Waiters in restaurants always arriving with the food just at the punchline of your best story

This sort of timing is part of a waiter’s skill-set and is high on the syllabus at any self-respecting Waiter Training College ( says Master Waiter and instructor Francois LePlonge) .Waiters may be by nature both attention-seekers and control freaks but they still have to be trained to be as intrusive as possible. Were it otherwise their visits to your table would be confined to the delivery of food and responding to customer summonses and would not include those frequent passes to ask “Is everything all right ?”.  Often in branches of a multiple restaurant chain they are encouraged to impose themselves even further by asking you to participate in a survey and to come up with ‘one word to describe your dining experience’. Other tricks of the trade include referring to customers by dish  (as is ‘Who’s the fettuccini? ’)   when in the restaurant and then by clothes when they get into the kitchen ( as in ‘ The yellow caftan says the veal is underdone ‘)

 What waiters learn at college may take years of on-the-job experience to perfect such as getting very shirty and snappy and stamping their feet when customers in big parties forget what they’ve ordered and fail to respond when their dish is called .     

(Dennis Drayne , Streatham) - QQQ**