The seating hostess or host is the first person a customer encounters when they enter a restaurant. These customers take on delightful, indifferent, and hangry level-500 dispositions. There's a story to tell after every work shift and it's due to the following list of hostessing truths:

Your wait time is a serious guesstimate.

This is no secret to anyone. The amount of time a customer waits, or how fast the waitlist moves is dependent on too many factors to count - how big your party is, the amount of backup in the kitchen, how long people linger at their tables, etc.

A sigh of relief follows after every customer that doesn't put their name on the waitlist.

One less group crowding our area and staring at us for the entire wait time.

When you wait longer than we estimated, we're just as upset as you are.

We're gonna hear it from you and several others including the manager. Our goal is to get you seated as soon as possible and we really do our best to make that happen.

We bring you to a specific table (even when the restaurant is empty) for a multitude of reasons.

Part of our job is making the servers' jobs as smooth as possible and we can't seat multiple tables in a row in one section. This is both for your benefit and their benefit - if we don't rotate seating tables by server section, your quality of service will be affected by it.

We don't want to seat 1 or 2 people at a 4 or more person table even when we aren't busy. We want to keep larger tables open for parties that will eventually need them.

And so. many. more.

We know exactly where each customer is with their meal - appetizers, entree, check paid, etc...

A very frustrating part of our job is watching tables who have paid their check sit and linger for a large amount of time. We've most likely already told someone on the waitlist you're ready to leave and we're giving them your table. Every 5 minutes someone is asking us if your table is ready for them - trust me on this one.

We probably know exactly how long or how short you'll be sitting at your table from the moment you walk in and what your complaints could be.

Group of young or middle aged adults - You'll be there as long as we are ordering drinks and catching up.

Family with young children - You want to be in and out as fast as possible.

Couple on a date - Depending on where your table is and how romantic it is, you're either going to linger or make it short (booths/secluded tables = 3 hour dinners).

Older customers - Most likely won't be happy with the atmosphere of any table in the entire restaurant but might stay a while anyway making them wild cards.

We understand your frustrations, but sometimes there really isn't anything we can do to fix them.

We do everything we can to make your experience pleasant, but when you're eating a sit down restaurant, sometimes your worst enemy is other customers.

We're in communication with every customer and every person on staff.

We know exactly how many people have been served, are currently being served, and are waiting to be served. We know how busy the kitchen is and the stress level of each server. We might have shared responsibilities with the bartenders and we work with the busboys to clear and set tables. Our manager comes to help us out and check up on us when they can find a spare minute.

You cannot seat yourself.

If you seat yourself while we're seating someone else, we will notice immediately and ask you to get up if we had already mentally seated a party off of the waitlist there. We will happily hand you the correct menu to look at while you wait because chances are you took the wrong meal's menu to browse.

When you see how busy it is, and you're really nice about it, we appreciate that so much more than you know.

We might even seat you ahead of your spot on the waitlist.

Our manager is probably going to tell you the same thing we've been telling you for a half hour.

No, the table we're trying to create for your party of ten requiring 3 other tables to get up is not ready yet.

We're just as hangry as you are.

We smell good food for 5+ hours and we're just counting down the minutes until we can put our own order in.