Restaurant Receipt Inspirational Notes Are What’s Wrong With America

I guess I’m old. I remember when you used to go to a restaurant for some chow and then you thanked your server with a tip and left. There were few lingering emotional connections, just a fucking burger and a bill. When the hell did everybody decide restaurant receipts were the appropriate forum for their personal expressions of faith and feelings? Waitresses are thanking customers for nursing their babies, customers are thanking waitresses for battling abusive husbands, servers are whipping out Leviticus verses on butch customers, ladies are commenting on each other’s economic plights, some woman is copping to back alley abortions in 1962 and weeping next to the bowl of urine-tainted cash register mints. It’s gotten so bad now that people are just faking notes to their own advantage. The latest is Kirsten Kinzle. I can tell I’m not going to like her merely from her alliterative name. Kirsten was born to get involved in other people’s lives. She paid the breakfast tab for an older couple in the same restaurantbecause why?

You just see people sometimes that just look like a great couple and they really loved each other.

Well, fuck you. Whenever I see a great couple in love, I like to pay for their shit. Last week at The Cheesecake Factory I bought a total stranger some condoms and a motel room because I could see he really wanted to bang his co-worker without his wife finding out. What Kirsten couldn’t possibly know was that the couple she so whimsically covered with her beneficence included an older gentleman who had recently lost a sibling to cancer. Blow the fucking trumpet of St Gabriel. Busybody waitress Stephanie Miller knew this patron factoid. I bet Stephanie knows lots of personal shit about her restaurant customers and I hate her already. It turns out, Stephanie had lost a relative to cancer precisely one year earlier. Holy Jesus! A tear-filled Stephanie felt obliged to translate her pent up emotions into a handwritten note to Kirsten with her bill to affirm her awesomeness. You see, charity only counts when it’s been attested to by Stephanie in all caps and unnecessary exclamation points. Kirsten read the letter and also began crying, until finally the entire restaurant morphed into one ginormous estrogen soaked lachrymal sandwich. Finally, the dude who had his tab paid for announced that he could pay for his own fucking pancakes next time.