[Blarg]

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Maybe he can't afford to pay somebody a reasonable enough salary to be in such a supervisor capacity.


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Possible. If so, he is probably not that good a businessman or very ambitious. I would think being the owner of one small business you could never leave would be among the least likely of an owner's goals. And among the least wise or healthy. In any case, if he really is a good businessman, he's crippling his earning power by not developing his staff so he can look into developing other opportunities, or expand. Sounds like a businessman who doesn't love business, or even money. Perverse!

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From the owner's standpoint if you presented this idea to him he would think, "Why would I pay somebody to a job that I'm perfectly capable of doing? Isn't that wasting my money? How is sitting around doing nothing while I'm paying $50k/yr to some new guy going to help me?" (and, of course, they will generally think they know how to do the job better anyway).


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Yeah, there are a lot of unambitious people out there. And egotistical ones. You need a certain amount of ego to even try to own a business, so some is good. But when you are your own boss, it's very easy to have your ego go completely unchecked and out of control, because there's nobody there to tell you to knock it off until somebody sues you or its in some other way too late.

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Agree with ElD on the hostess part.
Some young girl is at the door and asks you "smoking or non-smoking."
They aren't usually there in a supervisor capacity at all in such casual-dining establishments.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if they were somehow slightly lower on the totem-pole than the servers even.
"Crap, she doesn't even know our menu yet and has zilcho wait-experience. Just have her greet and seat people. She can handle that, can't she?"


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If the business is really that small and tight, they aren't hiring people who are useless and aren't going to be doing anything. They can't afford it, and if they could, it would still be throwing away money. This person will generally have multiple duties.

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And finally, LOL at the insistence that you need to call ahead of time to confirm something like this.
I would say, "Yeah, I think they sing at that place. Does anybody know?"
somebody else, "Yeah, I'm pretty sure they do."
"Okay, then we'll give that place a try. Kid wants tacos and singing. I think that place will work fine."

Calling ahead for such details just to go out to dinner at a mexican place seems unbelieveably nitty to me.


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This sounds really LOL to me. This sounds like a friend of mine, who would pile everyone into his car then go to a restaurant that he essentially thought was "over here somewhere" or "maybe north." We'd drive around endlessly, aggravated as hell. Finally we wouldn't go anywhere he suggested unless we confirmed it in the yellow pages, checked it out in the Thomas Guide, etc.

People who don't know where the hell they are going or what the hell they are doing are huge pains in the asses to the whole party. Nobody wants to sit through that crap.

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Just show up, inform restaurant it's your kid's B-Day. Proceed from there. This is how most normal people would do it I think.

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Normal people who walk into lightposts regularly, maybe.

Obviously, if it's so important to your kid to have happy birthday sung and you don't do one damn thing to lift your finger to see that it gets done, you don't really give a damn about whether your kid is going to get that song or not. Sounds like being a completely sucky dad.

It's his birthday, for crying out loud! Show a little initiative and responsibility. Jeez, it's not like he's not your kid or something.

Or is it? Maybe that's the story!