I have, in fact, worked in the restaurant industry and I can't think of a single time when the gender of the person who ordered the food was relayed to the cook, because, frankly, he/she couldn't give two shits.

Yep. 5cents each lemon wedge. It was under the miscellaneous charges on the computer. It was kinda funny because people like that aren't going to tip for shit anyway. When you're working for $2.13 per hour and your tips are pretty much all you get after taxes, etc., if you can't make much off the table in actual…

Just to be clear...you're insinuating that the cook, who wouldn't know your gender unless specifically told by a waiter, is cooking your steak more well done than your husband's because you're a woman? And that this pattern of waiter telling cook your gender invariably happens when you two go out to dinner and both…

50 is not really old, says the person seven years from being 50.

Thank you, it's kind of fun to share the dumber stories from my time in food service, even if my writing quality may fall below that of a professional journalist or writer (oh noes!). It's definitely nice to know that other people find some of this stuff amusing too.

Coffee guy was 50. That's hardly within the realm of "old people". Sandra Bullock, David Spade, Keanu Reeves, Run DMC, Molly Shannon, and Eddie Vedder all turn 50 this year. So does Russell Crowe, but he's been an asshole forever.

Oh god. I ran to McDonald's on my lunch break the other day and...ok, my lunch break is only 15 minutes but everyone's pretty lenient about it if you're going out to get food. Still, not to be a dick to my coworkers, I try to be fast. I walk in and one woman just had her order taken, then it's a woman getting ice…

There's this new BBQ joint that opened up in San Francisco that makes charges $20 a pound for brisket because they use waygu beef. The whole point of slow-cooking is to take shitty cuts of meat and make them tender and delicious. You don't smoke fucking waygu beef.

I just wonder how many times the kitchen staff scratched their balls before hand-squeezing the coleslaw. I'm gonna bet $50 on EVERY TIME.

I had someone (one single person!) ask for a soup bowl of honey mustard dressing. They got hit for $5, because fuck that. People would occasionally pull that kind of shit. You knew they just wanted free dressing to save, instead of buying it from the store. I'd happily give a couple extra ramekins of dressing if…

50 is not really old these days

Actually, the best research we have on the subject shows that people tend to get nicer as they get older. I think there are a lot of people who are assholes when they're young that are assholes when they're old, but the correlation isn't age - it's just being a dick in the first place.

Speaking of therapist servers, have you ever heard that piece of advice that if you think a break up is going to go poorly you should do it in public? I can't count the number of breakups I've waited on. And that was at Denny's, so it wasn't even like "let's commemorate this amazing run with a final dinner," it was…

I believe that standard guideline is to charge 3x the food cost so you cover all your overhead and make a profit. Good bleu cheese, while not astronomical, isn't exactly cheap either. Plus, like C.A. Pinkham mentioned, the guy was a total weirdo, so they probably weren't exactly trying to encourage him.

Can I ask, respectfully, why you would even post the "Fuck this link" link? It's a complete non-story, so it's not even like, say, Kim Kardashian's pregnancy weight where if you don't report that tabloids are reporting it, you're willfully ignoring a big story (why that one was a big story, I don't know. But it…

So you say, "fuck this link" yet you still post a link to a page that exists ONLY to make fun of a woman's body? A woman with a known substance abuse problem, I might add.

Some of us don't even bother most of the time. I did manage to make it into the kitchen before busting out in laughter, the time I told my 3 year old son I didn't want to see him throwing food on the floor, and without missing a beat, he told me "just don't look then." His father just sat next to him cracking up…

From watching my friends, I often think the hardest part of parenting must be keeping a straight face.

I noticed one day that my five year old nephew was making toast. I said, "Cool, when did you learn to make your own toast?" Without missing a beat he said, "When I was in the Army."

Is this an intorvert-extrovert friendship? My extrovert friends never think I'm enthusiastic enough about anything.