If there is a time that should be the happiest time on a weekend afternoon, particularly those in the Chinese community, usually have to do with going to a Chinese restaurant and have a lunch meal consists of dim sum, and either special rice/noodle dish. However, for some strange reason, particularly when weekends meets with the holidays, tensions and worst sorts of behaviors similar to those of the crowd issues often tend to ruin such celebration, thus becoming the most frustrating days in the calender as well. So how does that manage to get this bad? Let’s have a look at some examples of those sorts of chaos (which ironically includes those from my own family) occurs, and later I will also discuss how to prevent such disaster (or at least try to, anyway).
In my experience, some of more disgraceful behaviors tend to erupt when my family have to wait outside a restaurant for awhile, and at some point, whether it would be me whose stomach had a tendency of going haywire, or my father launched some tirades towards the hosts who were trying to manage their hardest to make customers to have them seated, for being tired of waiting. When the arguments between them gets worse by the minute, he tended to promptly pull everyone out of that restaurant and headed to another place to eat while leaving the former locale in a raging huff. Some point after all that, with his anger still lingered on, he scolded everyone for whatever mistakes he saw even if some of them weren’t caused by us. Hours afterwards when he fell asleep and headed to bed, only we tried to figure out who, what or why he managed to ruffle so many people’s feathers.
Another example came from the way of Yelp.com, and this came from one of the reviews I read about a few years ago on a restaurant that had an ownership and shop name changed. For this particular instance, from it was mentioned in one of those critiques, two different groups of prospective customers were waiting for table and apparently a fist fight broke out. While I don’t want to assume how bad this scuffle was, the story ended with both parties got ejected from the restaurant.
So how could things like waiting for seating in restaurants erupt into something like a fist fight, forced removal from favorite restaurants, or something worse? Unfortunately, it all comes down to at least a couple of factors in the lack of patience, lack of tolerance, and something else I have some difficulty of expressing them – for the lack of a better term. Moreover, from the two examples I mentioned earlier, when one or more factors combine together, we end up having something resembling to crowd issues erupt upon the unsuspecting hostess and patrons’ own families. To be absolutely blunt, some of those instances potentially tends to lead to another problem after returning from the meal – domestic abuse, another issue that I am all too familiar but have been unable to speak about for many years (that will be talked about in another time).
Now, if you ask me what solution I would recommend when you encounter something like that, there is a lot of recommendations I would suggest. Unlike the earlier eras when we have to rely on telephone books, we are now in the age of smartphones, in which we could look up the nearest restaurants with phone numbers listing in one click. Then, there’s the “trying something different” if your family approves that suggestion, providing that one of your family member doesn’t go off tangent on that suggestion. Of course, if none of those suggestions work for you, there’s always the “dreaded” option of fast food restaurant, and lastly, possibly the worst suggestion of them all, stay at home and make dishes.
For now, until next time …….
