Having turned our clocks back an hour last night, I woke up an hour earlier and decided to utilise this precious extra imaginary time to write a quick one here. And this was after figuring out what the real time was. Back in the old days you made a mental note, got up in the morning and simply adjusted all clocks and watches accordingly. Now that many of them change automatically, you really are not quite sure which is the right time as some say one thing and some another.

I remember once when we were still running the restaurant we had a late night party on the same night in October and were running an open bar. The organiser somehow incredulously expected us to run the bar for an extra hour for free, as it started at midnight and when at 3am it became 2am again, he didn’t want to be charged in real time, but in clock time! I initially thought he was joking and had a good laugh, but no, believe it or not, these people do exist.

His main argument was that this was simply our bad luck and that if we had any business sense we would ensure that we book up a similar open bar event at the end of March, when we move our clock forward and then charge the poor sod for an extra nonexistent hour.

Now I am not usually a violent man….. no actually my look was enough to firmly finish that argument. Nice try I thought to myself, but fat chance you have in shoving that one down my throat.

But the cheek of some people can at times be astounding, and running a restaurant is one of those situations which exposes you to a lot of such antics, which are cheeky, mean, yet often humorous.

One of the most common forms of cheekiness is the free drink stunt, practiced by many. You offer a complimentary after dinner drink to say a table of four, the men are game but the women aren’t. So immediately you notice the men nudging, winking and kicking their poor spouses under the table and sure enough it so happens that the spouses purely accidentally want the same drink as their husbands. Cheap and obvious you might think, but wait, that is really nothing.

There are others who have their meal, ask for coffees, get the bill, proceed to pay and only then, very strategically ask for a round of liqueurs. And if you so much as even hint that they are going to be charged, they will in all probability snap back at you that you will never see then again. At which point you must really bite your tongue, which is not one of my better skills I must admit, and refrain from screaming back the word “Good!”.

I am a great believer in taking away with you what you have not managed to eat on site. Both my wife and myself are not big eaters, and we very often end up leaving much on our plate, simply because we are full. We also happen to have seven dogs, three cats and a goldfish, so anything we can cart home with us is also much appreciated by our pets, although the goldfish doesn’t really appreciate very large bones.

There is absolutely nothing wrong either, in my books, in taking away the remains of a bottle of wine which you prefer to finish later. Especially if there is quite a bit left in the bottle. But we did have the odd scrounger who also wanted to take something like a sixth of a bottle of water away, the bread and the butter too, on the premise that if it were put on the table, then it was his to eat on site or to take home. But probably the worst of all in the take home department, and I kid you not, were a table of regular luncheon clients who after having eaten their salads, always insisted to take home their lemon segments, albeit these already being squeezed, as in their own words these would come in handy with their afternoon tea and some juice was always left in them, finishing off with their magnificent words of wisdom – waste not want not. Our initial disgust eventually turned into humour, you just have to laugh at the absurdity of these situations.

But we also regularly faced much viler practices where certain clients even cheated their fellow diners, including friends and family. One thing to watch out for when part of a large table, and someone in your party very – or should I say overly eagerly, takes over payment procedures with quite a passion. They insist that a good tip is left by all, which with a big table could of course add up to quite a lot. They then take the money themselves to the cash point, pocketing most or all of the tips themselves. Yes! We did see this happen on many an occasion.

We had a couple of others who regularly brought us customers, and with whom we had worked in a commission on every meal, normally a percentage on the total amount. I find this fair and standard practice when dealing with their contacts, tourists and other recommended diners. But when then they bring their parents for a birthday meal, or on Mother’s Day or a similar occasion, it is not them who pay for the meal, but say their parents themselves, and as they walk out they tell their parents, oops I forgot something inside the restaurant, I’m just off to fetch it, be back in two minutes….. Yuck, you can imagine what they come back in for! If they simply asked for their commission to be deducted from the bill to save their parents a few bob then fine, that I can understand. But the standard excuse with us at least was that they didn’t want to show the sort of arrangement they had with us for whatever reason, so they would use the commission to buy a gift or something for their parents. Yeah sure they are, we always thought…

Then of course you have the compulsive nicks, who purely and simply cannot go out without pinching something or another which is entirely useless to them, but of great use and expense to the restaurant. Anything goes – cutlery, ashtrays, glasses, table numbers, whatever comes their way. In most cases they will probably chuck this out anyway after a few days, but collectively it naturally costs the restaurant a considerable amount of money and is a totally dumb and ghastly habit.

We saw this in a very big and openly cheeky way when we had late night parties. It is fashionable for certain people to walk away with their drink, glass and all, thinking this makes them look cool. In this manner they also drink on their way to their next drinking hole, lest they dehydrate or rather sober up on the way. And many also seem to think that they have every right to do so, as it is customary in certain circles. What they do not realised is that if you use nice glasses these very often cost more than the drink they paid for. So it is ludicrous for the establishment to let it happen. There are certain places where many bars are located next to each other, and patrons move from one to the other bringing their glasses along, which should automatically level out between the bars, and that I can understand. But this certainly wasn’t our case, so at the end of each party, along with another staff member, I used to stand just outside our establishment and literally fight and run after people to get their glass back, usually resulting in dozens of retrieved glasses.

On the subject of pinching stuff, I did this once myself, purely out of fun and in one of my madder moments! Yes wait for it… I was still living in France many years ago and was at a nightclub with some friends, in Valence just South of Lyon, I remember. For some reason we were discussing this same very subject and some of us there were showing off about the various items they had lifted from different establishments, when they started mentioning some of the larger items they had managed to move. These were mainly large bottles of wine or spirits. So fuelled by alcohol and egged on by my friends, I was dared to try and beat this there and then. Yes, I fully admit that these sort of things always end up revolving around naughty and incorrigible moi. So in my mad alcohol and adrenaline induced state, I simply stood up, lifted the very large armchair I was sitting on, which was a full sized, mini sofa type one, and simply walked out of the club with it in my arms, as my mates watched incredulously, mouths wide open.

I make it all the way outside, passed assorted club personnel and decide to wait for my mates by placing the armchair right in the middle of the establishment’s rather large car park, with me sitting comfortably in it, facing the entrance, in all my pride and glory. They all streamed out laughing hysterically and shouting and clapping, and in my opinion it must have been this that gave me away. Sometimes when you do even the oddest of things, but very naturally, in the open and in plain sight of others, everyone automatically assumes that there must be a valid and perfectly explainable reason for it. And I believe that this is how I got away with it.

But my friends were making such a massive row that they obviously caught the attention of the staff and well, let’s face it, me sitting their at around 3am on one of their sofas right in the middle of their car park, might also have been a bit of a pointer for them.

Perhaps pulling this stunt at a nightclub was not the best of ideas, as the two staff members who came out for me were about the biggest and meanest looking security personnel I have ever encountered. Without even saying a word and before I could even have a go at some ridiculously redeeming story, they simply picked me up, sofa and all and tossed me off it so high and far off that I literally bounced off a large plastic skip onto the hard surface below. I wonder if that is why they call them bouncers in the first place…

But to return to our restaurant in Malta, we had to bear the brunt not only of cheeky customers, but also at times, of nasty staff members. The very worse incident of this type happened with a new dishwasher who was working on his first shift. So we show him the ropes, set him up comfortably at one of the sinks and off we go to serve that evening’s customers, following which of course, all crockery and cutlery end up in the hands of our new Einstein.

When you know a place very well, through your constant and longstanding presence, you tend to hone in very easily on anything out of the ordinary, be it something visual, auditive or even olfactory. In this case there was something clearly auditive which caught my attention. It was only a little click or chinking sound, made by hitting metal with metal, which I heard every so often, which I was not in the habit of hearing.

So I follow the sound and realise that it was coming from the dishwashing area. I walk in quietly and as the dishwasher had his back to the door, he didn’t see me come in. I observe him for a while and much to my intense horror and disgust, I realise exactly how that sound was being produced. This flipping genius saw it fit with all the cutlery that came into his hands, to wash one piece of cutlery and chuck the next one into the large bin next to him!!! So he washed every alternate one and trashed every other! I watched in amazement, desperately searching my brain for some sort of logical explanation. I simply couldn’t come to terms that this anus of a human being was actually discarding half my cutlery and tried desperately to come up with any other possible reason why he was doing this.

After having watched the process time and time again, I finally went up to him, tapped him on the shoulder and asking him what the hell he was doing, in exact words I will not repeat right here. I look inside the bin and there is a massive pile with many dozens of forks, knives and spoons pilled up inside it. I can also confirm that this putrid hemorrhoid of a man was engaged with us very incidentally only days after I had just upgraded all the restaurant cutlery, costing me several thousand Euros, each individual piece of course costing several Euros on its own.

And here now comes the cherry on the flipping cake! You will simply not believe what this horrid ape told me. His stared back at me unashamedly and said “Pfff just cause I’m not washing everything. It’s only a bit of cutlery. What a greedy man you are. You own an entire restaurant and you’re making a fuss for a few forks and knives. It’s true that in life the more you have the greedier you become and the more you want”!!!

That is word for word what he said. My wife and all my previous staff who were there and know the story well will vouch for this.

It was one of those very rare moments in my life when firstly I was totally speechless and secondly I very genuinely can say that I came very close to murdering another man. Really. I distinctly remember as the saying goes, truly seeing red and being transported into some other evil dimension where only revenge existed. I looked down on the side of the sink and there lay a big pointed kitchen knife and immediately my arm started moving down towards it, as I went to grab it and to stab this vile snake several times in the neck and throat. I was also looking at his throat and planning exactly were to dig that knife repeatedly into him.

Very fortunately something stopped me in my tracks. And how lucky that was, for I really and truly would have killed him in my immense state of rage. So I somehow managed to pull myself away, I walked out without uttering a word and strongly trembling I asked my head waiter to go kick the bastard out, ensuring that he does not pass by next to me on the way out.

But enough of this, as yet again I have been brought back to my senses by another distinct auditive sign. That of my poor dogs barking with hunger out in the garden. I forgot that for them their body clock hasn’t changed, and that I am now an hour late in feeding them.

They very much miss our restaurant times when it was daily lavish leftover fresh fish and steaks and the odd bit of cutlery to chew on.