Congratulations. You Broke A Waitress.

This happened about twenty-five years ago and I still think of it about once a month.

My dad used to think of himself as a fancy, business-type gentlefellow. We’d go to restaurants and he’d try to order off-menu, at like a chain restaurant. He wouldn’t wash his hands before we ate; he’d have the waitstaff bring him lemons and then rinse his hands in lemon juice because I guess that’s what fancy people do. It always took several attempts to seat us because he’d walk around the place trying to find a place to sit worthy of his time. He was insufferable. And as a little kid, it turned me into a walking apology for his behavior.

One weekend, we went to get dinner, just him and me, and he went through all of his usual behavior. But he was actually in a pretty good mood, so I had high hopes. Unfortunately, as soon as the waitress started taking our drink order, he found out that they were out of real cream for his coffee.

He didn’t swear or raise his voice, because that’s what the common people did, but he laid right into this poor woman about the sheer temerity of running a restaurant and not having the ability to meet the basic needs of your customers and then trying to smooth things over with cheap, fake products like non-dairy creamers. He suggested that she was trying to make him sick by feeding him some sort of chemical swill. I remember her exact face as she just stared at him and took it, not knowing what to say. It haunts me.

My dad ended up just ordering an appetizer and she left politely… and never returned. He and I sat in that booth for thirty or forty minutes until the manager finally came out and went table to table explaining that the waitress had quit suddenly. My dad was, of course, offended, and the manager, of course, offered to give us our meal for free.

And that’s the part that annoys me the most: that my dad won. Hopefully, that poor woman found a better job.