went to fish and co for dinner the other day and sadly had the experience ruined by two different groups of people. doubly unfortunate me and harry were sandwiched between both groups and the tables were all lined up very close together. and this certainly ain’t the first time i've seen such behaviour in public. so typical. so uncouth. so without etiquette.
to my right, an irate old man who decided to take the waitress to task for mistaken billing. well not exactly mistaken as it turned out. man ordered soup, soup never turned up, soup still entered in bill, man asks why the soup is being billed when he didn’t receive any, waitress says another waitress remembers clearing a soup bowl off his table and and and… man goes ballistic!
man (raising voice): what do you mean she cleared a soup bowl? i never even saw any soup appear! i never even drank any soup! ARE YOU ACCUSING ME OF LYING? i said i never drank any soup! you better check! this is ridiculous! I SUE YOU then you know!!
waitress apologises profusely, mumbles something about re-doing the bill.
man: ya that’s more like it! don;t think i can’t sue you over this ah!
now this just takes the cake. the parts above in caps aren’t just to emphasise his raised voice, it’s also quoting his exact words. stupid man. ruin dinner for me and harry only. if in the first place you didn’t get your soup, you should have just alerted someone earlier to bring it round. even if you forgot about it, there’s hardly a need to yell about sueing anybody over fucking soup.
this is one major problem with singaporeans today. they really know how to abuse the ‘customer is always right’ principle and take advantage of it to the max. no one is perfect so if the serving staff make a mistake, be more gracious about it. it will say tons more volume for your level of etiquette and handling of people than to act like some pms-ing tycoon demanding immediate redress or risk court order over soup. and chances are when you're more polite maybe you’ll get even better service.
this is just sad. i have seen too many singaporeans who think they have tons of friggin moolah when they don’t and still they wanna throw their weight around. trust me i’ve been in a service line before. worse still are the penny-pinchers on top of that. funnier are the ones who wanna sound important and educated in complaint letters but can’t even string a decent sentence together in proper english. or spell for that matter. but at least these are a real laugh so that helps to normalise my blood pressure back.
now to my left, two girls and a guy. guy sounds local, girls are from china. girls talk in chinese super loudly and annoyingly non-stop making big hand gestures. the one sitting immediately next to me starts talking on the phone too… oh why don’t you come down, just come down, come down come down, just come for awhile, come come come ok… (and later after paying the bill…) where’s the change, is it correct, i don’t see the change, oh there it is, are there any toothpicks, where are the toothpicks, i want toothpicks, can you (to the guy) go get some toothpicks…
well yes how about i come over and stick you with a toothpick. my fish and chips just turned stale and acrid from all their useless motherload of exhalation vapour wafting over my table from both sides.
