Some restaurant stories (3 of 3): Angry (older) (white) (women) day.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, I was joking with my one younger Thai newlywed coworker that it was "Angry White Woman Day."

Like, at this one table, the (old) (grizzled) (moustached) (flannel-wearing) (white) (husband?) guy laughed at me when I pulled out the notepad because it was our stapled together receipts and crumpled to boot, and then later the (older) (white) woman with (blonde) hair and a (triple) chin called aside my coworker to tell her that the salad didn't have any dressing, and that it was "disgusting" since there was a slice of tomato that contained the little brown rough bit where the stem goes in.

(When I cleared their salad bowls later, that little bit of tomato was sitting out on the slip of red sticky paper that you wrap around the napkin when you roll silverware.)

Later, too, there was this group of three (older) (white) people, and the woman said they hadn't been in there in like five or six years but she remembered when we had "real" lunch specials, and when I took her curry to the table it sloshed all over the bowl rim and I had to take it back to the kitchen to clean up, and when I brought it back to the table I said something about how our problem was that we were too generous, and one of the guys laughed, but she said that she didn't like how I brought it out just to take it away again, and later she called me over and said she only found one peanut in the curry, and there it was sitting out on the rim of the bowl, so I brought her more peanuts, but the kitchen guy had assembled a cup of crushed rather than whole peanuts, and she put them on her food and she said that she appreciated it but they weren't real peanuts, and then later when they had paid and they were sitting around talking for a long time and I was getting them refills, she asked me for a styrofoam cup so she could take her refill with her.

"I'm sorry, but I don't think we can do that, and I don't want to get the manager mad at me," I was like. "But I'm happy to keep you refilled while you're sitting here."

I had actually given a Styrofoam cup like that to someone who had asked me for something similar a few weeks earlier, but there was no way that I was going to stick out my neck like that for this particular customer. I mean, why?