A programmer’s paranoia

I’m 27 years old and I’ve worked in restaurants for about 12 years. Well I’ve not worked as a full-time employer but nearly 90% of my week-ends was spent in a restaurant. I’ve collaborated with a lot of different tuscan restaurants and all of them are very big (~300 chairs). When you have an experience like mine you can say to have seen every kind of people. There is the timid one that begins a phrase with a: “sorry ehm could you please…”, the miseducated one: “You! Bring me a COLD mineral water!” and a lot of other different animals.

All different guests of a restaurant have one thing in common: they never, never want to miss a thing, a service, a possibility that other guests have. Today we have a fixed menu and the table near me got a new bottle of sparkling water? Well I need a new bottle, I will pay for this lunch the same amount and I need a new bottle.

Sometimes this is a procedure activated by subconscious, sometimes it’s only emulation abducted by survive instincts. My experience teaches me that if there is a change in a table that this change will quickly expand. It’s pretty funny to see how people react when they are eating at a restaurant.Eating is an action that’s considered personal and that must be performed only with people very close to your person like your family. When someone go to a restaurant, especially a big and new restaurant, he expose himself to other people.

People react in very different ways to this condition and I can classify a guest type two seconds after the first sight. I will not describe all the animal type you can encounter on a restaurant but instead I will focus on some of my favorites. Let’s meet together the “screaming hungry baboon”.

The screaming hungry baboon (from now on “the baboon”) is a very particular restaurant guest. It’s a person that do not frequents restaurants and he walk the door only during very big dinners like marriage or christian holidays. He is invited to big dinners only because he is a family member or a close friend. You can immediately recognize him cause he, and the 5 guests sit right next to him, drink a 0.75 red wine bottle before having eaten something. After doing it he blocks a waiter with this “funny” sentence: “Waiter! This bottle is broken, bring me another one”.

The baboon will continue to drink and speak aloud for all the rest of the dinner. He drinks a lot and he also eat a lot. The baboon will stop eating just before that first dishes will be served. This is because he has eaten a lot of entry dishes and particularly because he has drank a lot. For the rest of the dinner he will continue to drink without eating anything (he actually takes every dishes but he do not eat it) cause just only the smell of the dishes can make him fell sick. This situation keeps stable until coffee time.

What can we obtain from the baboon? First of all we can evince that he wants to attract all the attentions on himself. When the baboon screams aloud he stands in his feet and show his breast to other animals in order to impose himself over other male contenders. He feels stronger and incite other to drink with him.

Secondarily he emits all that noise, walk in that strange way and punch the table in order to attract females. I can clearly see, when I work, how the baboon mimic sexual acts in nearly every actions taken in the restaurant. If the dinner ends with a dance he will try to catch every single women without success either because he is too drunk either because he is too tired either because he has a baboon IQ.

At the end of the launch the baboon always says: “have you ever meet a company that party like us?” I usually answer: “oh no sir. You are the funniest guys I ever meet!”

I’ve heard that sentence hundred times and I’m not joking.

Next time we will meet another big example of restaurant guest: “The Fake Rich Fox“.