Yesterday my husband and I went to one of our favorite pizza places. Its a quirky kind of place, with lime green walls and beadboard ceilings, band posters and funny faces and sayings on the tables. The music is always playing loudly...usually songs of local bands..songs I've never heard before. The servers walk around with shirts straight from the auto body shop down the street with names like Spock gracing their nametags. When you walk in, you just pick the table that works best for you. I'll argue with anyone that its the best pizza in the city with its sweet sauce and chewy..yet thin crust. They make their own salad dressings..such as tomato vinagrette (my personal fave)...and even offer cupcakes as dessert for a small donation.
On this particular day we noticed the parking lot was fairly full when we pulled up which was a bit unusual (not that the place is bad because its totally my favorite pizza ever).
When we walked in we were overwhelmed by the amount of people inside. The place is not very large. It has at most, around 15 tables. There was so much noise, we almost missed the sound of those local bands playing loudly over the speakers....which was also..very unusual since the music usually dominated our conversations. For the first time in over a year of frequenting our pizza joint, we had to wait for a table.
It wasn't long..maybe five minutes until we got a table. The table had not been cleared off from the previous tenants, but we weren't in a hurry and knew the girl would get to it as soon as she could. While waiting patiently at our table, we noticed the server walking around the large room quickly...rushing to get drinks to one table, and food to another. Was this girl left alone to serve 15 tables? Ten minutes passed and we realized she was super busy. We knew the drill..so we got our own drinks to try to help her out. We got our drinks and returned to our table just as a tray with drinks came crashing down next to the booth behind us. The lone server had dropped an entire tray of drinks on the floor. The ice flew in every direction and water splashed on my feet. Then......
The server started crying.
I could see her frustration as she dropped the tray to her side.
Then..the entire restaurant of customers went into action. One man went to get someone in the back to mop the mess up. Another man started grabbing plates to take back to be washed. Another man went to refill his own cup. Everyone went into survival mode almost. It was amazing to watch. In that moment, I was pretty proud...
In this world where people seem to think only of themselves. Its a now society. We want the best of things, we want them now and we are entitled to things.
Everyone saw how hard the girl had been working....and we all felt compassion toward her. She was doing a great job..as usual. We often had her as our server when going there. She finally got to our table after finding her composure.
We told her she was doing a great job and there was no rush. It was probably the longest meal we had ever had at our super famous cracker thin crust pizza joint, but it didn't matter.
When the girl came to bring us our check, she whispered..."I gave you your drinks for free because you were so nice to me."
We gave her that right back in extra tips. What a girl. She was overwhelmed...but she regained her composure really quickly. 5 or 10 minutes before we left, another man came in to work. It sounded like he had been called in because the girl apologized when he walked in. I've never seen such outstanding teamwork. He clocked in and went right to work helping her.
It is things like these that make me want to go back. It didn't matter that we didn't have a seat when we first walked in. It didn't matter that the table we finally got hadn't been cleared off yet. It didn't matter that we had to get our own drinks. It didn't matter that we didn't get our salad until half way through our meal. It didn't matter that our pizza was a little on the old side.
The fact that she took the time to notice that people were being nice to her....when she was too busy to even take a deep breath..showed a lot about her character.
So God bless you awesome pizza server girl. Maybe I'll stop by tomorrow just to say hi.
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