Insulting Guests

            In the interest of having all guests remain anonymous in this entry, we will refer to all of them as babies. This blog will be more successful for you as a reader if you decide to picture them this way as well. In this way, we will successfully eliminate all suggestions of sexual impropriety, insanity, or never-having-been-out-of-one’s-house syndrome.

            Baby #1:  Approximate Age: 35. Appropriate Baby Shwag: bib reading “I could have been twins”.

You walk up to the baby’s table sporting a new company shirt, with a clever I shamrock Guiness message tastefully splashed across your chest. The baby in question is sitting next to his baby wife, takes one look at you and orders an Irish car bomb.

You imagine that this kind of baby frequently annoys his wife by ordering telecommerical baby weight loss supplements or completely organic reusable diapers.

            You smile. “Was it my shirt?”

            The baby nods eagerly. “I mean, you walked up and the first thing I looked at was your chest!”

            A look of un-baby like horror immediately appears on his face and you watch him turn in slow motion to his child bride, while a series of apparently first words babble out of his mouth. His first discovery as a person newly come to language appears to be that there is a huge difference between the word ‘chest’ and the word ‘boobs’. His arms appear to be flailing as if he were Vanna White were uncovering the letters “C-H-E-S-T” on your boobs.

Being a child wife, she does not seem to grasp this difference and tells him in a uncharacteristically adult way to shut up.

            Baby #2: Also with child wife. Approximate age: forever 49. Appropriate Baby Shwag: a very small piece of candy or an electrical socket with a fork beside it.  

As you reach across the table to refill a water glass, your hidden tattoo (acquired in the mysterious cruel cruel world of adulthood you have lived in since the tender age of 18) pops out of your sleeve, immediately exposing the young, sensitive minds at your table to utter shock.

“Oh wow, what’s that?” Mogely asks, grabbing my elbow. “A dragon?”

“It’s a bird,” you say patiently, tugging down your sleeve.

You even decide to share something personal with this boyish sponge of childlike curiosity. “It’s pretty much the only animal I can tolerate.”

His eyes widen, taking it all in. “Wow, did you get that in prison?”

He laughs with all the carefree bliss of youth, unlike his mortified wife baby who now appears to begging you with her horrified baby eyes to, perhaps, adopt her.

Your eyes suddenly seem to be expanding into big alien saucers of dark knowledge, and with eyes that say ‘Every morning I have to dress myself you know nothing of this adult world of horror’, you blink once and say, “Yeah.”

When you return to the table with a crab cake appetizer and a pocketful of atomic fireballs, the baby is shivering in terror of you. He will not be fed candy and he cannot stop apologizing for his baby faux pas.

Baby #3: Approximate age:  65. Appropriate Baby Shwag: tiny Ms. Benjamin Button t-shirt.

The primly dressed lady baby is sitting at her table (which she found on her own, with no help from stupid adult hostess) on her invisible stack of encyclopedias with her arms folded across her menu, squeezing the bridge of her nose between two ancient baby fingers.

“I’ll be with you in a just a minute,” you say, touching the right shoulder of her shoulder-bladed suit.

“Can I ask you a question?” she snaps up.

You do not say, ‘see above for when I’ll be available’.

“Of course,” you say, smiling.

“So,” she begins in the tone of someone who has no intention of asking a question. “I’d like to order your hummus, but without chips. Can I order raw vegetables instead? I’m gluten free.”

Currently you are working in a burger joint. And on the vegetable level of the food pyramid, that means tomato slices and lettuce leaves.

“Honestly,” you begin, “I’m not sure that we have any raw vegetables we can offer you.”

“That’s funny,” she said, crossing her Button arms across her Columbo chest. “That’s what I had the last time I was here.”

Frantically you rack your brain, picturing some past motherly server trooping over to Kroger to buy pureed peas and carrots for this teething Ben the Buttoness.

“Well, we do have a cucumber relish—”

“Cucumbers are a raw vegetable,” she elucidates.

You are so proud of your little button, but you do not hug her or reward her with dessert. Instead, you promise to have that right out for her.

            If you have never seen a small child eating cucumber relish with hummus, you have obviously never worked in a strictly burger joint where small children naturally come to order this. You have never seen a grown woman adapt so quickly and smugly to the idea of dipping a shredded vegetable into a bowl of pureed chick peas. You have never seen the small intellectual victories of small children who will always know better than the foolish adults in this world who stumble around pretending to know what raw vegetables are.