An Open Letter to the Rude Regular Customer

I really do.

I really do.

Dear Rude Regular Customer,

Why are you always such a bag of douchieness, sir? I have waited on you so many times over the last four years and I have always been nice to you. You also perform at the club occasionally and even though you seem to think you are a star in the same caliber as Sting or Michael Bublé, the truth is that Charo’s right nipple probably has more Twitter followers than you do. The last few times you have come in, I have decided to see if you will even acknowledge my presence, waiting on the sidelines to see if you will recognize me as the same guy who is here every single time you come in, but you never do. You walk right past me as if I am Casper the Friendly Ghost’s homely cousin with a hairlip that you don’t want to make eye contact with. Last night was no different.

You stood in my way. You fixed your hair. You ignored me. You fixed your hair again. You ignored me again. Yes, I saw you looking at yourself in the mirror over and over again. Don’t worry, the stubble on your face looks perfect. A few weeks ago, you talked to me a for a couple of minutes, but that was only after I told you I was doing a show and that I had 178,000 followers on Facebook. I could see in your eyes that you were jealous. (As of this moment, I have exactly 32.40329 times more followers than you do, sir.) I brought you some water last night, but you didn’t say thank you. The only people you know how to thank are the 15-20 people who come see your shows, friends, most of them. Bored friends who are there out of a sense of obligation.

Your parents showed up last night to hear you sing and since you were only doing one number at the very end of the evening, we didn’t charge them or ask them to buy drinks. They got there late and since we know them and they’re nice, we were nice to them. That’s what nice people do. I guess niceness can skip a generation, huh? After the show was over and I was cleaning up the room, I found an iPhone at a booth. A nice, white, unlocked iPhone. I knew it belonged to your Mom and I also knew that we had your number and could call you to come get it. I dropped it into my apron and carried some empty glasses over to the rack. This is when you came back in because you forgot something of your own.

“Hey,” I said to you. “I think this is your Mom’s phone, isn’t it?”

What you did next didn’t surprise me at all: you took the phone put of my hand and wondered out loud about your Mom’s inability to keep up with her things. You turned away from me without a thank you or eye contact or any acknowledgment at all that I had just found your mother’s fucking unlocked iPhone. You put it in your pocket and walked back out of the club. And this is why I hate you.

I didn’t have to give that phone to you. I wouldn’t have done anything to it like toss it in the trash or hide it under the booth, but I could have put it on silent and placed it in the lost and found box in the coatroom so your mom wouldn’t know where it was for a few days. I could have done what my friend Bob did to an unlocked cell phone that his asshole customer left behind. He took it into the restroom and took a picture of his dick and then texted it to the customer’s mother. When she texted back with shock and disbelief, Bob apologized and told the mom that the photo was not meant for her but for his boyfriend. And then when her text came back that said “You’re gay??” Bob texted back and said, “This isn’t how I imagined coming out to my mom.” I didn’t do that, did I sir? No, I was nice.

After you left and I picked up my jaw from the floor at your unbelievable rudeness, I called you a douchebag, not knowing that there were three customers still sitting in the lobby. They thought I was calling them douchebags and came up to ask me why I was being so rude to them. I had to explain myself to them. I went to your poster hanging on the wall.

“I wasn’t calling you a douchebag,” I said to the man. “I was calling this guy a douchebag.” I jabbed my finger at your perfectly Photoshopped face on the poster. “This guy right here is a douchebag. His mom left her phone here and I found it and gave it back to him when he didn’t even know it was missing. He didn’t say thank you and it pissed me off, so that’s who I was calling a douchebag, not you.”

“Oh, okay,” replied the man, “because I couldn’t understand why you would have any reason to be mad at us.”

(Truth be told, I did have a reason to mad at them: they were pains in the ass who were needy and whiney and when the computer rang in the wrong price for something, I apologized and not only corrected the mistake, but gave them a discount on top of it and after splitting their check with three different cards, they still left me no tip. I called them douchebags after they left, because I may be a bitch but I’m not stupid. I wait until after people leave before calling them douchebags.)

So, Rude Regular Customer, I guess I just wanted to get that off my chest. If your mom ever leaves her unlocked iPhone in my section again, she will be getting a very interesting text message from you. It might involve a penis or it might involve an asshole, but it definitely will not involve a “thank you.”

Mustard and mayo,
The Bitchy Waiter

Discussion

    • Angela
  1. Waiter #2
  2. BobbyAnn
  3. anne marie
  4. Atom

Leave a Reply