This is a fictional story I first published here in 2012, but these days restaurants are short-staffed and struggling even more, so let’s remember to have extra patience with them.
Bob the restaurant general manager checked the weather one more time. It was 8:00 a.m. and while Chicago was tricky, he followed the forecast and tried his best to predict the temperatures each day.
“It says warm and sunny. Great!” Bob said as he stood up from the office computer and strode out into the main dining room. The skies were indeed clear and bright, so he gave the word to set up the patio tables and made sure he had three servers to staff the deck. That was less than he’d like, but hiring had become extremely hard in the pandemic. He was lucky to also have three servers scheduled to work the inside tables, although that still left many tables shut down. Every day he made do with fewer people than he needed.
Four hours later, his outdoor servers huddled in the dining room, glaring at him for making them work on a gray, chilly patio where no guests wanted to sit.
“Hi, folks. How are you today?” Bob asked of a group of four business people who had just walked in for lunch.
“We’re good,” a stout man replied, “though it’s a bit windier than I expected.”
Bob tried to keep a cheerful front as he seated the foursome at the last table he dared to seat. With only three servers inside, he couldn’t allow any more customers to sit down until some left. Meanwhile, the patio sat empty and cold.
At 1:00 p.m. the wind was still up and the temperature still hadn’t hit 65 degrees, with no sunshine in sight. “What the hell are weather forecasters good for?” Bob muttered. Glumly, he joined staff in breaking down the patio, bringing in tableware and glasses and pushing all the tables and chairs up against the building. He told the outdoor servers that they didn’t need to stay for the dinner shift and prepared for an evening inside.
Then the Chicago weather changed. By 4:30 p.m. Bob was facing his third irritated guest.
“Your patio isn’t open? But it’s beautiful outside!” a woman in a red blazer insisted. She gestured toward the calm, bright afternoon.
“I’m sorry, but I can give you a nice table in the window, overlooking the river,” Bob said.
“Ridiculous! It’s 72 degrees out there!” the woman said to her companion as they followed Bob to the best table he had available.
For the next two sunny, warm hours Bob did his best to handle countless people who wanted a patio table, including people who said they’d only come to his restaurant because of its beautiful patio. In private moments, Bob cursed the skies for tricking him. “God damned Chicago weather!”
The moral of the story: please have mercy on restaurants when they can’t give you the table you want. They are truly doing their best, but when circumstances conspire against them, getting mad won’t help. Please keep in mind that they aren’t idiots or lazy, but weather in a temperate zone makes it even harder to run a restaurant.
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