When will the lambs stop screaming!?

I was doing some trolling over at waiterrant.net today and couldn't resist the opportunity to tell the story of the one waiting job I ever quit in a huff.

Here's a copy and paste:

My first job ten years ago, at a failing chain restaurant just BELOW Applebee’s on the restaurant spectrum, was the only job I ever quit.

It was a weekday lunch, a Tuesday IRCC, one of those shifts waiters are forced to take in order to score the weekend shifts. I was resigned to the fact that I would be making $32 that day, but I wasn’t ready for the 16-top that sat in my section just as I was campaigning to be cut.

They were large people, big and sweaty with six equally round children in tow. Aside from the copious amounts of deep-fried food and Diet Cokes they ordered, I had never experienced a louder and more rude table up to that point in my waiting career.

But the kicker came when they asked for the check. Ten separate checks, multiple split items. This was the time when Micros REALLY sucked and this particular restaurant had decided to stay with the 1989 model. After much cursing and questions regarding who gets what and how much, I was spent. I had hit a waiting tables nadir.

Things were just finishing up and I glanced at the table from the waiter nook and saw the woman that caused it all. She was big, dressed in a moo-moo and sitting right in front of the bay window. The noon summer sun was shining through her moo-moo, revealing more than I wanted to see and she was going to town on the remnants of the chicken wing sampler, so loudly clacking I could hear it 20 feet away. In her arm was her three year-old doing the same, gnawing away, both open-mouthed chewing in unison. She saw me looking at her and asked through her chewing for a refill on her Diet Coke.

That was it. I was done. I couldn’t reconcile this with a good way to earn a living. I walked back to the kitchen, patted my manager on the back and put my book in his chest. I gave him a ‘thanks - nothing personal, just can’t do this’, and walked out, brimming with a restorative optimism of a Jack Kerouac hero.

Three days later, tail firmly implanted between legs, I tried to get my job back.

To this day, the most embarrassing, soul-crushing moment of my life.

Note: I forgot (truly) to mention the fact that, when asking (gulp!) for my job back, I was rebuffed...with extreme prejudice.