and drawing insane pictures of aliens harvesting heads, I catch up with them and visit. Then, at the end of the night, it's usually the same thing. Instead of the staff sitting on Table 8, like the old days, we all hang out at the bar and visit with our favorite regulars. It almost seems wrong to call these people regulars since a lot of them are friends who happened to be customers first. That is how I would describe these people to outsiders. Yes, we met in a server/served environment, but we have gone beyond that relationship and developed a full-on friendship. This happens sometimes in some restaurants and bars, but it happens at our place more, I think. The way the restaurant operates, and the longevity of the staff makes it the perfect place to become really good friends with the staff and regulars.
For instance, years ago, a woman named Karen started coming in to eat. She would come in and sit at Table 11 or 12 (depending on which one was open at the time). She would read on her Kindle and have a glass of wine and eat a little something. Well, after a couple of times waiting on her, I asked how she liked the Kindle (they were new at the time), and from that question on, we became friends. She would come in every Wednesday and Friday for years and years. We became Bookface friends, and we would talk for hours about everything from technology to the Opera and everything in between. Now, you are probably thinking, well, obviously a young waiter and a single woman becoming friends in a restaurant is nothing out of the ordinary. That sort of thing happens every day. The only difference is that Karen and I are completely different people from completely different times. She could be an aunt of mine or some distant relative that would be a peer of my parents. But, because of the restaurant, we are now friends. In the outside world that never would have happened, but in the restaurant it happens all the time. The fact that I have so many friends my parents age and older is directly related to working at the restaurant. And so, I guess it is a little sad that the T&J production has gone down but the reason for the slowdown is a positive thing. I mean, friendship is more important that productivity any day of the week.