Hey Guys.

The transfer is complete. Please change all your bookmarks to: www.iserveidiots.com and stop using the ryaneday.wordpress.com link. It will only send you back to here and no new stories are coming here. They’re all going to www.iserveidiots.com.

Thanks,
Ryan

The Apocolypse Is Now.

Hey guys. The site’s gonna be down for the next couple of days. I’m changing hosting plans and doing a few other things to make the site a little better.

In the meantime, go to www.ashersarlin.com.

Affectionately Yours,
Ryan

Dear Self-Righteous Readers Of My Site,

It would seem as though the recent string of readers of this site hold themselves in such high regard that they would never DREAM of raising their voice to a customer and even the NOTION that a $4 tip on a $120 bill is wrong makes me un-frickin-grateful. Some have even gone so far as to imply that (as one email put it) “all my stories are 100% bullshit”.

Hey jackasses, want to know why I sometimes fly off the handle in my stories…or why I don’t always take the “higher, moral road”? Because these stories are true and decent people (such as myself) don’t always remain calm and they CERTAINLY care when they’re given a few bucks on an hour and a half worth of work. It certainly doesn’t help when it’s work for some ungrateful, ignorant, idiotic customers.

So before I get another email telling me how I should just shut up, accept my dollar an hour in wages (after taxes) and “be oh so grateful” for my tips, take a minute to think how you’d feel if you spent 90 minutes serving a family of four blacks and all you got out of it was $1.80 at the end of the night and the tag of “racist”.

This is the last thing I’ll write on this subject. Do you people know just how easy it would be for me to twist the stories around to where I looked like a saint in the face of such stupidity and ignorance? Do you? But I don’t. I write about what truly happens and sometimes I come out looking good. Sometimes I come out with egg on my face. I’m sorry that for the 30 or so hours a week I’m a server, I don’t go by the book 100% of the time and that sometimes, I get upset. Sometimes, I write what I’m thinking. Sometimes I might ask a customer why I got a bad tip (which is, coincidentally, encouraged by management). Sometimes I might get upset and show a little emotion. Sometimes I get downright pissed when I’m walked all over and have a buck to show for it.

So for all those things and more, I’m sorry.

Good night and good luck, Chris.

Every Time A Black Person Calls Me Racist, An Angel Gets Its Wings.

Tonight, a family of four came in. We have community tables that seat up to about 10. There was a family of four sitting on one side of the table and I sat the four menus on the other four table settings.

This, of course, is a cardinal sin against black people.

Black Woman: “Why can’t we get our o’n table!?”
Me: “Well…ma’am…this is how the seating works. It’s like a community table and the chef just comes out, cooks everyone’s food at the same…”
Black Woman: “You can’t tell us w’ere we can and can’t sit! You don’ hafta say dat ’cause we’s black.”
Me: “Uh…I wasn’t…I was just saying that…”
Black Woman: “I’ve haff a min’ to file a discrimination suit ‘gainst ya.”
Me: “Is that a joke?”
Black Woman: “No.”
Me: “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought it was a big joke.”

Why is it some black people feel entitled to special treatment? Oh, that’s right…because of all those slaves I’ve owned and all those Million Man Marches I’ve demonstrated against. That and I strangled Martin Luther King Jr to death with my own two hands.

And why is it when they don’t receive that special treatment they feel it is me “holding them down”. People, that’s how our restaurant works. It’s not racism or discrimination.

So I seat them, smile politely, and take their drink and dinner orders. I tell them that because they wanted a seperate table, it will take a little longer for a chef to come out.

Black Woman: “What fo’?”
Me: “Well, we only have two chefs on and you’re the third table to be sat. If you’d like your food a little quicker, you can sit at the table that I was showing you earlier.”
Black Woman: “But why is it gonna take longa fo’ us?”
Me: “Okay. You’re the third table. There’s two chefs. They can only cook one table at a time. That’s why we have large community tables that can hold eight people…so everyone gets their food faster.”
Black Woman: “Whate’er.”

Obviously, there’s no place for logic in a brain so filled with racism-paranoia and ignorance.

As I was walking away from the table, I heard the little girl at the table I tried to seat the black people at when they came in, point at the black family and say (within earshot of the black family of four), “Daddy, do they hate us?”

Cue laughter for me and the white family. Cue embarassment for the black family.

After the dinner, I brought them the check. I was polite and helpful throughout the entire dinner, even taking time away from other tables to show the black father how to use his chopsticks and getting them every to-go sauce they could ever need. I wanted to be overly-nice to this black family to prove a point to myself.

See, to many readers of this site, my stories could be complete horseshit. I could be the worst server in the world and could just be using that to fish for customers to get pissed so I have material to work with.

But I’m neither. I’m a decent server and a good guy. And I wanted proof that, regardless or my attitude and quality of service, I was going to get stiffed on my tip by a black family of four that is just looking for a way to “get back at the man” for all those things white people did to blacks before I was even conceived.

So out comes the bill: $110.98. Pretty hefty bill for four people. The boyfriend of the black woman that argued with me earlier gave me $115 and sad, verbatim, “Keep the change as your tip.” My fate was sealed. They were going to leave me a $4 tip on over $110 worth of food. That’s about a 3% tip on some damn good service.

It was here that I. Just. Lost it.

I looked the boyfriend in the eye and asked him point-blank, “Do you want your four-dollar tip back?”

He didn’t respond. In fact, I said it so loudly, patrons at the bar looked over and started giving the man dissapointed looks. He looked a little embarassed, but instead of facing it like a man, he took the path of a coward and walked out the door.

Then the black woman with whom I argued passed me and I said even louder, “Do you WANT your FOUR-DOLLAR TIP BACK.” She replied, “No” and kept on walking.

It was then that I stared in the eyes of the father with whom I had taught to use chopsticks. I looked at him, beet-red in the face, and asked just as loudly, “Would you like the FOUR-DOLLAR TIP BACK. YOU GUYS OBVIOUSLY NEED IT.” He just frowned and kept on walking.

Finally, the mother walked by me. I just stared at her, still beet-red, still furious. I didn’t say a word to her until she was so close she could hear my louder-than-normal heart rate. In a whsiper, I said:

Me: “How dare you.”
Her: “What?”
Me: “How dare you and your family.”

And then she as well walked out the door.

It was a slower-than-usual night and they wouldn’t have made that much of a difference if they had, indeed, tipped me well. But it’s ignorance and downright social idiocy that gets my blood boiling.

My manager told me after they left that the father came back in looking for me. I saw him open the door, but I didn’t want to look at him again. I knew I couldn’t hide the obvious disgust from my face.

Don’t pin the strained relationship between whites and blacks in this country solely on white people. True, it is mostly past white’s faults that blacks are still at a level of inferiority economically, socially and academically in this country. But there are those still in this country that revel in the strained relationship and feed that beast the ignorance and stupidity it so craves.

If they treat me, a white man that put forth an effort to provide great service to them, with this kind of disrespect how do they treat people the way they treated me?

Reasons You Didn’t Get The Job: Reason #21 – You Came In For Your Interview Through The Backdoor. BEFORE We Were Open For Business.

We open our restaurant at 4:30pm every day except for Sunday where we open at noon. Someone obviously did not get the memo (or learn how to read signs on the front door).

At about 3:50pm last week, a disheveled woman in her early-40’s came in through the backdoor as we were loading food and drinks from the supplier’s trucks. We thought she was a girlfriend of one of the chefs or truck drivers.

Apparently, the woman saw all of us working out back and decided this was as good a time as any to pop on in and ask, no…yell, for a manager.

Her: “Are ya’ll HIRING!?”
One of our chefs: “Uhh…who are you?”
Her: “Is there a manager here?”
Chef: “Yuki!”
Her: “YUKI! YUKI! WHERE ARE YOU!?”

In walks Yuki, our manager for the day. He gives the woman a quick lookover and informs her that we are, in fact, not hiring. She insists on filling out an application anyway.

It takes the woman almost an hour to fill the thing out (comparitively, it took me and many fellow employees about 15 minutes to fill in every box). She then walks out (with our pen in hand, mind you) and we never hear from her again.

It’s probably because Yuki put a big “NOOOOO!!!!!” on the top of her application.