Miscommunication at Work

As a waitress, I work as a medium for customers to get their orders...they tell me what they want, I send their order to the cooks, and the cooks make the food and give it back to the servers to give to the customers. Unfortunately, the line of communication does not always flow perfectly from customer to waitress to cooks to waitress and back to customer. Another component in the restaurant business is the host(ess), who seats the customers.

On days when the weather is nice enough, we have tables we seat outside on the patio. Each of the tables is assigned to a different server (it's very hit or miss whether or not people are going to want to sit outside on any given day) and when the host seats a table outside for the first time that day, he or she is supposed to inform the server that they have a table outside. However, it doesn't always work out that way.

One day, I was serving and I had a table outside. It was a slightly chilly day, so not many people wanted to sit out there. However, when it got busy, the host seated a man and his daughter outside at my table. The host forgot to tell me he had seated me, so I didn't know I had anyone out there. It was busy, so I was running around trying to take care of all of my indoor tables, not thinking I needed to go out to the patio. However, I tried to check outside every once in a while to make sure I wasn't missing anyone. I went outside and sure enough I had a table. I hoped that they had just been seated...but no such luck. I went to greet them, "Hi, my name is Cassidy and I'll be taking care of you today. Can I start you off with anything to drink?" They gave me their drink orders and then I asked if they wanted to order or if they needed a few minutes to look over the menus, to which they replied, "No, we don't need any more time to look over the menus. We had PLENTY of time to look them over while you were IGNORING us!" I was mortified, but apologized and took their order.

In this situation, there was miscommunication between me and the host. He was supposed to tell me that I had a table outside, but was either too busy at that moment or just forgot. However, the problem could have been avoided if I had kept a better eye on my outdoor table to make sure I wasn't ignoring anyone. I also could have asked another server with a table out there to let me know if they noticed my table being sat. I feel that I learned from that mistake and now try to check on my outdoor tables more frequently to avoid the situation repeating itself.