Like, Basically, Shut Up

My ears are bleeding. Not because I stuck a Bic pen into my ear canal and popped my eardrum but because of a customer. He is a regular and I don't think he reads this blog, but if he does, this comes from kindness: for the love of all things bitchy please shut the fuck up!

He talks too much. The only time his gums aren't flapping is when everyone around him have excused themselves to go to the restroom. During that brief respite, his eyes desperately scan the restaurant searching for someone else to direct his words to. It's almost like if he doesn't get the words out, he will explode and spew out homonyms, synonyms and leftover pieces of a thesaurus that he once crammed up his ass in an effort to sound smarter. He does not stop talking. From 6:00 when he arrived until I left at 10:00, his vocal chords were working overtime, annoying me and everyone else who had the misfortune of having the gift of hearing. Never in my life have I wanted to be someone else more than I did that night. Oh, how I longed to be Helen Keller so that not only did I not have to listen to his voice but I could also be spared the sight of his chapped lips that had collected the tannins of his bottle of Cabernet.

Others were feeling the same way I was. More than one table let me know how he was destroying the tiny bit of ambiance that the restaurant has to offer.

Said table 7: "At least I'm not sitting next to him on an airplane."
Said table 2: "My GOD, I want to stab him in the face with a cork screw. Who the hell is he talking to anyway? Please make him stop. I hate him and I want him dead."

I feel bad for the guy, I really do. He needs to be told that after his third glass of wine he should be using his indoor voice. Or better yet, no voice at all. No one cares that he is having lasagna for Christmas dinner and nobody needs to hear the plot to a sci-fi movie that came out four years ago. He needs to realize that when I am standing in front of him ringing in an order at the bar, I don't have time to listen to the details of a vacation he took five years ago with some bitch I care for even less than I do for him. He should learn to use words more wisely and not rely on "like" and "basically" to connect every thought he has into one endlessly long run-on sentence that seems to never have an ending and just when you think it's almost at the the end, it gets longer by adding the word "and" and then it continues on and on until you realize that he will never stop talking until you actually either walk away from him or stick a napkin in his mouth but you don't want to do that because it will remind him of this other time that he had a napkin stuck in his mouth and then he will share that story too in another run-on sentence. Run-on sentences suck, sir. Don't use them.

We've all been there, trapped next to the guy who can't stop talking. In real life, I don't have an issue telling them that I need to have some alone time or that I am trying to read a book. However, when it happens with a customer at work, we sometimes get stuck with them. The only thing we can do is pray to be interupted. This is why from now on at work, I, along with my co-workers, will have an escape plan. We shall devise a signal that will alert others that we need to be saved from the conversation. the signal shall be something subtle like the gentle tug of an earlobe or the scratch of a nose. If all else fails though, clubbing the customer over the head with an ice mallet will do the trick too.

Shut the fuck up.




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