Pizza, Wailer, Order, Cry

A friend and I have a standing dinner out one night a week. Because I have some funny food habits, we usually go to the same few places, but this time we have branched out to a pizza joint neither of us really knows.

Unlike most pizza places in the city, they have slices under a heat lamp as well as offering full freshly-made ones. They also have a few sides. I order a few slices from the display and a side.

Employee: *Nervously* “I’m sorry, sir, the side will take around twenty minutes.”

Me: “It’s fine. It’s a side; it won’t kill me to wait.”

Once our orders are placed and our immediate food is handed over, we sit to wait. It’s a small place, so it’s hard not to notice when another table starts grumbling about the wait.

We keep waiting, eating what we have. I finish up my slices, and maybe ten minutes later, my piping-hot side gets rushed out to me, as does the large order for this other table. It looks like a minimum order of three large pizzas and half a dozen sides. I would have no reason to notice this if the man had not gotten in the waiter’s face — while he is trying to set this feast down! — to start on a big rant that starts at, “We’ve been waiting half an hour!” and ends at, “We’ve waited forty-five minutes and no one told me it would take so long!”

I get angry. The waiter clearly has no power. He wants to put the food down and probably go back and get a manager to help. I sincerely doubt he was not told about the wait. So, I stand up, and get his attention.

Me: “Hey, you’re complaining about the wait? Well, your food’s here, so sit down, shut up, and eat!”

He turns around, towering over me and angry. The waiter runs off.

Customer: “F*** off! I’ve been waiting an hour for this and they didn’t tell me it would take so long!”

Me: “I agree, they should have told you. But your food is here now, so why don’t you eat?!”

There was an awkward silence. The man still looked pretty angry but did seem to be going to sit down and eat. I left with my friend trailing after. Goal achieved: the waiter had gotten away.

What got to me, though, is that I found a Google review a few days later saying how sad it was that this poor man had been made to wait so long and then have this “large, interfering woman” make a scene with comments that “her boyfriend couldn’t cash.” I was smaller than both the women the man was with… and I’d stand up for my own comments! I know I wasn’t polite, but yelling at the waiter over something he can’t change does not make things better.