Maybe The Beers Were Vaporized

This is a story from my absolutely hellish New Year’s Eve. Plenty happened, including a guy physically ripping my shirt trying to grab me (I love working with drunk people!), but this one just confused me.

The place where I work is kind of posh. We are a restaurant but we do some drinking-only events, and our New Year’s Eve event was ticketed and drinking-only, with booth packages on every single one of our booths. These ranged anywhere from about £500 to £1500 in my section, depending on the size of the booking and what package they got.

I had my table of eight come in. They’d gotten our twelve-beer package and our vodka-and-mixers package. Simple, really. All was going well. They were arguably my least favourite table in my section, but that’s mostly because all the others were super hype and fun. (Plus this one girl at the table seemed to think she was the sole exception to our no-vaping and keep-your-f******-shoes-on rules.)

After the twelve beers were done, they asked how much it’d be for another twelve. I told them, the three guys discuss, and they got the twelve beers for themselves and a bottle of prosecco for the girls. Again, nothing wrong so far.

Over the course of the night, while I was in my section, I physically watched them drink those beers. I took away their empties every time. Then, at about 1:00 am, I noticed that their beer bucket was empty and took it away. When I got back to the section after running a quick errand, the table called me over.

Vaping Girl: “Excuse me. Someone took away our beers.”

I thought there had been a bit of confusion.

Me: “No, I took away your empty bucket.”

They protested this, with several of them screaming at me there were still beers in there.

This went back and forth for a little bit before the vaping girl turned to me, snooty as h***, and said:

Vaping Girl: “We paid a lot of money for this table, and someone’s just stolen our drinks!”

I got my manager, and their story changed to someone — not staff — coming over to the table and taking beers out of the bucket during the midnight countdown. My manager comped them six more free beers essentially to shut them up.

In the end, most of the table left, and the three who were still there at closing were lovely, but I’m just confused how someone could drink all their drinks, somehow not notice they’d done so, and then proclaim that we’d unjustly stolen them away from them?