Bless Her Heart....

Bless her heart.....she was the most foolish, fumbling, incompetent waitress. Ever.

Now let me say, I waited tables for five years and have a pretty extensive patience threshold when it comes to servers, but this poor woman hurdled that line and kept running.

Mark and I sat down to what promised to be a lovely evening of good food and wine in a very cozy little Italian restaurant. Little did we suspect that our evening was about to hijacked. Once seated, we waited for a substantial amount of time (enough that we had chosen our wine as well as decided on what to order for the evening) before she even came to the table.

Finally she arrived. She approached the table with a very fixed smile on her face and her eyes so wide open that she might have been watching a horror film. When she greeted us her speech came out so stilted and scripted sounding that I actually thought she might have a nervous tic.

Hello. Sorry. you. had. to.....wait...so long. Can. I. take your drink. order?

We ordered our wine and sort of winced at each other as she walked away. After about five minutes she returned, still wide-eyed and still awkward.

"Your. wine. will. be right. up......I will. return.....with. some bread and. oil...and water."

(No nervous tic....just nervous crazy.)

She soon came back with our wine, two glasses of water and bread, but no oil. Upon what I can only imagine was her realizing her oversight she sort of slapped the end of our table and walked off again. At this point Mark and I were very bemused by her obvious greenhorn status and resulting crudeness.

A few moments more and she returned to the table with the oil and made the first of many bizarre comments.

"Here you. go. I would not expect. you. to. eat that."

We can only assume she meant that we wouldn't eat the bread without the oil, but we aren't sure. She then recited the evening specials to us while Mark and I tried with all of our strength not to burst out laughing as she butchered the words and continued to make strange commentary.

Mark ordered the three-cheese pizza. Her response to this was:

"Wonderful. That is our. best cheese...... made pizza. cheese. It is fabulous."

Yeah. I don't know.

So at this point her anxiety and cloddishness is actually beginning to make us quite uncomfortable. Fortunately, we were about to get a nice long reprieve from her. Unfortunately, this is because we waited for a long.....long......time for our food. This is also the juncture that we actually started looking covetously at tables around us with servers who were clearly doing wonderful jobs. This interval was interrupted at one point as she approached the table to tell us that "we shouldn't worry, our food was up in the window". Then she proceeded to talk to the table next to us for 10 minutes. Just as my annoyance was about to brim over onto a manager, a different waiter brought us our food, and we were only accosted by the painful floundering of our poor, clueless server (bless her heart) once while we ate.

This, at first, was a great relief as we could eat our meal and converse in relative peace. However, this relief turned to irritation when we had both finished our meals, pushed them to the middle of the table, and then sat there for probably another 15 to 20 minutes until she finally returned with yet another apology for keeping us waiting. The apologies at this point were becoming almost as obnoxious as her bad service. We were so anxious to be away from her that we decided to order dessert to go. I asked her for a tiramisu to-go and she repeated it back to me. We also asked her to box our left-over food.

10 minutes.

"Sorry. your food is. being. boxed. Don't. worry. I didn't. eat. it."

ummmm....okay.

10 minutes

Different waitress comes out with......

Two PLATES of tiramisu. I tell her that it was supposed to be ONE order TO GO.

5 minutes

"So. sorry. When you. told me. about it being to. go. it must. have gone....right. out my...ear."

She brings us two to-go boxes of tiramisu and tells us again that she is sorry and then says...I kid you not...

"Here is your tiramisu...it is kind of jacked up. I mean, there are two halves. a whole....and two halves...and like 2....for one...I'm sorry."

Mark then asks where our food is since it was taken away to be boxed up about 20 minutes ago and we haven't seen it since. She says it is still being boxed up and walks away. At this point we are laughing quite uproariously at this truly bizarre evening and laying odds that the food was thrown away 20 minutes ago.

We left the restaurant with two boxes full of tiramisu, our left-overs (to our surprise, they hadn't been thrown away, though there was a piece of pizza missing, strangely enough) and a renewed appreciation for the servers out there that know how to do their job and can make a dinner into a phenomenal evening.

Bless her heart...