5 Rules For Eating Out: Case of the Bicker Sisters

Recently, my husband and I had lunch at our usual weekend haunt known for its New Orleans flair. When we arrived some of the lunch crowd had subsided but it was still busy enough that we had to wait a few minutes to be seated in one of three dining rooms. No sooner had we ordered our food when two women were seated in an adjacent booth behind my husband. We couldn’t see them. We could hear them plenty…and therein lay the point of this story. Now, I am not so unreasonable that I don’t expect to hear a laugh, a word, or sentence, or two from a nearby table. However, I don’t expect to hear the entire conversation and in this case, the entire feud.

One woman spoke loudly and at a fast, almost nervous rate. Her tone and pitch suggested a friction between them that was about to explode. For the first few minutes they made general chit-chat about their kids, their husbands and a possible trip to New York. Then, everything changed and out came the emotionally loaded pistols. Turns out ,these two women were sisters…bickering 20-something sisters. They bickered about this and that, about how one never phoned the other enough, how she felt shut-out, what their mother had said, and about things that had happened years ago.
“Oh, this is gonna go south real fast,” I said to my husband.
“It had the tell-tale signs from the start when they told the waiter, we’re going to be here for about 2 hours and we don’t plan to order anything.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I whispered.
And sure enough things got worse and stayed loud. Said the one sister to the other,
“….and I don’t know if it’s because of your immaturity and lack of experience but…”
“You are so hurtful,” retorted the other sister.

My eyes bulged and I mouthed, ‘Oh my gosh,’ to my husband. He nodded his head in disbelief at such an embarrassing public display.

Our food arrived.
“Is there anything else I can get you,” asked our waiter.
“No, but I have to say….we’re enjoying the show.”
“The show?”
“Yes, the people in the next booth are quite loud,” I pointed.
The waiter asked if we wanted him to tell the squabbling sisters to keep it down, but we said no. Honestly, a part of me was agitated at the extreme rudeness and the other part was curious to hear how far things would go. The feud became so loud that we could scarcely hear the conversation at our own table. I looked around the dining room and others were agitated as well. Even fussy children weren’t as loud as these two grown-ups. We were further shocked when overhearing that one of the sisters was a teacher for the past seven years. I expect better public behavior from a teacher than that! Forty-five minutes later, the bicker sisters were still at it and in my opinion had made no progress to resolve their dispute. My head hurt. Before we left and purely from curiosity, I walked to the back of the dining room to find out if I could still hear their every word. Somewhere around four tables back from our booth I could no longer hear verbatim, but I could distinguish their voices from the others in the dining room.
And now some general rules to remember when dining out:
1. A restaurant makes money when you order food
2. The bulk of a waiter/waitress’s income is based on tips which is relative to the bill
3. People go out to eat to have fun, relax and enjoy time together
4. Leave your unresolved personal and family arguments at home or save it for the therapist’s
office
5. If the entirety of your table conversation can be heard by others then you are speaking to
loud.
Cheers!