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[noelbotevera]

Having spent the last six months working part- and full-time at a mom-and-pop Korean restaurant:

-People dining in at 8:30 when the restaurant closes at 9:00 and we're clearly sweeping the floors.

From my perspective based upon your comment, if you don't want people ordering food at 8:32 PM, then close the restaurant at 8:30 PM stating that the kitchen is closed. There are no-prep items available, and you can wait until last to remove and soak/sanitize the soft drink nozzles. I wouldn't chase the customers out for another half-hour though... that could affect the tip.

Yeah, isn't closing time usually the last time you can start something, not "get out now, we want to go home" time?

Huh, I never knew different restaurants did closing time differently. To clarify, we actually start wrapping things up by 8. Usually there's few people dining in and most are picking up orders (also soda is given in cans - not enough room for a fountain!). 9:00 is essentially "we're closed, and we MEAN it" because we've finished cleaning and taking out the trash and such. The latest I've stayed is 9:30 simply because I had to help pack away a bunch of kimchi and clean the containers used to brine and wash cabbage.
I actually don't serve that often - I'm usually on meal prep/dishes/cooking (with a gas stove). But the few times I have served, the stars align in such a way that I get the worst customers where dealing with them is like the Iranian hostage crisis. Check splits are annoying because I have to make two tickets and figure out who gets what - not easy when it's a big order, and it usually is. Luckily, I don't have to deal with drunks since it's a BYOB place.

[Scott5114]

I think what I would do in your position is arbitrarily assign one person as A, the next as B, etc. You can even come up with an arbitrary rule like "A is always the person closest to me on the left-hand side" or something like that if it helps. Then as I was writing down the order I'd put a small A or B or whatever next to whatever the person ordered (making sure to do so in such a way that the kitchen doesn't get confused by it). If they don't split the check, it doesn't matter and the markings can be ignored. If they do split the check, you know who had what.

[J N Winkler]

-People dining in at 8:30 when the restaurant closes at 9:00 and we're clearly sweeping the floors.

From my perspective based upon your comment, if you don't want people ordering food at 8:32 PM, then close the restaurant at 8:30 PM stating that the kitchen is closed. There are no-prep items available, and you can wait until last to remove and soak/sanitize the soft drink nozzles. I wouldn't chase the customers out for another half-hour though... that could affect the tip.

Yeah, isn't closing time usually the last time you can start something, not "get out now, we want to go home" time?

Either that or post separate times for kitchen closes and dining room closes; I've seen this several times though normally in places which switch from restaurant to club after 9 or 10 PM. I used to work until 11 PM, so it was normal for me to eat dinner late on my days off. It annoys me when I'm eating in a restaurant and it's not closing for thirty minutes yet workers start cleaning the floor all around you and glaring at you like you've committed some sort of horrible faux pas. It works both ways.

My personal bottom line is this:  if I show up at a restaurant expecting either takeaway or a sit-down meal and it is too late for it to be prepared without inconveniencing the kitchen staff, I want to know that up front so I can go elsewhere.  I do not want to be seated and offered drinks and a menu, and then simply be ignored until I get the message (as at a Pizza Hut where the staff were trying to close over an hour before their posted time), or have a food order rebuffed with the statement that only microwave reheatables are being served (as at a local-chain bar-and-grill restaurant).

On the other hand, I've come to realize there are often non-obvious reasons front-of-house staff are not straightforward about the non-availability of food.  These can be simple conflict avoidance (even though it is myopic to set the stage for greater conflict by leaving the customer to realize his or her time has been wasted), misguided corporate policies along the lines of "Don't let the customer ever hear No first thing in the door," or even not wanting to let an outsider into an impromptu decision to close early.

These days I usually try not to go looking for a sit-down meal too far outside the usual dinner hours of five to seven PM.  Even showing up at seven PM prompt can be cutting it fine on a Sunday in a small town.  If I'm on the road and cannot easily stop to eat in or near that window, I fall back to restaurant chains where 24-hour dining is an established part of the business model (like Denny's or IHOP), fast food, or packaged salads at Walmart.

[ethanhopkin14]

-People dining in at 8:30 when the restaurant closes at 9:00 and we're clearly sweeping the floors.

From my perspective based upon your comment, if you don't want people ordering food at 8:32 PM, then close the restaurant at 8:30 PM stating that the kitchen is closed. There are no-prep items available, and you can wait until last to remove and soak/sanitize the soft drink nozzles. I wouldn't chase the customers out for another half-hour though... that could affect the tip.

Yeah, isn't closing time usually the last time you can start something, not "get out now, we want to go home" time?

Either that or post separate times for kitchen closes and dining room closes; I've seen this several times though normally in places which switch from restaurant to club after 9 or 10 PM. I used to work until 11 PM, so it was normal for me to eat dinner late on my days off. It annoys me when I'm eating in a restaurant and it's not closing for thirty minutes yet workers start cleaning the floor all around you and glaring at you like you've committed some sort of horrible faux pas. It works both ways.

My personal bottom line is this:  if I show up at a restaurant expecting either takeaway or a sit-down meal and it is too late for it to be prepared without inconveniencing the kitchen staff, I want to know that up front so I can go elsewhere.  I do not want to be seated and offered drinks and a menu, and then simply be ignored until I get the message (as at a Pizza Hut where the staff were trying to close over an hour before their posted time), or have a food order rebuffed with the statement that only microwave reheatables are being served (as at a local-chain bar-and-grill restaurant).

On the other hand, I've come to realize there are often non-obvious reasons front-of-house staff are not straightforward about the non-availability of food.  These can be simple conflict avoidance (even though it is myopic to set the stage for greater conflict by leaving the customer to realize his or her time has been wasted), misguided corporate policies along the lines of "Don't let the customer ever hear No first thing in the door," or even not wanting to let an outsider into an impromptu decision to close early.

These days I usually try not to go looking for a sit-down meal too far outside the usual dinner hours of five to seven PM.  Even showing up at seven PM prompt can be cutting it fine on a Sunday in a small town.  If I'm on the road and cannot easily stop to eat in or near that window, I fall back to restaurant chains where 24-hour dining is an established part of the business model (like Denny's or IHOP), fast food, or packaged salads at Walmart.

I agree if your closing time is 9:00 and you really want to close at 8:30, make 8:30 your closing time.  I work until 5:00.  I don't get to start mailing it in at 4:30 because I am "shutting down".  Be upfront about these things.  Nothing is more aggravating than being somewhere during business hours, yet no one wants to serve you because they wanted to go home at closing time. 

[Scott5114]

Problem is that in a lot of these places the person who sets the closing time at 9:00 is not the person who wants to start closing at 8:30. Said person who sets the closing time at 9:00 (often with an eye to getting everyone off the clock by 10:00) may have no clue that closing duties take an hour and a half, probably because they've never actually had to close the restaurant themselves. In a particularly large chain, the person setting the closing time at 9:00 may have never even set foot in one of the stores they set policy for after 5pm and is more likely to hold a business or marketing degree than actual experience working as a cook, server, or dishwasher.

[zachary_amaryllis]

delivery minor thing:

customer : "yeah, i'm the 4th house out on the old blibbetyfuck road"

me : * looking on map for aforementioned blibbetyfuck road, not finding it, and realizing its now 'west county road something and hasn't been 'the old blibbetyfuck road' since 1952.
*asks customer for actual address

customer "i don't know. its just the 4th house"

me: *fumes

That's annoying.  Also annoying: Providing instructions on how to get to my front door from the street that are so detailed, they border on "take ten paces south, then take five paces east," only to have the delivery driver tell me they can't find it.

Also annoying: That woman who was an asshole to her third-party delivery service driver and went viral.

at least you use cardinal directions. some customers use 'right' or 'left', not considering that the address can be approached from more than one direction. better to use a description : "blue house with funny porch light" works.

[kurumi]

Regarding giving directions, here's Psychostick from 2009 (sorry, it's sexist):

[thenetwork]

One thing I've been noticing on radio and streaming internet music channels during the commercials is that the difference between the Lowe's and Home Depot commercials and the JCPenney/Macy's/Kohls ads are so homogenized, it is really hard to distinguish between their stores in their respective categories.

The background music is so generic, their ad copy pretty much is vague, concentrating on "xx% off throughout our store" and "earn extra bonus bucks this weekend" tag lines week after week.

When I was growing up, ad agencies would frequently come up with memorable jingles for a company used in every ad, and the ads would have a some sort of unique theme to each of them.  Kind of like the Liberty/Progressive/Geico insurance ads (Although I occasionally have trouble remembering which radio ad was Progressive's and which was Geico's -- again because there is no sung jingle or music signature.

[Scott5114]

That's probably because now that, thanks to Internet advertising, advertisers have access to actual honest-to-God data on what makes people buy and what doesn't...and the ad agencies have discovered that jingles, mascots, themes, and sitcom-esque scenarios don't actually move product. All of that is actually... clutter.

If you have 30 seconds to talk to a customer, you have to pack that time as densely as you can with the message you want the customer to actually receive. The window dressing doesn't actually communicate what you want the customer to do, or why they should do it. In fact, in some cases it can actually distract from the message.

Now, is message-focused advertising more boring? Sure. But ads aren't there to be entertaining, they're there to enrich the people who put them together.

[ethanhopkin14]

One thing I've been noticing on radio and streaming internet music channels during the commercials is that the difference between the Lowe's and Home Depot commercials and the JCPenney/Macy's/Kohls ads are so homogenized, it is really hard to distinguish between their stores in their respective categories.

The background music is so generic, their ad copy pretty much is vague, concentrating on "xx% off throughout our store" and "earn extra bonus bucks this weekend" tag lines week after week.

When I was growing up, ad agencies would frequently come up with memorable jingles for a company used in every ad, and the ads would have a some sort of unique theme to each of them.  Kind of like the Liberty/Progressive/Geico insurance ads (Although I occasionally have trouble remembering which radio ad was Progressive's and which was Geico's -- again because there is no sung jingle or music signature.

I take a nod from both the above campaigns.  I can't say any ad ever made me rush out and buy a product or go to the restaurant they are portraying.  I will give them maybe a hint of subliminal affect there, maybe, but I am stuck in my ways so I went to In-n-Out burger today, not because I heard the song, but because I wanted In-n-Out.

Now on the flip side, I think there is a huge reason why I can still do these things from the 80s-90s:

Sing the Folger's song (The best part of waking up, is Folger's in your cup)
Sing the Kentucky Fried Chicken song (Kentucky Fried Chicken, we do chicken right!)
Sing the number to Empire Carpet (800-588-2300 Empire!)
Sing the Michelob Light song (Michelob Light, oh yes you can!)
Do the Nestea Plunge
Sing the Zest song (You're not fully clean unless you're Zest fully clean)
Sing the Juicy Fruit song (Juicy Fruit is gonna move you.  It's like a song, it gets right to ya.  Juicy Fruit, the taste, the taste, the taste is gonna move ya)

There are way more to put on the list (not even talking about sitcom and gameshow jingles).  Whether or not I ever bought any of these products is irrelevant to the staying power those jingles have had in my mind.  A lot of it came from me being a lonely kid and jingles entertained me. 

[CtrlAltDel]

I can't say any ad ever made me rush out and buy a product or go to the restaurant they are portraying.

Well, no. This is almost never the objective of advertising, although it does happen every once in a while. It's all about the subliminals, or mental impressions that are by and large outside conscious control.

[formulanone]

That's probably because now that, thanks to Internet advertising, advertisers have access to actual honest-to-God data on what makes people buy and what doesn't...and the ad agencies have discovered that jingles, mascots, themes, and sitcom-esque scenarios don't actually move product. All of that is actually... clutter.

I'm not an advertising expert, but I think the concept of the jingle was a "long game"; get it stuck in your head and even to get others to occasionally say it (whether naturally or in jest). Psychologically, an advertisement wasn't there to get you to do something Right Now, but in time; it would imprint the message over time and parasitically implant it in a emotional way.

Maybe you took on some reflection before making a choice, or took some recommendations from those you knew, but you probably first encountered the brand or offer from the initial advertising. This way, when you needed it, you'd remember which plumber, breakfast cereal, repair facility, insurance company, or florist to use when you needed it. Or...look it up in the book of thin yellow-paper with lots of words, conveniently aaaaalphabetized.

Internet advertising works somewhat along those lines, but there's more immediacy (i.e. shock) because there's the assumption of bombardment by information and clutter, causing a low signal-to-noise ratio. It still works on repetition, but until recently, there wasn't the ability to pump in sound into an animated banner. You can get an ad in the message before playing a video, but the ads also have to be a lot shorter; one might only get 5 seconds before the message is skipped or entirely discarded. Since the "jingle" was almost always secondary -  occurring after the message - it was also supposed to be a "reminder" of the ad you just saw.

Maybe some well-established brands with a long-lasting jingle will stick with it, because they've seen some market research that people have a positive effect on the brand and people aren't totally annoyed by it. Of course, sometimes the shock value gets more people to pay attention; after all, there's a lot of "fear of missing/losing out" involved in grabbing your attention. I have heard a few brands use a short "ringtone" melody at the beginning of the ad. Honda does this, and I want to say a few others do to (but I can't think of any others offhand).

[J N Winkler]

A couple of new entries in the minor-annoyances file:

*  Large files that won't download 100% and cannot be resumed.  (I'm dealing with this right now with the National Roads Agency in South Africa--four files are involved, the smallest of which is 200 MB and the largest about 1.8 GB, and of course these are the ones that have the traffic sign drawings.)  Remote upload through a cloud broker (like MultCloud) used to offer a satisfactory workaround but now does so no longer.

*  Highway construction advertisements that mention the possibility of free anonymous download of the documents but don't have the plans attached.  (I've just run into this trying to find expressway construction plans for Sichuan province.)

[1]

On this forum: 3×3 and 4×4 roads. If they existed, they would have 9 and 16 lanes, respectively. They should be called 3+3 and 4+4 roads instead.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

That's why I use 2x3 and 2x4 (or 2*3 and 2*4) respectively. 2x2 and 2+2 (and for that matter, 2²) yield the same result.

Some minor things that really bother me when they happen to Big Rig Steve:
- Getting a red light (or no light at all), meaning one truck is forced to enter a weigh station (when it's open in the latter case), only to get instructed to go on the bypass lane. If you are doing that, better give a green light.
- Weight stations that are off the way. Extensible to American Truck Simulator, I once got fined in that game as I didn't show up to the weigh station near Cortez, Colorado as my route didn't take me past it (I was going from US 491 coming from Utah to US 160 East, the weigh station is located on US 160/491 South of that city both in real life and in ATS).

[webny99]

On this forum: 3×3 and 4×4 roads. If they existed, they would have 9 and 16 lanes, respectively. They should be called 3+3 and 4+4 roads instead.

There are probably at least a few examples of actual 3x3 and 4x4 roads. This section of ON 401 is a true 4x4.

3x3 is harder to find since it would require three reversible express lanes. This section of I-95 south of DC has just that, but the outer carriageways have four lanes each.

[Max Rockatansky]

People clinging to the notion that Michigan has the worst roads in the country. 

[interstatefan990]

Speaking of tips, I dislike when you take an Uber in a high-demand area at a surged price rate and the app still gives you options of 15%, 18%, etc. I always tip based on the normal rate, not the surged rate. If an Uber between two areas is usually 20 bucks, I'm tipping $3 on that route no matter how much the fare has been increased due to demand. The driver's effort and time is the same regardless.

[jeffandnicole]

Speaking of tips, I dislike when you take an Uber in a high-demand area at a surged price rate and the app still gives you options of 15%, 18%, etc. I always tip based on the normal rate, not the surged rate. If an Uber between two areas is usually 20 bucks, I'm tipping $3 on that route no matter how much the fare has been increased due to demand. The driver's effort and time is the same regardless.

No different than a restaurant where one meal is $10 and another is $20.  A water is free but a soda is $3.  Etc.

[interstatefan990]

Speaking of tips, I dislike when you take an Uber in a high-demand area at a surged price rate and the app still gives you options of 15%, 18%, etc. I always tip based on the normal rate, not the surged rate. If an Uber between two areas is usually 20 bucks, I'm tipping $3 on that route no matter how much the fare has been increased due to demand. The driver's effort and time is the same regardless.

No different than a restaurant where one meal is $10 and another is $20.  A water is free but a soda is $3.  Etc.

It’s more like if the restaurant decided there wasn’t enough pay for the waiters and reacted by charging $10 for the soda so they would get higher tips. Uber does it to incentivize more drivers to be out and about in order to meet periods of high demand, not because they incur a higher cost.

[formulanone]

Speaking of tips, I dislike when you take an Uber in a high-demand area at a surged price rate and the app still gives you options of 15%, 18%, etc. I always tip based on the normal rate, not the surged rate. If an Uber between two areas is usually 20 bucks, I'm tipping $3 on that route no matter how much the fare has been increased due to demand. The driver's effort and time is the same regardless.

No different than a restaurant where one meal is $10 and another is $20.  A water is free but a soda is $3.  Etc.

It’s more like if the restaurant decided there wasn’t enough pay for the waiters and reacted by charging $10 for the soda so they would get higher tips. Uber does it to incentivize more drivers to be out and about in order to meet periods of high demand, not because they incur a higher cost.

Look at this way, they're probably sacrificing their Friday and Saturday nights to serve you, instead of going out and having fun.

When I worked in various service industries, my gratuities averaged slightly higher during weekends.

[Scott5114]

Mobile phone cameras not actually rotating the image when the phone is rotated; they just put a flag in the file telling every application that uses the file from then on to rotate it 90 degrees. Then, of course, some applications don't do that, so your image looks correct in some situations but is rotated 90° from how it should be in others.

[J N Winkler]

Mobile phone cameras not actually rotating the image when the phone is rotated; they just put a flag in the file telling every application that uses the file from then on to rotate it 90 degrees. Then, of course, some applications don't do that, so your image looks correct in some situations but is rotated 90° from how it should be in others.

This is an old problem.  In the case of PDFs that serve as containers for bitonal CCITT Group IV TIFFs, it often leads to some pages drawing from left to right while others draw from top to bottom, which was really noticeable (and distracting) back in the days of slow GPUs and inefficient rendering routines.

[LilianaUwU]

Something that annoys me roads wise is when people use "interstate" to refer to any kind of freeway. Just because it's a freeway doesn't mean it's an interstate.

[1995hoo]

People who spell "Super Bowl" (correct) as "Superbowl" (incorrect). I’ve never understood this one. If you write "Superbowl," you should also write "Rosebowl" or "Orangebowl" or "Sugarbowl" (to say nothing of the sponsor-named games).