When you come to a fork in the floor...

While I'm on the subject of bad customer service, I need to give a rather loud "Huh?" to some of the situations I've encountered recently while eating out. I was at a restaurant where, for one reason or another, there was a fork on the floor. Now I don't know about the sandbox where these people lived, but in my house, if there's an eating utensil on the floor, you pick it up. So you can imagine my astonishment when not one, not two, not even three, but four members of the waitstaff walk by it, acknowledge it by looking down, and just keep right on going. Two of the four even kicked it, and still did nothing about it - our waiter included. Finally a young lady walks from the other end of the restaurant picks up the thing, and takes it to the back.

The other situations all revolve around one thing - the waiter/kitchen staff messing up an order. A handful of times in the past weeks something ordered isn't brought out right (or at all). On at least three of these occasions, our waiter has disappeared after this, never gracing our table again with his presence, sending the busboy over to clean off empty plates and do refills; twice, the waitress has accepted the food back, yet never apologized; and on at least one oh-so-memorable occasion, the waiter plopped the wrong order down in the middle of our table (despite being told nobody ordered that) and just walked off mumbling what sounded like "somebody f*%&ing ordered it."

My final words of whine are more general in nature and deal with one rather annoying aspect of eating out with large groups - the automatic gratuity. What makes the restaurants think that just because we're in a group greater than 6/8/10/12 their server is automatically deserving of a tip? Mind you, I seldom leave anything less than 15% - 20% is the norm - and rarely have left anything at 10% or below. It just rankles me when I'm at a place with a big group and have a server who is so inattentive that the entire table's drinks are empty, yet I know they're going to pad their wallet that night with the automatic 18% gratuity added on.