If you are one of those people who truly enjoy going out to restaurants for dinner, I strongly advise that you listen no further.
It was 1966, and I was a freshman at Sacramento City College more or less majoring in goofing off. But in order to come up with enough money to pay my monthly car payment and also have some left over for the big weekend poker game at my fraternity house, I took a job as a busboy on the late shift at what was then a pretty upscale restaurant. I had never worked in the restaurant business before, and I had no idea how hard everyone – the cooks, waitresses, and busboys all labored at their specific tasks. And if you were one of the waitresses or busboys, you were paid less than the minimum wage, which I think was about $1.25 back then, so your livelihood basically depended on tips. So, on those rare occasions when I do go out to eat in a restaurant I try to be a pretty generous tipper because I saw up close and personal just how often very hard working waitresses, who share their tips with the busboys, get stiffed. But back to my little story, which is supposed to explain why I, for one, prefer to eat at home and not out in restaurants.
One night with the restaurant I was working at full of patrons and all the help running around like chickens with their heads cut off, I suddenly heard one of the customers screaming at a waitress. Since the table where all the yelling was coming from was one of the ones I was responsible for, I strolled over with a water jug in hand to see what all the commotion was about.
“It turned out that a very rude middle-aged man in the company of a couple of other guys, who looked like they had all had too much to drink, was very upset about the way his steak had been prepared. The waitress kept offering to take it back to the cook to have it grilled a little longer, but the man was demanding to have a whole new steak, which the waitress agreed to, but only after she had to stand there and be verbally abused for a good five minutes. When the jerk finally called her a particularly offensive name, she began to cry.
I could see the head cook – a man of very few words who ran his kitchen like a military camp – observing all this from the swinging doors that separated his world from the actual restaurant. And it was he who took the plate with the unwanted steak from the tearful waitress when she brought it back to be exchanged. So, wondering what the cook would have to say about all this, I made my way back into the kitchen and from a safe distance, along with the waitress who was still crying, watched him throw another steak on the fire and carefully cook it to just the right medium that the customer had demanded. But as the cook flipped the steak over to grill it on the other side, I couldn’t help but notice that his face was as red as the meat he was cooking and that his anger was barely under control. Then, just before he was about to place the new steak on a new platter with a new baked potato and new vegetables, I watched in amazement as he unzipped his pants and urinated on it.
Her eyes no longer full of tears, and with a barely contained grin on her face, the waitress took the new platter of food back to the customer, who insisted that she stand right where she was until he had taken a nice big bit out of his juicy new steak.
“Now that’s more like it!” the man roared to the pleasure to his friends.
So, on those rare occasions when I do find myself in a restaurant, I am not only a generous tipper, but I am also extremely well-behaved, because the very last thing I want to do is get somebody pissed off!