It frequently occurs that a guest begins to tell me their order by saying, "Now I'm going to do something a little crazy here..." and then proceeds to ask for something completely mundane. For instance, they might have an appetizer for their entree, or construct a meal out of our side dishes. Stuff like that happens several times a night, and I have to fight back my sarcastic urge to say, "Whoa whoa, you're so crazy girl! Stop taking all those shots because you're getting out of control!" You want soup for an entree? Who cares? NBD.
In my experience, this happens most frequently with women. The feminist in me thinks that perhaps it's due to a lifetime of patriarchal culture telling them they need to apologize or explain themselves for doing anything slightly different than what's typically expected. Let me relieve any women reading this of that notion: ORDER WHAT YOU DAMN WELL PLEASE, IN ANY ORDER, WITHOUT TELLING ME WHY. If you just want a side salad for your main course, you don't owe me an explanation. I don't care that you had a big lunch. You're not hurting my feelings (although you are hurting my pocketbook...)
The truth is that servers have seen it all, and some requests really do deserve to be called "crazy". But no one who's a true weirdo ever starts their request with, "I know this is totally different, but..." No, the nutjobs typically like to spring their eccentricities on us without warning.
Which brings me to the man at table 301. He came in with his wife and was sat in my coworker's section. She's a true pro -- always professional, rarely weeded. It's unusual to see her knocked off her game. She took the guests' orders and brought them some bread to enjoy. As soon as she put it down on the table, the man recoiled in horror and pushed his chair away from the table. The wife looked down at the plate and said, "He's got a thing against square plates."
Apparently, this is the Devil's work.
I wish I could have seen my co-worker's face at that moment. Sometimes the hardest part of this job is just holding in our reactions to the things our guests say and do. My co-worker is a stone cold ace but I'm sure that at least for a second, there was a glimmer of "WTF?!" in her eyes. Regardless, she quickly removed the plate from the table and passed it off to be replaced immediately.
I found our server assistant in the back, placing the bread on a new plate while shaking her head and muttering to herself. Sometimes serving rich people with nutty demands can get the best of us all, and clearly, she had hit her breaking point. I asked her to explain what was going on and all I could hear her say was "crazy white folks..."
The bread was re-delivered to the table on a plate deemed acceptable to the man, but the couple's dinner was ruined from that point on. I'm not sure if he just couldn't stay in a restaurant that used square-shaped plates, or if she started to nag him for being afraid of geometry, but eventually he left her alone at the restaurant. I guess there's some things you just can't recover from. Like shapes.
No matter. That man is in good company. Some customers can't have their food items touch, one guest will only drink out of a styrofoam cup that he brings from home, and still others don't want anything green on their plate. They sound like toddlers, don't they? They're not. They're adults with money to spend, and good money can buy you a lot of things: Having your oddest demands catered to is one of them.