Thursday, October 22, 2009

A small lesson in customer service

I went to a tiny little restaurant/bar tonight with three friends. We sat at a high top table in the bar area, ordered drinks and $1 tacos. We were having a lovely time, until they turned the music up so loud that we were shouting at each other from 1.5 feet away.

I've been in bars where the music was this loud, but it was usually a very big, very full bar, and it was somewhere between the hours of 10pm and 2am - this was a small bar and it was not even 8pm.

Also, 99% of the patrons in the bar were there to either watch the ALCS game or the Caps hockey game - so no one cared about the music.

When it got to a deafening level we asked the bar tender if he could please turn down the music - the speakers were right above our table and it was awful. He obliged for about a minute, then came back and said "you guys are the only ones in this place that want the music turned down, I'm pretty sure everyone else wants it loud."

Wow. There were no more than 20 others in the bar area and 20 of them were there to watch a game of some kind, none of them were there for the music.

So I did what any good, annoyed patron would do. I borrowed $2 from the girls and went to the jukebox.

For the next 20 minutes the only music blasting in that bar was Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, Ricky Martin, and O Town.

And it was the first time that anyone else in the bar noticed the music.

I hope I made the bar tender mad, I hope he remembers me next time I go there for $1 tacos, and I hope that the next time someone asks him to turn down the music because it is at a deafening level he'll listen.

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