10 annoying things you’re doing in a restaurant. The waitstaff reveals all.

Don't bring your laptop.

​When you sit down to eat out, are you the couth, dapper don you imagine, or a scrumbling mub, laughed at by those who bring you food and drink?  It’s time for an etiquette check as the Intergalactic Business Report explores what you’re doing wrong when you pathetically pose at an eatery. So stuff that napkin in your collar, lean back, and learn. Waitstaff at some of the trendiest restaurants in the country tell us* what annoys them the most about their customers. 
 
 
Ten annoying things you’re doing in a restaurant according to waitstaff.

1. Don’t bring a laptop to a restaurant. One waiter tells us, “No one’s so busy they need to bring a computer to dinner. It’s rude to the waiter, the restaurant, and others around you. Put work away and just enjoy the meal.”  

2. Don’t tell waiters their food would be better if they “siphoned it through their buttholes.” An LA waitress tells us: “While butthole siphoning is a legitimate way to prepare food, it’s not known by many people outside elite culinary circles where they do things like buffalo slaughters and sea salt semen showers. Bottom line: you’re being pretentious so stop.”  

3. Refrain from beating off under the table. Everyone can see you doing it and there’s a steady tapping noise that’s highly audible. “Uh yeah… We can see you,” says a hostess in the Midwest. “And the worst part is the eye contact. Keep it in your pants till you get home or at least in your car.”  

4. Don’t purposely shit yourself and then ask if someone can come over and give you “a quick wipe.”  This one drives one Florida waitress particularly mad. “First of all, there is no such thing as a ‘quick wipe.’ It takes at least thirty minutes. And, honestly, it’s nobody’s job. Am I wearing a little name tag that says, ‘Shit Wiper?’”  

5. Don’t ask to see where employees have sex with each other. A waiter in Utah suggests: “If you want to know, ask if they’re hiring, come back to fill out an application, explain that the reason there are huge gaps in your work history is because you had a lot of issues you can’t talk about in front of other people, and then ask if there’s somewhere quiet you could talk and tell them about it and when they take you there, that’s the place where employees fuck each other.”   

6. Stop leaving confederate currency as a tip. “You’re not an old southern general so stop showing up with a wad of money with Jefferson Davis’s face on it and making it rain slavery cash. It’s offensive and we wouldn’t accept that money even if it were legal tender.”  

7. Don’t pretend you have an australianish/Scottish accent so loud and incomprehensible that it just sounds like you’re spitting food and maybe choking on your tongue. Says a NYC veteran waiter: “Are you doing Shrek or having a seizure? Yeesh.”  

8. Stop standing up and announcing you are Jesus and then insinuating that Jesus may have a gun. “You’re scaring the customers. It’s that simple,” a St. Louis waitress tells us. “Jesus wouldn’t threaten people. So at least say you’re the devil or something.”  

9. Never challenge the manager or other guests to a pecker slapping contest where the prize is to be part of a “manly competition in a controlled setting with a resistant audience.” At a deep south barbecue joint, a manager says that shutting these competitions down is by far the worst part of his job. “These boys will show up and act normal at first,” he says. “And then, after ten or twenty beers they’ll be pulling out their wieners and fighting with ‘em. They try to make it sound all scientific. ‘Controlled setting. Resistant audience.’ But all it is is a bunch of pecker slappers looking for a fight.”  

10. Don’t do the thing where you never break from your persona as an 80’s robot. For example: “Hello wai-ter. My name is X3459, mod-el 3. What kind of oil to you have on tap? I am very thirs-tee.” “Oh my god,” says Hailey (not her real name), a waitress working in North Carolina. “People do this all the time and think it’s funny I guess. But to me it’s just annoying. I don’t mind it for the first couple minutes or so, but when they never break character I’m just like, give it a rest C3PO.”  
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*No they didn’t. 

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