Grace Community Christian Church

 

Archived Things Above

Red Robin Service (5/28/09)

The hostess warned us as soon as we walked in to the Red Robin Restaurant at Charlottesville, Virginia. "This is graduation weekend, so please forgive us if we're a little slower tonight." Fair enough. College town. College workers. Most want to be out with friends & family. Not a problem. We appreciated the heads up & set about lowering our expectations of the service we'd be receiving.

Except that they really weren't that crowded. And the manager flitted about from the serving area to the bar, but didn't appear to be doing much else. He was having apparently good conversations with several of the staff, but when after 45 minutes our Towering Onion Ring hadn't appeared, we both began to squirm a bit.

But what really rubbed my rhubarb was all the un-bussed tables. There were five in our area alone. For over an hour, nothing was removed from them. Not a glass. Not a fork or knife. Half-eaten hamburgers just sat there, making faces at us. French fries grew cold. A napkin stayed on the floor where some kid had dropped it. For over an hour, at least four different servers and the manager walked by these tables, but not a single one ever thought to grab at least one item to take to the back.

Now, granted, I'm not the most patient person in the world. And you already know I don't handle disappointment real well. But I'm working on these things. At least I'm aware of them, and I've made it clear that it's OK for you to call me out when it looks like I'm about to overreact (I so much prefer that term to "sin"!) in these areas. But when Kim slammed her hand on the table and announced, "This is ridiculous!", I knew I wasn't being unreasonable after all.

The food finally showed up, & it was good. (The Towering Onion Ring somehow got forgotten in the rush, but at least our server took it off the bill.) I tried to assess what had just happened, and two things struck me:

1. The crew was off their normal game. Normally, the place would have been hopping with customers and plenty of staff. In a busy environment, everyone would know what to do. They'd be too busy doing their jobs to have time to chat and ignore messy tables. Somehow, the manager had permitted an atmosphere of "It's graduation weekend, so we don't have to be on our A-Game" mentality to creep in. I've worked lots of other jobs besides ministry, so I understand how that can happen in a work environment.

2. The "It's not my job" syndrome prevailed. All those people walking by all those messy tables. Do you know how long it takes to bus a table? Probably less than two minutes. That's remove everything into a plastic bin, wipe it down and reset the salt and pepper. Two minutes! Yet for over sixty minutes, those tables didn't get touched. New customers had to walk by them, and we had to look at them the whole time. Would it have killed someone to simply notice, and take some initiative, and not care whether or not it was "someone else's" job? And why wasn't the manager leading by example on this one?

Churches are a lot like restaurants. We're both in the service industry. There's lots of jobs to be done that nobody necessarily notices, until they don't get done. It's easy to forget why we're here. It's easy to expect someone else to do stuff. It's easy to settle for mediocrity, or worse. It's actually easier in the church because nobody's getting paid. How do you insist on excellence or caring from a volunteer? Heck, most of the time you're just glad someone showed up. Now you want something from them?!

Except unlike Red Robin, the church provides spiritual food that feeds the soul. The church provides community that encourages and nurtures and lifts and comforts. The church helps people reconnect with God and each other. So we give it our best effort. Every single time. And we do whatever needs to be done, every single time. Because everything we do here, matters.

I can understand Red Robin lowering their standards. But the church? I just don't get that.


Jim Dewar --