So You Want To Be a Banquet Manager...

Another One Bites The Dust

2009-09-30T18:54:32.746-04:00

It’s the end of my night. The banquet manager is going home. I turn off all the lights in each meeting room as I do my final walk through. Air conditioners off, check. Store rooms locked, check. Computer turned off, check. It’s around 12:30am and finally it’s time to leave.

As I stop in the bar to get a cup of water for the trip home, I come face-to-face with a Room Service waiter that is helping himself to a Grey Goose and tonic in a plastic cup.

He looks me in the eye…I can smell the fear from across the mahogany bar top. Not a word is said. Then he puts a lid on the cup and does an abrupt about face and scurries out of the bar. Of course I follow him.

Down the rear service stairs he goes with me in hot pursuit. Boy, either he’s one fast SOB or I’m getting slow. I finally catch up with him. With his liquid loot still in his hand I say, “What’s in the cup”? Now he looks at me with those same eyes as a sad little bunny rabbit………….”Ugh, I was just getting a drink for the ride home”. “I’m sorry”, he said, “It won’t happen again”.

Correct! You’re FIRED!

I hope he doesn’t know where I park my car…

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The 11th Husband

2009-09-28T16:33:58.266-04:00

A young man married a beautiful woman who had previously divorced 10 husbands. On their wedding night, she told her new husband to "Please be gentle; I'm still a virgin."

"What ?" said the puzzled groom."How can that be if you've been married ten times?"

"Well, husband #1 was a Sales Representative; he kept telling me how great it was going to be.

"Husband #2 was in Software Services; he was never really sure how it was supposed to function; but he said he'd look into it and get back with me.

"Husband #3 was from Field Services; he said that everything checked out diagnostically but he just couldn't get the system up.

Husband #4 was in Telemarketing; even though he knew he had the order, he didn't know when he would be able to deliver.

"Husband #5 was an Engineer; he understood the basic process but he wanted three years to research, implement, and design a new state-of-the-art method.

"Husband #6 was from Administration; he thought he knew how but he wasn't sure whether it was his job or not.

"Husband #7 was in Marketing; although he had a product, he was never sure how to position it.

"Husband #8 was a Psychiatrist; all he did was talk about it.

"Husband #9 was a Gynecologist; all he did was look at it.

"Husband #10 was Stamp Collector; all he ever did was........... God I miss him !!!

"But now that I've married you, I'm so excited".

"Wonderful", said the husband, "but why ?

"You're with the GOVERNMENT ". This time I KNOW I'm gonna get SCREWED!



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Stale Friggin' Danish Again, WTF!

2009-09-28T16:35:13.644-04:00

How damm hard can it be to order a few dozen Danish and muffins everyday? Not too hard I guess. My one-eyed half-bald cat that shits himself twice a week can probably do it. But Noooooo, the kitchen apparently can’t.

Whether it’s the chef, or the dumb-ass purchasing chick (yes, we have a chick in Purchasing – why I don’t know), either way - they forget to order fresh bakery items at least once every two weeks.

We do breakfast for 6-7 groups everyday that average around 500 people plus the restaurant is usually busy with all the transient hotel guests and all goes well. But as soon as we come to a quiet day with one or two small groups in-house, they must stick their heads up their a** and shut their eyes and forget to read the damm BEO’s. WTF!

Now I need to put day-old Danish & muffins out on our nice fancy silver trays. What a contradiction in terms – old shit with new platters. The banquet manager is not having a good day...

I need a REAL job!


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Are Waiters From Buenos Aires The Best?

2009-10-10T08:15:43.316-04:00

Buenos Aires boasts impressive waiters, whose minds are worth studying, according to the paper Strategies of Buenos Aires Waiters to Enhance Memory Capacity in a Real-Life Setting, published in the journal Behavioural Neurology."Typical Buenos Aires senior waiters memorise all orders from clients and take the orders, without written support, of as many as 10 persons per table. They also deliver the order to each and every one of the customers who ordered it without asking or checking."And most of the time, they get it right.How do they do it? Researchers Tristan Bekinschtein, Julian Cardozo and Facundo Manes ran an experiment to find out. The three are based variously at the Institute of Cognitive Neurology and at Favaloro University, both in Buenos Aires, and at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge.Eight customers sat at a table, and ordered drinks. When the waiter brought the beverages, the scientists tallied up how many were served to the people who had ordered them, and how many delivered to someone else. All the waiters performed admirably.The customers later ordered more drinks, then switched seats before the waiter returned. This produced dreary results. The scientists tried this on nine waiters, only one of whom consistently delivered drinks to the right people.Interviewed afterwards, waiters said they generally paid attention to customers' locations, faces and clothing. They also disclosed a tiny trick of the trade. They "did not pay attention to any customer after taking a table's order, as if they were protecting the memory formation in the path from the table to the bartender or kitchen."In preparing their study, Bekinschtein, Cardozo and Manes discovered a published account of a remarkable waiter who had trained himself to "recall as many as 20 dinner orders, categorise the food (meat or starch) and link it to the location in the table. He also used acronyms and words to encode salad dressing, and visualised cooking temperature for each customer's meat and linked it to the position on the table."The Buenos Aires waiters, in contrast, "reported systematically that they have not thought of any particular strategy and that their great ability comes only with time and practice".The best waiter – the one who delivered drinks correctly even when customers had swapped seats – claimed that, unlike his colleagues, he ignored where customers sat, and paid attention only to their looks. His professional experience, he said, "had been mostly in cocktail parties for 10 years, where people tend to change their position in the room; only in the last three years had he been working in the restaurant".Link to original story: guardian.co.ukWell, do you agree with this crap?Next Post: Stale Friggin' Danish Again, WTF! [...]

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