Gratuity Comes In Many Forms

Let me start by introducing myself. I am a handsome and polite young man, and I am a waiter at a restaurant in Manhattan. I've pretty much reached the point where I hate what I do, but thanks to my parents, I have a nice work ethic and I still do my best at my job.

So anyway, things have been relatively slow in the early evenings lately, and then picking up around 8 or so and getting busy until about 10pm. This was the case this past Friday night. Around 7 pm or so, I saw that I was having a 2 top sat in my section, so I immediately grabbed 2 menus and went over to greet them. When I arrived at their table I saw that it was two black women probably in their mid 30's (* I don't know how everyone else is planning on writing these entries, but I'm probably going to mention the race and gender of the people I'm talking about, because I think a lot of times race and gender and age of customers are all factors that can determine how the experience is going to go, not always but a lot of times).

These women were very pleasant, and since it was early in the night I was able to give them all of the attention that they needed. They ordered a couple drinks, looked over the menus, had a couple questions for me, and then placed their orders. The food came out not too long after, their water glasses were kept full and they declined to order more drinks. I checked in with them a few minutes later and they said that everything was great. They finished their meals and then asked for the check. I brought the check to them, and we always include a to-go menu and some other stuff with the check, one of the things we include is a comment card.

So I ran their credit card for them, and they left a few minutes later. I went to the table to pick up the credit card slip, and I saw that they had filled out the comment card. So I picked up the slip and comment card and brought them to the back wait station. I looked at the slip and saw that they had decided to leave me $10 on a $109 check. Not even 10 fucking percent. Now I'm dreading looking at the comment card because I'm assuming it's gonna be some rant about how bad the service and food was, just picking any excuse to be mad and leave a shitty tip, and this sucks because I have to turn all comment cards over to my manager. I look at the card and all it said was "Service was Excellent".