“It’s hard to impress me with chicken.”

This is what I overhear the stuck up woman behind me say, as though she’s more important than whatever lesser population that eats chicken. But if you want to be impressed, don’t order a chicken breast with nothing more than a garlic sauce. That’s just plain old common sense.

I move through the tables, trying to balance a bachelorette party’s colorful cocktails. Waiting on society’s rich and famous has its perks, for sure, big tips being the main one, but the cons come close to outweighing the benefits. One would think that rich people that have to be concerned about their image would have more class in a restaurant, particularly surrounding alcohol, but alas that is not true. I’ve had to handle more unruly drunks at this high end restaurant than I ever did working at a local bar and grill. But the most repeated offense of the wealthy population is the wealth of snobs. While yes, it’s not unreasonable to expect to enjoy your meal, and have it cooked properly, everyone here is human. You can ask for the mistakes to be rectified, but there’s something to be said for having grace with people. There’s no reason to address people like they’re incompetent, brainless monkeys that just wait around for you to order them around.

The worst type of customer, the one that takes the cake, is the older groups of women. The restaurant is a common place for women’s clubs to meet, so I encounter plenty of women that believe I must be doing something wrong, simply because I’m in my twenties and have a singular tattoo around my forearm. There’s at least one woman at every table that feels as though it’s their job to correct every single dish they encounter, nevermind the fact that these meals have been praised by some of the best food critics.

But what can truly turn a day into a nightmare is if I encounter not one, but several of these characters. And these different elements can combine into a storm I like to call Alex’s ending. And today, ladies and gentlemen, with the women expecting to be impressed by chicken, has all the elements of a monumental storm. I’ve handled three drunks, one drunken fight, seven dishes being sent back to the kitchen, and four lectures on what our chef in our Michelin star restaurant can do to make the food worthy of their table. Suffice it to say, I am at my last straw. It honestly may only take one more comment, or one more escort out of the bar to send that storm spiraling out of control. And that’s when a man and woman wearing clothes that I couldn’t afford with a month’s wages decide that today was the day I should get fired.

“You know, you really shouldn’t be holding the glass like that.”

“Did you shave off some of my food?”

“There will be fingerprints on the glass, making it harder to photograph well.”

“There’s not enough food on this plate, you should be fired. Just because you serve the food, does not mean you get to have some too.”

And that, my dear friends, is when the storm turns into a natural disaster, starting with the shattering of the tropical blue cocktail in my clenched fist.