Service

We went to Giardini’s for lunch yesterday*. I had a chicken caesar salad, while M had a BLT. I really like the dressing Giardini’s use with their caesar salads, and they just generally put it together well. The lettuce tends to be of good quality, and everything as a whole tastes fresh. The only time I’ve had a bad  caesar salad at Giardini’s was the time there was what seemed like a whole 50g jar of capers tipped into the salad. I spent most of that meal picking the capers out. Yesterday there were only four or five capers in the whole plate, which to me is just the right number of the little buds.

While the meal itself was fine, I found the service a bit irritating. The waiter who served us called us Darl, Love, and Sweetheart everytime she spoke to us. She was efficient enough, but all those endearments grated on my nerves after the first sentence she spoke. As we were leaving, she actually came up to me and put her arm around me very briefly, and said “Thanks darl!” Coming from someone I had never seen before, will be most unlikely to see again (we don’t go to Giardini’s that often, and they have a reasonable turn-over of staff), and with whom my only interaction was a very specific type of customer-waiter exchange, it was a bit strange and offputting.

I didn’t complain, even though the manager was the one who took our money, but it would probably have been easier to complain if the service had been indifferent. I would have felt churlish to have made a fuss, given that she was being friendly. Other people might have even liked it and said she was showing that she cared, but I think you can still care about the experience your customer has without hugging them. Imagine if I patted a student on the back or gave them a hug every time they learned how to find the online version of a journal, or called the Professor of Global Economics “Sweetie” the next time he rang to talk about the Library buying access to a particular database, or called the security guy “Darl” whenever I rang him to remind him to change the lock settings on the Library door…

Edit 8:42am: See also the Sydney Morning Herald’s take on this so-called Sweet Talk.

Categories: food, annoyance, people

*Yesterday was M’s birthday, so we both took the day off. It’s always good to have an excuse to have a day off from work, and what better excuse than a birthday? I plan to take my birthday (in October) off too. In fact, come to think of it, I haven’t worked on my birthday for about 5 years now.

Given that yesterday’s theme was A Day Off, I didn’t follow my usual routine – didn’t blog, and I slept in – got up at 6am! You must be rolling your eyes at my extreme sluggishness, huh? 😉 I was somewhat tempted to just lie there and get up whenever, but I couldn’t get over the feeling that I was just letting the time waste away, and in any case there was no point in sleeping when I wasn’t feeling particularly tired. I did have a nap in the afternoon though, after we got home from lunch and shopping (M’s been looking for a new monitor for his PC). Baubles the Cat, opportunistic and ever on the look-out for a warm spot, joined me on the sofa bed, and it was so warm and cosy I could have lain there for hours. (Actually, I did!) She is pretty smart – she is not allowed on the sofa bed as it is meant for our guests, some of whom are allergic to cats, but she must have realised that I was sleeping and not likely to push her off for a little while, so she hopped on. Also, I am a pushover – M would probably not have let her get away with it!