A customer ordered steak fries at a Mexican restaurant and got fries topped with steak instead of the wide-cut fries he expected. The server threatened to charge him and insisted the menu was clear, but after showing a Google image and consulting a colleague, they resolved it. The speaker learned that understanding the other person's perspective matters more than being right.
Chapters
Steak fries or steak fries? And so had a situation where I was having a meeting, uh, looked on the menu. So it was a Mexican restaurant, and on the menu it had steak fries. And so I was thinking that it was steak fries, right, like the wide version of fries, and not fries with steak. So it was a typical, I think, uh, moment of clarity that was needed, because when they brought it out, they brought it out with a With fries with steak on it. And so when that happened, uh, it was, you know, obviously a misunderstanding. I was like, oh no, I thought these were the steak fries. And so the guy wanted to charge me for the order. He was like, man, it says steak fries on the menu. And I'm like, it does, but my interpretation is that steak fries are the wider fries. Now this can go either way. I understood where he was coming from. This The challenge was that he didn't take time to understand where I was coming from, and so we had a small, quick conflict about whether I was going to pay for it or not, and I wasn't. I wanted to reorder, and he said that he was going to charge me, so I decided I wasn't going to order at all. But then he went back to the back, he talked to someone, he came back, they decided to understand where I was coming from. I Googled what steak fries looked like, showed it to him, and was able to resolve it and still have an enjoyable experience. But I could see how fast, because his first stance was, that was on me, that's what the menu said, like almost like I should have known better. And it kind of tests my theory of you, of us, always if we spend more time to seek understanding instead of trying to prove each other right and wrong, we'll get by, we'll get farther faster. I enjoyed my meeting, enjoyed my meal, and gave him a decent tip. But that could have been very different had we did not take time to understand each other. EI lesson.
