Dialogue: Cafe service with a snarl

I was snarled at again - I presume merely for existing - by so-called staff behind the counter of a Ponsonby cafe last week.

Actually, I am getting a little tired of rude and petulant service staff. They add less to their country than they think.

They tell too many people off. I'm not quite sure why they've got it in for everyone. I have waited tables in my life and probably will again. The point I clung, and cling, to is that it's really not that bad.

The most obvious mistake that the cafe made was not securing sufficient staff to work the morning of New Year's Day - a problem compounded by the fact that the ones who had made it in appeared to be still sleeping off their New Year's Eve.

The second mistake was assuming that its clientele wanted to hear about the first. Staff made a point of trying to excuse, rather than hide, or indeed correct, their incompetence - a particular bugbear of mine.

"I'm sorry that we're being so slow, but we're just rilly, rilly busy today," one of them whined when, after waiting half the morning for a waiter to make even an exploratory pass by our table, we asked who you had to sleep with to get same-day service.

"I'm rilly, rilly sorry. Someone will be with you in just a minute. We're just rilly, rilly busy." Yap, yap, yap.

I hate it when staff do this - fill the moments in which they should be taking your order by telling you that the reason they are not taking your order is that their cafe goes to pieces when confronted with custom.

Only New Zealand service-industry folk seem to think that this is acceptable - that it is acceptable, as a waiter, say, to let customers know that your establishment cannot get organised into dealing with a full house.

It's fantastically subversive. Staff who say this sort of thing are telling you that the place in which you're about to eat is a perfect shambles behind the scenes and that management has never seen the point of a best-case-scenario roster.

I wonder whether, as a customer, I need to hear this. Certainly, I wonder whether I need to hear it as often as I do. I am forever hearing restaurant staff delivering themselves of lines like "It'll take a while to serve you because we're busy tonight," and other fantastically uninteresting disclaimers.

I have never understood why staff think I care. The truth is that I don't care. I don't care if your kitchen is on fire and your chef has overdosed and your waitresses are illiterate.

I just want my food, and I want it delivered to me with the least possible dialogue about the thrills and spills of life in the kitchen.

The final mistake that the woman behind the counter made was telling me off in a very loud and screechy voice when I asked if we could split the bill according to our (four rather poor) meals, rather than pay the bill as one.

"No," shrilled the witch, flailing about in horror. "We don't do that. Look - it says that on the menu. Anyway, we're too busy today."

Hmm. Like I say, I could not really give a damn about them being busy. I really hope that nobody tries that line on me again. I hope they don't try it on anyone else, either. People remember bad service.

I was thinking about all this on a recent trip down to Wellie on the train. It was full of tourists and I took the opportunity, as I often do when thrown in with foreigners, to ask what people thought of New Zealand.

People inevitably answered this question in two parts. Like most visitors here, they complimented New Zealand on its environment, and its scenery. They commented on the service they had received - at hotels, at restaurants, at the places at which they had been spending their money.

One woman, from England, was very impressed by our service industry. She was travelling to Wellington from Auckland and had found people helpful and her travel connections easy to make.

"Everything works," was the way she put it.

An American was less complimentary. He spent most of his trip complaining about the standards in his Auckland hotel. He did not seem to think that a trip to New Zealand was money well spent.

Pity, we need that money.