A Challenging Puzzle

I had a really fantastic day at work yesterday. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I generally jump around between bussing, hostessing and expediting at work, and last night I was hostessing. Now I'm sure you can imagine hostessing is not usually the most exciting position in a restaurant. It's a lot of standing around waiting for people to arrive and then just walking them to a table. At first I didn't like it. I felt like I couldn't really help out the other support staff because I always had to remain at the door in case someone arrived (it's funny how uncomfortable people are when they get to a restaurant and there's no one there to greet them, but I suppose I'm the same). Anyway, I hated that feeling that I was just standing there and that my job wasn't actually necessary until someone walked up the stairs into the restaurant, but yesterday was one of the good days.

We've been slow the last couple of Sundays, so the manager cut back on the number of servers working last night. That's why it was unfortunate that it was such a beautiful day out and lots of people called up to make reservations at the last minute. It's days like this when hostessing becomes really fun. It's like playing a giant puzzle in my head. I have to make as many people happy as possible using only a limited amount of resources. It's like when I play Sims; I make someone have next to nothing and then I help them rise from the ashes to earn everything they could want or need. I've always loved doing stuff like that. Trying to survive and thrive with so little on my side. It's so much more rewarding than a night that goes by without any problems. I want the problems because I want to be able to solve them and make a difference.

I know it's just a restaurant and maybe it doesn't seem very important, but it's so rewarding to have even just one person thank you for making their evening lovely. There was one table last night and the couple was so patient and thoughtful. They didn't have a reservation, but had come all the way from Vancouver because they love our restaurant so much. I told them that the earliest I would be able to fit them in would be in an hour, so they went for a walk. When they came back I had just had a table open up, so I told them to wait downstairs while I set it up for them. Of course, that was the moment where the phone started ringing off the hook, about 7 reservations came in that needed to be seated, and a very difficult pair of regulars insisted that I find them a table despite their not having a reservation. I think it took me about 15 minutes to deal with all of this before I got around to clearing there table. When I finally got them seated and thanked them for their patience, they were nothing but thankful that I could get them a spot. The whole time they were pleasant and just wonderful to be around even though they waited over an hour to be seated and possibley the worst table in our restaurant. It's things like that, which make me feel happy with what I'm doing. I love to have that challenge thrown at me and see if I can deal with it. The reward is talking to kind people and I love that I work in the kind of place that respects the kind of patient customers we get and rewards their thoughtfulness with complimentary peanut butter pie :-)