Daughter Melody and I went out to dinner at one of our
favorite restaurants: Houlihan’s, in
Elkridge, MD. We’ve been going there
since they opened more than a decade ago, and it qualifies as one of the better
chain restaurants we frequent. We had a
special promotional envelope that was given to us on our last visit, about a
week before Christmas, and we were anxious to see whether we would be getting a
free appetizer, dessert, or discounted meal, which were advertised as possible “prizes”
inside the envelope.
We entered and saw that it was not at all crowded. The host, a young man, perhaps in his late
teens or early twenties, asked us how many were in our party (just the two of
us), made a series of marks on a list on his clipboard, and took us to a table
right in the middle of the restaurant, awkwardly sandwiched between three other
occupied tables. There were a lot of
other open tables nearby, including several preferred booths. After sitting, I quickly glanced over at my
daughter, and she looked at me, and we determined that we were going to be too
uncomfortable to converse with each other while other patrons were sitting just
a few feet away. Our server showed up
almost immediately, a young lady in her early twenties, and we told her our
dilemma, and asked if we could move to one of the open booths, several of which
were adjacent to our table. She said she
understood, and told us to hold on just a minute, as she needed to clear it
with our host. He happened to be passing
by at just that moment, and our server asked him, within earshot of Melody and
me, if she could move us to the booth nearest to where we were. He sighed, and said that it was in “Jared’s”
section, and she would have to clear it with him.
Now, I’m from the school of good customer service, and accommodating
a guest is just good business. Our
request to move was not out of the ordinary, and there seemed to be no issues
with over-crowding at the restaurant, and the server even volunteered to
continue serving us at the other table. But
the host’s reply struck a very negative chord in me, as if we were
inconveniencing everyone by wanting to move from a heavy concentration of customers
to an open table. His concern, I
reasoned to myself, was that it might unbalance the number of customers in each
of the server’s sections, and he didn’t want to make the change on his
carefully arranged clipboarded sheet of paper.
Either way, I immediately went into the “red,” stood up,
grabbed my jacket, and quite audibly exclaimed, “Okay, we don’t want to
inconvenience anyone. We’ll just leave!” And I headed for the exit, followed by my
suddenly surprised daughter. As I walked
away, I muttered about how ridiculous this was, and I couldn’t believe I was
walking out over this. As I reached the
host/hostess stand, a lady who I’m guessing was a management type,
asked, “What happened?” I said, very
loudly, “It’s apparently too difficult to change tables!” I said, flashing my
prize envelope so she could see this wasn’t our first visit to the restaurant. “We’ve been coming here for over ten years,
but you just lost a customer!” And we left.
I have never walked out of a restaurant like that in my
life. I was flush with emotion, and my
poor daughter looked at me like I was a crazy man. I immediately apologized to her, and told her
that I didn’t mean to ruin our evening.
We went back to our car. I told
her that I have never reacted like that before, never been so upset that I’ve
walked out of a place. She didn’t know
what to say to me, so she didn’t say anything.
I asked her to pick another restaurant, any place, something that she
liked. But we just sat there in silence.
I replayed the entire incident in my head, trying to figure
out why I reacted so uncharacteristically.
I am not one to fall so quickly into anger. However, given the current Federal Government
shutdown, which is directly affecting us, plus not receiving
a paycheck even while I continue to work to help maintain our National Airspace System, stress seems to be ruling my thoughts and actions, causing me to
have a short fuse, and I overreacted to something that wasn’t worth reacting
to. I normally would have been too
embarrassed to draw attention to myself in a situation like that, and my normal
reaction would just be to suffer in silence, even though I knew my daughter and
I both were very uncomfortable with the seating arrangement. But I flew off the handle and reacted.
I again apologized to my daughter, letting her know that I
was embarrassed by my reaction, and I promised her that we would return to the
restaurant in the future. I didn’t want
to sacrifice more than a decade of patronage at a favorite eating establishment
over one lousy incident. In addition,
since we are friendly with one of the managers, who has been there since they
opened (though she wasn’t there last night), we would likely have the
opportunity to talk to her about what happened.
Melody and I went on to have a very fine evening, completely
overshadowing our bad experience, and I didn’t dwell on what happened, like I
usually do. But it serves as a reminder and cautionary tale of the impact stress can have on our day to day actions. I will do better.
Have a great evening, everyone.
