Seeing a customer's one-star review was initially upsetting for waitress Daniella Claeys, so she decided to use humor to cope with it. The waitress was working at a restaurant in London on a Sunday when a big family came in. She had a cold and was dealing with a migraine, she explained in a video shared on TikTok, but she went to work anyway because she "didn't want to let the team down" (and she has to pay rent, she added).
The negative review came from a situation involving a screaming child. She decided to have the one-star review printed on a T-shirt to cope with it.
The review that she turned into a T-shirt read:
“We Will never be back!!! at this restaurant the staff made us feel so uncomfortable. A waitress named Dani suggested the manager to seat us outside (in) the cold when our baby cried because she had headache. She didn’t bother to hide her discomfort and looked at us like we were rubbish we obviously left the restaurant straight away. Very not family friendly atmosphere in there don’t bother to go with kids.”
In a video shared on TikTok, the waitress explained what happened that day from her perspective.
Though it's normal for kids to scream, cry or get emotional, the waitress explained that the child was crying a lot — and she was particularly sensitive to it that day because of her migraine. The family didn't know that their waitress wasn't feeling well ("it's not their job to know that," Daniella noted).
"The child was doing what children do, and it was having a little bit of a tantrum and screaming a lot," she explained on TikTok.
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Daniella said she doesn't "ever want to make anyone feel uncomfortable" when she's working as a waitress. She admitted she "slipped up" that day.
The noise was making her uncomfortable that day, and her discomfort was probably noticeable, she noted.
Though she was extra sensitive to the noise because of her migraine, she noticed that other customers were also bothered by the screaming. The restaurant she was working at has a heated terrace, and sometimes if a child is emotional, a family member will take the child out to the terrace to help them calm down.
When she told this family that they could take the child out to the heated terrace to calm down, the family was insulted. A woman in the family started walking out after the waitress made the suggestion, and said "don't worry, we're leaving."
The woman also said that she would never come back. The waitress acknowledged that she could've dealt with the situation better, but she was also having a bad day — which happens to everyone.
The situation "broke" her at first because she doesn't want to make any customers feel bad, but she also feels that people don't always understand how it "takes so much energy to be 100 percent" all the time.
She created the T-shirt as a way to laugh about the situation and to find others who could relate to it. She told WalesOnline that she wore the T-shirt at work on her break and laughed about it with her coworkers. She also told the outlet that she "wasn't doing it out of malice or saying the woman was wrong."
She also thinks making the t-shirt "humanises the servers and the waiters that are often just not recognised. It is widely felt across hospitality that a lot of the time people talk to you as if you're their personal server," as per WalesOnline.
She added that "Waitressing is just not regarded as a high-skill job even though I truly believe it is. A lot of the time people don't appreciate or recognize the effort we make."
Many TikTok users loved Daniella's one-star review T-shirt, and shared some of the negative reviews they've received while working in hospitality.
"I got a review saying 'our waitress left us when her shift ended' like YEAH BYE???" one TikTok user commented.
Another person shared, "I got a negative review for not wearing makeup during a Tuesday afternoon shift. 'Our waitress looked sickly.'"
