What a Twist!

I just spent the weekend with my family in Phoenix, my Least Favorite City in America (although to be fair, I haven't yet been to Cleveland, Detroit, or New Shitstainberg, Delaware). The locale itself was actually not the subject of today's ire; everything went swimmingly until my final meal before leaving.

It was breakfast, this morning at the hotel. The service was bad. Specifically, our waiter was very slow taking our order and bringing out the food. Worse than that, he was condescending. He made little feather-ruffling quips here and there, such as when my uncle ordered egg whites with broccoli, and he said "I have to see if we have that. That's not a normal menu item." It wasn't exactly the content of what he said, but they way he said it that chapped my lips. It was downright snooty. (Snooty? Snotty. Snotty?!?! Five bucks if you can name the movie.)

Anyway, later on in the meal, a busboy brought out the scoop of cottage cheese my aunt had ordered a half hour earlier, and she politely refused it, saying she was no longer hungry. When the waiter came back, my grandfather's wife informed him of this development.

"Oh, okay. I'll take it off the bill. Somebody had to be served last."

Can you believe that? He actually said that. "Somebody had to be served last."

I turned and looked up at him. "What an asshole," I said, chuckling in disbelief.

"Excuse me?" he said, incredulous. 

" 'Somebody had to be served last?' Are you kidding me? You're a fucking prick, man." The waiter didn't know what to say, so I continued. "You say that like you brought everyone's food out at once, happened to set her cottage cheese down last, and she complained about it. As opposed to what really happened, which is that you took a half hour to scoop some cottage cheese into a fucking bowl and trot it out here."

"I said I was sorry--" the waiter began to stammer.

"No you didn't. At no point did you attempt to apologize. You just said you'd take it off the bill. How does not charging someone for something they didn't eat constitute an apology?"

"I don't appreciate your language," the bastard sniveled, trying to assert himself. 

"I don't appreciate anything about you," I shot back. "Bring your manager out here, post haste!" The waiter muttered something and disappeared. Five minutes later, his manager came over to speak to me, a middle-aged British woman. I explained to her what had happened, and the waiter was fired on the spot. Then he went home and hung himself.

You might presume that the subject of this kvetch was our jerkoff waiter. But you'd be wrong. In fact, more than anything, I was annoyed with myself, as that entire interaction, after the waiter said "Somebody had to be served last," occurred only in my mind, several minutes after he had left the table, having not at all been put in his place, and with an inflated, unchecked air of self-righteousness. 

One of the many instances when I wish my life had a rewind button.