On Difficult Customers

When I worked at a restaurant out at Disney from 1998-2003, there was a customer that everyone in the restaurant used to call "The Spinach Sushi Lady." Come on, have you ever even heard of spinach sushi?

Of course not! It doesn't exist. Yet somehow this lady decided that she needed to have spinach sushi everytime she came to our restaurant.

Pretty much everyone in the restaurant hated dealing with this lady and her family (the family is a whole other story, I'll stick to spinach sushi lady). She had to sit at a booth. This restaurant could seat almost 400 people at any given time, but there were only four booths. God forbid they all be full when this lady walks through the door.

Drama EVERY SINGLE time.

When she was seated we always knew that she would order spinach sushi. She'd say something like, "I know this isn't on the menu, but I've come in here before and they said that it isn't a problem."

Only problem, it was a problem.

She'd order the spinach sushi and I'd have to go check with the sushi chef to see if he could make spinach sushi today. He'd tell me to go talk to the chef to check if there was any spinach today (there was always spinach, but they'd always make you check). If the chef wasn't talking to some hot girl at the bar, he was sweating bullets behind the food line trying to crank out meals for the 400 other hungry guests waiting for their dinners. Either way, he didn't want to talk to you.

He'd usually say, "Oh, is SHE here?" and then direct you towards the keeper of the spinach. Then you had to take the spinach to the sushi chef, listen to him grumble about the special order, and then get back to spinach sushi lady in time for her to tell you that she was cold and that she'd like you to turn down the air conditioner.

Then she'd start bitching about how the restaurant was really going down hill, blah, blah, blah...

To make a long story short, they complained through the whole meal, made special requests for EVERYTHING, left a horrible tip...and always came back the next week...or worse, sooner.

Restaurant guests like that deserve to die. That's all I have to say about Difficult Customers.

And don't think that I was some self-absorbed server who didn't care about my guests. This family hated being alive and did their best to ruin the lives of everyone around them. I cringe whenver I think of her bleached blonde hair and fat husband.

(erg)