Restaurants of all sorts are great cross sections of humanity. Everyone has to eat – that means that you’re likely to meet some of these charming everyday people. Well, they’re charming most of the time. Until they’re not (what a plot twist, right?).
This is the backdrop for today’s story – a family of 3 was having a good time at a diner, when a woman came in, cut through the queue and literally demanded to have their table.
More info: Reddit
Although restaurant patrons are usually pretty normal, you do see a lot of bad apples crop up who want to be treated like Michelin Guide critics
Image credits: Syed Ahmad (not the actual photo)
A mom took it to the Entitled People community to share a story of the attempted usurpation of her table at a diner
Image credits: u/babymonsters2
Image credits: Ketut Subiyanto (not the actual photo)
A woman decided not to wait for a table to free up but rather demand to be seated at their table while their toddler was still eating
Image credits: u/babymonsters2
Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)
She wouldn’t let up, but her waitress managed to convince her to be put on the wait list while the kid finished her meal in 10 minutes
Image credits: u/babymonsters2
Many weren’t happy with the poster, saying they were hogging the table, while they were really there for only under an hour
Waiting to get a table at any place usually sucks. I mean that – you have to stand around awkwardly while you’re really hungry and covertly stare daggers at currently eating patrons, hoping that your psychic barrage will make them abandon their table ASAP.
But barring that, you can’t really do anything about it, right? Even staring shouldn’t be overdone, especially when you’ve got no claim to the table.
Turns out you can do something about it! It just takes being entitled and super annoying to boot.
I’m your regular, normal, down to earth guy – the humblest person I know, really. So imagining walking up to a table and saying “I’ll sit here, thanks” while pointing to the people sitting there just seems like an inter-galactic level of crazy.
If that wasn’t enough, when a waitress tried to politely snap that woman out of her maddened state, she simply refused to return to sanity. I’m being facetious, but waiting tables could probably be compared with being a roughneck on an oil drilling operation in terms of difficulty. The struggle of dealing with awful people on an almost-daily basis takes some very serious mental fortitude.
It’s even more wild that some people in the comments defended the madwoman. They flipped the story on the writer and her family, saying that she is the entitled one for taking one WHOLE hour to finish breakfast and calmly sip on their coffee.
This actually seems to stem from a cultural thing, with the Europeans emphasizing that eating at a restaurant is an experience, not just an opportunity to stuff your face as quickly as you possibly can and leave. It really depends on the establishment, but choosing what you want can take 10 minutes sometimes, then 10-20 to get the food, depending on the amount of clientele, so that’s 30 minutes for a meal, which isn’t a lot at all, if you want to sit down and relax at a nice place at all.
Image credits: Roman Arkhipov (not the actual photo)
Although it wasn’t a restaurant, I’ve had a very similar experience, but the person actually sat down next to me! In my youth (eons ago) I was sitting in the park with a friend, spending some of our limited afterschool time before we had to go our separate ways.
Up comes this senior citizen and plops down right next to us. I mean, it is a public park, but there were several benches to the left and right of us, which weren’t any more inconvenient than the one we had occupied. Us, being polite high schoolers, simply accepted this as a fact of life.
Within minutes, that woman was talking about every single detail of her life up to this point, putting a lot of emphasis on her nose whistling career. You heard that right – she used to musically whistle through her nose and apparently was quite popular for it. Unfortunately, she couldn’t whistle at that point anymore, because of a nose cartilage operation, but did give us a regular lip-whistling performance, which wasn’t bad, really.
When we were sufficiently rattled by this jarring display of overbearing self-confidence, she went “there’s another bench over there, if you’d like” to us. I would have said something smart and snappy to her at that point, but I was a 17 y.o. teen, so I have to comfort myself with imagining comebacks before sleep.
The poster’s story got over 7k likes and many of the hundreds of commenters shared their own stories of similar ilk, servers and patrons alike. There was a splinter group of people who did say that OP was the jerk here, but the overwhelming majority had a more tolerant take.
Share your own stories of annoying diner customers in the comments section below!
The comments shared their own stories of encountering rude clients at restaurants and agreed with the poster’s view
