I hate the word, "customer".
This hasn't always been a thing, I used to sling the word around at work almost as often as I dropped "fuck" and "shit" in the kitchen (Restaurants are wonderfully lenient, vocabulary-wise). For the longest time, people who came to where I worked were just faceless annoyances that helped keep me employed.
And then I started reading about fine dining restaurants in magazines. I visited a couple, to see what the big deal was. I thought of myself as a customer. But setting foot into those establishments, heinously underdressed in some instances? I was shocked. Not by the portion to price ratio, I expected that, but by how... welcomed I felt. I fully expected to be greeted with disdain, pretentious attitudes, annoyance. It's what I would have done back then, had I been in my server's shoes. I was always dining solo, my tip certainly wasn't going to make any significant difference in their earnings. I never got that blowback. Every time, I was greeted with grace, friendliness, and dignity. They took what could have been an awkward, stiff experience, and made me feel like I had been a regular for years. The sensation stuck with me. I wondered, how did they accomplish that and I couldn't? How were our restaurants so different?
I had to know. I had knowledge, and I was sick of working shitty sports bars. I needed to know I could do better. I wound up working at a Spanish wine bar with a service manager named Sean.
Sean is a larger than life personality, with a laugh to match and more blue checked shirts than is really reasonable. And he is the modern-day Dionysus, always ensuring anyone who encountered him had a smile. He had one steadfast rule, that anyone who crossed the restaurant threshold was a guest, NOT a customer. He felt that thinking of a person as a customer was too impersonal, and we were here to curate an experience for people. We were told to treat every table as if they were, in fact, guests in our home.
It brings a whole new aspect to people-watching thinking that way. And it turns what could be a very rote experience and makes it far more enjoyable. Guests become more accessible, more approachable from the server's perspective. And they pick up on that sentiment, and respond in kind. It creates a more jovial atmosphere all around, and it is the entire reason I have yet to get bored with my current job. I no longer work with Sean, but he did me a huge favor helping me adjust my mindset.
