13 Reasons Not To Make Assumptions

I’m going to start this by saying I’ve tipped every single waitress, waiter, and bartender 20% by default with the exception of this one.

I went to a chain restaurant with a friend. We were going to a movie after dinner but didn’t want to spend the ridiculous amount of money on theater snacks. If we ate dinner right before, we wouldn’t need movie snacks. Since it was hot out, being the middle of summer, I was wearing a tanktop that exposed a tattoo of the number 13, which looks like one of the 13s commonly gotten by MS-13 gang members. I’ve gotten weird looks about it before.

We got seated at a table. The hostess had no reaction to this tattoo or my two others. The waitress came up, got our drink order, and walked away. As she did, she passed our table on my right and saw the tattoo. She clearly reacted to it.

Ten minutes later, she brought our drinks and left without immediately taking the food order. She came back fifteen minutes later for the food order. Our drinks were completely empty and didn’t get refilled a single time.

We eventually finished our plates and the plates remained on the table for about twenty minutes, around forty-five minutes since we’d last seen the waitress.

My dad was a bartender and/or a waiter for many years, and one of my siblings was also a waitress. I figured our waitress might be struggling to keep up with what I would consider a busy non-holiday dinner service.

Nope, not at all. I spent the entire time watching this girl while watching other diners finish their food, pay, and leave. The tables would quickly be reseated. I watched this waitress start walking into our section, look at our table, and then intentionally avoid serving our table. All of this over a tattoo. The only one gang-related on my entire body.

The manager got a very detailed complaint about how this girl was not only avoiding our table but about how I watched every other table in our section be turned over at least twice if not three times in the time we’d been there. Our meal was free. No tip was left for the waitress.

This restaurant was around six blocks from my friend’s home. According to her, whenever the manager spotted her after that day, she got the best service the restaurant could possibly offer. That waitress was also nowhere to be seen.