How to get Wait Staff not to Spit in Your Food

Most servers don’t spit in food, or at least most of the time they don’t. I think. Yet there comes a point in some customer interactions where you’re left feeling helpless, like your nerves have been stripped back to their wires and like there’s no way to make yourself feel better aside from doing something awful to a plate of chicken wings. The following is a list of how to avoid the occurrence of bodily fluids in your dinner, unless of course, you’re a complete asshole: 

1)      If you’re going to send something back don’t be a jerk about it. Mistakes happen, steaks get over-cooked and your dressing on the side ends up on the salad,  most of us are happy to make things right. Unless you’re rude about it, then all bets are off. I worked with a cook prone to leaving shoe prints in people’s food after it came back to him the second or third time for no good reason. I suspect he would still be back there in the kitchen if not for his fondness for Nike footwear and the woman who, upon the third delivery of her steak, noted a crisp check mark in its surface. Sure he got fired for it, but many times before that had he gotten away with it, sending the steak skittering across the kitchen floor with his shoe, popping it back on the grill and sending it back out to be finally proclaimed delicious.

2)      Know what medium rare is. If you don’t know tell me how you want it to look in the middle. If it’s pink in the middle, the way you ordered it, and you complain about it you’re the asshole. When we finally get it to well done, like you actually wanted it—the ends of the thing black and curling off the dish—know that while you were yelling at me for my so-called incompetence someone was sitting on your plate.

3)       Don’t think that not eating exempts you from the list of possible bodily fluids you might ingest tonight. I’ve seen a bartender that I knew very well come around the corner to talk to me, drop his testicles into a glass while speaking, and go back to his taps and pour beer into the now offensive vessel.

4)      Don’t tell me to be quick about it. Chances are, especially if it’s busy, that I am going as fast as I can. I had a job where we’d had to prepare our own salads for customers, dipping little crystal bowls into a none-too-clean bucket in the cooler. I had one woman advise me to hurry up. I had a cold at the time and so in my haste to shut her up I’d forgone blowing my nose for the moment. As I was fishing her salad out of the dregs in the bucket with my bare hands my nose dripped into her salad bowl. And, after my initial horror wore off, I decided to hell with her and served it up anyway.

5)      Never ask where your drink has been. Narnia obviously. Because the next time I come back with another beverage for you you’re sincerely not going to want to know where it has indeed been.

6)      Do not think that just because your ex husband took off with a waitress that I, your server for the evening, had anything to do with this. Waitressing is not a cult; we don’t all know each other so do not take your loss out on me. Because at the very least I’ll start short-pouring your drinks.

7)      Don’t think that just because your inappropriate comments are vaguely original makes it okay to speak them aloud. I once had a guy tell me he wanted to eat my ass like a cupcake. And after the initial surprise wore off I still had the bartender gargle with his straw.

8)      If after you’ve been terribly rude to me and I waltz up to your table with yours and your friends’ drinks, pausing to hold them up to the light and say, “Now, which one of these did I pee in?”

Do not reply by sipping the beer I’ve placed in front of you and saying, “Excuse me miss, there’s either too much urine in this, or not enough,” because that sir, is a challenge. 

Know that most of the time when you head out for dinner nothing happens to your food (unless the place has mice or has suffered a recent lengthy power outage. There’s nothing quite like wandering into work the night after a storm to find that the coolers have been off since sometime the night before, and that the Muslim cook has his nose pressed to a pack of bacon, trying to decide if that’s indeed what it’s supposed to smell like). But if you peer into your glass and notice something floating there, a jellyfish of phlegm wrapping itself around your straw, think about whether you just might, perhaps, deserve to be finding it there.