Last night, a friend and I went to a local bar for some wine and dessert. I had been suffering a severe migraine for most of the day, but wanted to stick to the plan with the hopes that human interaction and bread pudding would resurrect me. It didn’t. I was a vegetable.
The server came to our table and I said, “We’ll have edamame, bread pudding, fried oreos, and seared tuna please…Oh and two glasses of Cabernet.” That’s not how you order that shit. He looked at me like I was an idiot, and offered to start us with the tuna and edamame, then bring out the dessert. “Sounds great,” I said.
I’ve worked in the restaurant industry for a long time. When people order like that it can be frustrating. You question if they’ve ever been to a restaurant before. But I felt like I was dying last night. I was in no condition to put together cohesive thoughts and speech. And that’s the point of this post:
You don’t know what’s going on with other people.
You don’t know what their day has been like. You don’t know if it’s the anniversary of their father’s death. You don’t know if their kid told them to ‘fuck off’ today. You don’t know, man.
Who knows? Maybe that person is just being rude and inconsiderate…but you have no way of being certain. It can be incredibly difficult at times, but a fantastic rule of thumb is to treat people with respect and patience as if they had a terrible migraine. Because you don’t know if they have one or not.