late tables and tipping

ok.  lemme break this down for you.  just because we're open until 9 (or ten.  or midnight.  it doesn't matter.) DOES NOT mean it's okay to come in at 8:56.  i don't understand this thinking.  if best buy closes at ten, they don't let you in at 9:55 to spend forty five minutes looking at tvs.  if the grocery store closes at midnight, then you can't go in there at quarter to twelve and spend an hour shopping.  IT'S NOT ALLOWED.  so why then, in the restaurant biz, does 9:55 mean "they're still open!" as opposed to "shit, they close in like five minutes"?  i don't get it.  at my place we have people coming in after the open sign is off and just sitting down.  even though there's no other customers and the waitress is mopping and i'm standing there with my fucking keys in my hand.  wtf?  on tuesday night (which is all you can eat spaghetti night...more on that later) we had a 12 top come in at about 8:15.  we started closing at nine last week.  so forty five minutes before closing, ok, i can handle that.  except that those people didn't order for twenty five minutes.  and in the meantime we got like three four tops and a few two tops.  so tammy was the only server, and was running her ass off, and ended up having to put most of the orders in at once at about ten minutes to nine.  so most of the food came up right around nine when we were closing.  whatever, just eat fast.  only nobody gave a shit that we were now closed...boy, they got there when we were still open!  i mean, don't hurry to eat and leave, it's not like any of us have families we want to get home to.  and tuesday is the one night a week i barely get to see my wife because i close the place, and i was all excited because we're back on fall hours and i was going to get an extra hour to go home and hang with the wife. 

BWA HAW HAW HAW!!!

fucking customers....

oh, and the spaghetti....well, first off i burned the sauce heating it up, and absolute rookie mistake, but my boss was talking to me and i got sidetracked.  anyway, if you ever burn spaghetti sauce, don't throw it away!  put a lump of peanut butter in it and wait a few minutes...you wouldn't believe how well that works...i thought i was going to have to throw six gallons of spag sauce away (very expensive) but a dollar's worth of peanut butter fixed the whole thing.  dig that!  if you don't have peanut butter, however, you're probably fucked.