Trying Too Hard

So I’ve blogged before about my Tuesday ritual (Tuesdays) of doing a kickass session in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, followed by a big chow down at a little place called “The Flying Biscuit”.

Well, obviously all these Tuesday’s have made us regulars at our breakfast haunt and so we have developed a preference for the table we like to sit at and the server we enjoy most. James is his name. But James had been missing the past few weeks. We had no idea what happened to him. Did he leave? Was he fired? It was all a mystery. A mystery that could easily have been solved by simply asking the other severs if he still worked there. But where’s the fun in that? Frankly I prefer the thrill and suspense of walking in every week and scanning the restaurant, from way up on my tippy toes, to see if he is around. Then once we discover he’s not, we can waste a good 5-10 minutes bitching about the fact and get ourselves mentally ready for the substitute server. Who we prejudge as not being great, simply cos they are not James.

But yesterday, James was back. Cue the heavenly music and the laser beams of sunlight. We were so happy. The funny thing is, that up until yesterday, James had no idea he was our favorite server. But we were so relieved to see him that we decided to share. This is where the problem began. I think our sharing of information has put James under some sort of server performance pressure, cos he immediately began trying. Trying to come up with interesting “I care about my customer” questions. Catching bits of our conversations and popping in with his own spin on things. And hovering. He began to hover around our table, checking in with us way too much.

I have to say we were a little disappointed. The reasons we loved James was that he use never do all this stuff. He always greeted us as his regulars, knew our order and just got it started, was friendly without being invasive and didn’t hover over us as we ate like hungry savages.

Poor James, what have we done? We appear to have turned the perfect server into the type of sever that must be avoided. My fear now is that the pressure to play the part of and live up to his new label will eventually break him. What a shame, for all of us.