Be Nice When You're Frustrated.

Tonight Eric, Roan and I went out for dinner.  Huge regrets.  It happens to be Roan's favourite restaurant and both Eric and I really like it.  They have great food and we've never had a problem with service or anything along those lines.  It's always been clean.  The only downfall is that it's in a pretty inconvenient location in this tourist trap of a town.  So tonight had to be the worst experience of customer service I've encountered in a restaurant in years.  I'm really disappointed too because I really like this restaurant and hope it's not a sign of things to come. 

I hesitate in naming the restaurant because this is the first of many visits we've made to it where we were dissatisfied with our treatment.  I'm grateful that this wasn't our first visit or this would be all I had to go on.  We'll frequent this restaurant in the future but probably not again until the autumn season.  I'd rather just avoid all the heavy traffic in that part of the city during the tourist season.  The owner doesn't know that we had already made that decision before we walked into the restaurant.  He knows we're in there often, he recognizes us each time we go in, but this will let him sweat for a while. 

I work in a huge customer service heavy field and I wish more people cut us some slack when we made an error.  (Alas, that's not likely to happen anytime soon.)  For whenever one experiences lousy customer service one soon forgets that one is not perfect, him or herself.  I am quite positive that those who complain have at one point in their lives, but most important to this post, in their jobs made a mistake.  I wish people understood that in my experience when one makes a mistake in their job or in their execution of customer service that they do in fact feel badly about it.  They don't need to be berated or made to feel even more lousy than they do already.  Drawing attention to the lack of service is adequate enough.  Most often one will offer a solution to try to correct the situation or compensate for it, all on their own without the complainer having to ask.  It's those people who are compelled to bank on the situation who piss me off and make me loathe my job some days.  My mind is boggled that someone can judge and treat another human being for being just that, human.  Like I said, there are very few people who work in customer service just to ruin another person's experience or day. 

So next time you experience poor customer service, by all means draw attention to it in hopes to have the behavior corrected but maybe give a little grace will ya?  Maybe that person works two or three jobs to make ends meet and feed their kids, so maybe they are exhausted.  Maybe they have their mind somewhere else and are having a hard time getting it back to the task at hand but don't have the luxury of blowing off a shift to sort their own stuff out.  Maybe they are taking the slack for someone elses bad work habits but because they are the 'frontline' employee, they take the blame.  Who knows the reason, but the odds are it wasn't done maliciously.  So be kind in your complaining.  Please.  You have the right to choose not to go back to that establishment but don't tarnish or badmouth the business and potentially put someone out of job because of an innocent mistake.