Hey Admin

[FailingEnterpriseAdmin]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Hey admin I need your help. Today i went to a expensive restaraunt and had a reservation for dinner. When I got there at 725 for my 7:30 reservation i was told a table wasnt ready! I had to wait almost 15 minutes!!!!! I mean I had a CONFIRMED reservation and there was no table for me!!!!!!! Then after finally getting seated i wanted to order a nice bottle of wine that wouldnt cost me to much. Well wouldnt you know it they didnt have the one i wanted but of course they offered one that was a little more expensive!! Now being as i am a anal person who cant deal with the fact that sometimes life doesnt go exactly to plan, i am furious!!!!!! How can i put my anal tendencies to best use and build a web site that not only voices my concerns about this establishment but also create rumor mill that accuses people of coke use and cheating on their families? I dont care if most of them are false I will allow myself to sleep at night by telling myself i only created the site for legitimate reasons

I like the restaurant analogy, but we need to make it more accurate.

Dinner at a restaurant owned by Enterprise:

I call a week in advance and make a reservation for two for Tuesday night at 7:30. The receptionist looks at the reservation book and sees that they're completely booked for the evening and have reservations for another two dozen people that they can't possibly squeeze in. Her manager listens in and whispers "book, don't look" and she tells me "No problem! See you at 7:30 on Tuesday!".

I arrive with my date at 7:30 on Tuesday. I announce that "We have a reservation" and she says "Would you like to have dinner at our sister restaurant around the corner for only $7 more per entree? It's a much nicer restaurant and I'm sure you'd be much happier there". We say no thanks. She offers another restaurant, one that totally doesn't meet our needs, and this one is "only $4 more per entree". We say no thanks again.

She looks at the reservation book several times. She talks to her manager. She looks at the dozen people in the bar already waiting for tables. She looks in the dining room and sees it's completely packed. She says to me "It will just be another minute or two; your table is almost ready!".

We wait and wait and wait, for 45 minutes. We have theater tickets and we're getting worried we're going to miss the show. Every time we ask, she says "They're clearing your table now!", but we never get seated.

We give up on seeing the show and they finally call our name after an hour. On the way to our table, the waitress explains that the restaurant has two coat rooms: the regular one, where sometimes coats get stolen or vandalized, and the staffed one, where you agree to have a $3.95 tip added to your bill and your coats will be watched and she "really doesn't want anything bad to happen to your nice-looking coats". We agree to pay it. The coat check girl high-fives the waitress.

At our table, our waitress explains that the restaurant has roving musicians and that if you don't agree to have a $19.95 tip added to our final bill, they might play off key, or play music we don't really like, or trip and fall onto our table and damage the table or glassware, or some other calamity that we really don't want to happen. Of course, if it were to happen, the restaurant would be forced to add an estimate of the charges to our credit card immediately, but we can avoid all this risk by simply agreeing to this charge in advance. We don't want any trouble, so we agree to pay it. The lead musician high-fives the waitress.

We have a look around our table. The table has a noticable lean to it. It smells like smoke and marijuana, the tablecloth is dirty and there is a condom, a dirty diaper and old french fries on the floor under our seats. We ignore them and keep smiling.

The busboy then explains that it's sort of crowded in here and he's afraid we might accidentally flick some food onto some other diner, causing expensive dry-cleaning bills, or trip and damage someone else's table and glassware, or even injure them, but for an $11.95 charge added to our bill at the end, he can make sure we'll never see any of those charges. We don't want any trouble, so we agree to pay it. The busboy high-fives the waitress.

Finally, it's time to order. We checked out their menu on the web, so we know what we'd like. Regardless of what we order, the waitress reluctantly informs us that the chef has announced they are out of that dish. After many questions and answers, we find out all they have left are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Fine, we say, we'll take two. My date's sandwich arrives with no peanut butter and mines arrives with a bite already taken out of it.

There's an already-opened bottle of wine on our table. It's only 1/3 full. The waitress explains that we can either purchase this wine in advance, or refill it ourselves somewhere else, but if we leave the table with less than 1/3 bottle at the end of the meal, they'll charge us $15/glass to refill it. But if we simply refill the whole bottle ourselves, we'll get no credit for it. And no, we can't start out with a full bottle of wine; they're too busy.

Before our food arrives, the steward demands to see my credit card and he put a $250 hold on it. The steward explains "Hey, the furniture's expensive here! What if you were to accidentally break something?".

When the meal is finally over, we pay our bill. It's over twice as much as we expected and we're leaving over an hour after we thought we would.

On my next credit card statement, I see that the restaurant has billed my credit card for an additional $1,900, claiming that I've eaten the same meal there every night for the past two weeks. It takes a month to sort this out and the problem was that we didn't "really" inform them that we were leaving when we left. They assumed we were still there and just kept billing me for all subsequent meals.

Two and a half months later, I get a letter from Loss Control demanding $2,200 for "damages" to the walk-in refrigerator that weren't discovered until 17 days after we left and weren't repaired until another two weeks after that. I later found out that thirteen other customers who've received the same letter, and five of them paid for the damage.

I call on the phone a dozen times to get things straightened out. Nothing doing. I go on their website to find the Customer Service telephone number, but it's been removed.

I build a website about them and two Vice Presidents come out to visit with me. They say "Well, sometimes you win, sometimes we win". They explain they lose money on the musicians. They keep repeating that they want me to be "completely satisfied" and they agree I've received horrible customer service. When I ask them if they're going to correct the obvious problems, they keep avoiding the issue. When they leave, they say "Well, we know what we need to work on" and I never hear from them again.

There, that's the way to tell the story if you want to use a restaurant as an analogy for Enterprise.

[gp65:(]

That is f***ing hilarious.

Of course, not ALL of the analogies work, but they are all crazy funny.