Either Shut Up Or Get Off The Reservation

(My friends and I have been meeting once a week for around a year to play board games and catch up. We go to a pub that is quiet, cheap, and convenient for everyone… but the staff can be a little off. This week we have booked two large tables for the group. When we arrive, one of the tables is full. We ask the people if they can move, and they say they are nearly done. Then, they sit around drinking for another ten minutes and then leave. Not really a problem. We sit around the two tables we’ve booked and one of us puts a bag of games on a third empty table. It has a small reserved sign on it and there are many other empty tables of the same size. One of the staff members comes over…)

Bar Worker: “Whose bag is this?”

Friend: “Oh, I’m sorry; I think that’s mine.” *goes to move the bag*

Bar Worker: “This is a reserved table. You can’t come in here cluttering up a clean reserved table.”

Another Friend: “Okay, fair enough.”

Bar Worker: “And another thing: you need to tell us how many people are coming. You take up a lot of room and we need to know how many people are coming.”

Other Friend: “Sorry, we don’t always know.”

Bar Worker: “You need to book more tables; there are too many of you and you need to book more tables.”

Other Friend: “Fair enough…”

Bar Worker: *interrupting* “We need you to book more tables; you can’t just take up everywhere. This was a reserved table; you need to understand that you can’t use all the clean tables.”

(She continued on like this for a couple of minutes, interrupting if we tried to placate her. Eventually, she left and we all kind of shrugged because half of the pub was empty and we were only using the two tables we had booked. We noticed that all the tables around us had reserved signs put on them but they all stayed empty the entire night.)