Tonight me and my mum and bro went out to the movies. Nope, that's not the bad service. The bad service was that after we bought our tickets, we thought, we had an hour and a half to kill, let's go and get a nice dinner at the restaurant located next to the cinema complex.
We are seated in the very large, and very empty restaurant by 7pm, (I counted 6 other small 3 person groups seated in the restaurant area) we ordered our drinks (2 sprite and 1 coke) and then waited. For fifteen minutes. I figure, okay, they're just ignoring us seated in the corner. It takes three goes and a very loud ''excuse me'' to get one of the waitresses over to take our order from the menu. Our drinks arrive, 2 cokes, 1 sprite, so we just changed the extra over no problem.
We then waited for around forty minutes, just drinks on our table trying to catch a waitresses eye to ask where our food was. After an hour, a waitress came over, apologised and said that our order had not been put onto the computer, could we order again and she'd put a rush on it. Me and mum are a little bit irritated at this point, but repeat our order and the girl goes off. She comes back, tells us it will be twenty minutes, my bro points out that we've got a movie in half an hour. Basically, the waitress skirted around the fact that it was her fault, for forgetting to put the order into the computer. I could understand, if she had noticed earlier, but letting us sit there for an hour or so was just plain bad service. We DID try to flag the other waitresses down, but were ignored.
Food came out in about fifteen minutes, no surprises there. We'd been sitting for an hour and fifteen minutes by now. :(
The bacon was cold for my burger, and the mince in the hamburger buns was barely cooked all the way through. (speaking germ wise, mince meat should always be cooked all the way through due to the bacteria through it.) Mum is also a very slow eater, and because they didn't have what she originally wanted, she got stuck with a very salty vegetarian lasagna type thing. She took maybe three bites out of if, and then didn't touch it. (Mum needs a good deal of time to eat her food slowly otherwise she gets sick.)
I could understand the lack of service in a busy night, where a restaurant was filled to capacity, but there were eight other tables, most of which were filled after we arrived.
When we came up to pay, the waitress who was serving us was standing behind the manager at the till. Understandably, the manager did not want the waitress involved, and told her to just go away and she would ''deal with it.'' the conversation between my mother, and the manager was quite rude on the managers part, with shrugging, eye rolling and a very big ''not my problem attitude.'' (The manager did say this at one point to us.) She told us we should have come to her with our complaints first off, (how were we to know to do that? the waitress who took our first and second orders said nothing along those lines. It was the first time we had eaten there. We were paying customers just expecting our meal to be given to us within a reasonable time.
Mum pointed out that she only wanted to be compensated for the meal she did not eat because of the slow service, and lack of the meal being put through the ordering computers. And the manager finally agreed after being asked if she was the manager in charge, and what her name was. (Because I was clearly willing to go over her head if she would continue to be rude.) After all, it's not our responsibility to order the food, and then ensure it's put into the computer, it's the waitress who served us! Who clearly buggered up. The managers overall tone, and attitude towards my mum who is a very small, polite woman was rather surprising. Considering if I had rolled my eyes, shrugged and given a general ''not my problem'' attitude to any unsatisfied customer, I'd get fired so fast my shoes would spin.
Basically I was fairly unimpressed with the lack of service in the DEAD restaurant at 7-8pm, and then the rude attitude of the manager.
tl:dr: restaurant takes an hour to discover the order for our food hasn't gone through, manager gives my mum grief over wanting her meal for free or some sort of discount for the total inconvenience (and FAIR ENOUGH for my mum too.)
But, on the plus side, we made it into the movie for the trailers.