Dear Bar 8

Dear Bar Seat Number 8,

I appreciate the great enthusiasm you have for wanting to pay the check. Really, I do. However, I am currently actively engaged in taking an order from the person sitting next to you (that would be Bar Seat Number 7), and when you try to get my attention by waving your hand in between our faces in a frantic chopping motion, it makes me want to swat it. Hard.

It is my job and not your job to manage the needs of the eighteen (no exaggeration) people who are currently demanding my attention, so I certainly don't expect you to know the crazed way in which I am juggling all those priorities in my head. In a way you made my job a bit easier by moving yourself to the top of the list.

But I don't think I'm quite at the stage where I can thank you for that.

I know you would like think you are my only customer, but when you're dining in a restaurant, you can expect that you are not your server or bartender's only focus. We all have to share our love-- spread it wide and far. We try to be fair. We try to act like you're the only person we have to take care of. We try to tap into our inner lap dancer and pretend like you are the only person that exists in the world.

But when it comes down to it, we have to see to lots of people. And sometimes that means you have to wait nine seconds for your check while I take someone else's order.

Or at the very least it means you needn't stick your hand in my face.

Anyway, I hope you got to where you needed to be, with a belly full of fennel salad and a refreshing Negroni on the rocks.

Sincerely,

Your Bartender Who Wishes More Than You Do That She Were Not Being Pulled In A Million Different Directions