Can’t We All Just Get Along? (Conclusion)
Maybe I’m prophetic, or maybe my boss secretly reads my blog.
Let me explain.
After my post last week about certain coworkers who make theirs and their coworkers jobs more difficult a lot has changed around here. Let’s start with Friday night. The person in question in last week’s post took the night off to go to a personal engagement. With some shifting around of schedules and personnel we were able to easily fill the absence. To say that things went more smoothly than usual would be an understatement. We found ourselves incredibly busy that night, more busy than usual. Consistently we were 10 or more customers deep at the bar and our band kept drawing in an even larger crowd. Even at that volume and level of sales we were able to push through the night without a single disgruntled customer. Our tip percentage even increased by around 8%. With our sales for the night that added up to about $1,200 more in tips than normal for a comparable night. Virtually every employee was working at their maximum efficiency even towards the end when we were almost all over 9 hours of continuous, high-speed service.
When the night was over and we closed the doors after the last customer left we all sat around scratching our heads. How was this night so much easier to handle efficiently? Why were we not required to diffuse some type of situation with an angry customer? We all eventually came to the same conclusion, but we all had our doubts that that one factor could really effect so much. We were all just happy to have a very profitable night for ourselves and for the bar and left it at that.
The following day we all arrived to work as usual, and the person in question was also back to work that night. The night started off fairly slowly. Our band that night was the Tejas Brothers which have a pretty strong following so we expected it to get busy closer to their start time. As expected, 30 minutes before the band began their first set the bar began to fill up rapidly. To compound that we had an after-party show up unexpectedly from the skate park where they had just wrapped up an event that included quite a few celebrity skaters. Even though we were not as busy as the night before when everything when smoothly, as soon the crowd began to show up things started going sour. I was immediately having to deal with customer complaints regarding this coworker which began slowing down service and the line for the bar grew. Within a few hours 90% of the customers would not even approach my coworker’s section of the bar. The 3 remaining bartenders, myself included, began to take issue with doing 3 times more work simply because she couldn’t control her attitude towards customers which began causing tension behind the bar as well. We struggled through the rest of the night and finally were able to close the doors and lock up. Myself and my 2 overworked coworkers looked at each other and knew we were right in our assumption from the previous night. We contemplated speaking with the owner or general manager about the situation but decided to wait. We reluctantly split our tips evenly with her and called it a night.
I typically don’t work Mondays but was asked to fill in on a Monday lunch shift for a coworker who was going out of town to visit family. During my shift there was a flurry of phone calls and activity. The GM and the owner met for some time and then pulled me aside to speak with me. They explained that they had multiple complaints from customers on Saturday in regards to her and informed me that they were going to have to terminate her. Now, I would never wish unemployment on anyone but I still felt an unmistakable wave of relief come over me. I ended up having to stay to cover her shift that day which ended up being nearly 12 hours straight at work. I’ll happily endure a long shift like that to ensure a better work environment, as well as a more enjoyable experience for our clientele. The only downside is getting all of her shifts covered is seriously cutting into my homework and school commitments for this and next week. Oh well, I can sleep next month!
