Is this the party to whom I am speaking?
What we have here is more than a communication problem: Why would a restaurant hire an employee — a front-of-the-house employee — for a job that requires answering telephone calls and not train the employee to provide the answers to basic questions?
In the last few days, I’ve spoken with three different restaurant employees — four, if you count the grumpy manager who insisted on putting on me on hold for long stretches of time — to ask a relatively simple question: “What hours does the dining room serve food?”
In all three cases, I might as well have been asking for the name of the capital of Pakistan. There wasn’t an accurate answer in the bunch — or even an attempt to be accurate. “I think we open for breakfast at 7 a.m.” one young lady told me, “but it might be 6:30 a.m. I guess I could ask someone.”
Well, I guess she could have. But she didn’t. Her responses were all, obviously, guesswork. When I asked if the dining room was open on Sunday, she giggled, “I don’t know.”
