Boy: “Hey, do you work here?”
Me: “No. I just came from a Halloween party nine months too late. How’s my costume?”

The other night, I got a group of boys and girls that made it their mission to piss me off as much as possible.

Thinking they were better than everyone else in the restaurant (as teenagers are wont to do) one young man wanted a beer. When I asked him for his ID, he responded with, “Dude, don’t you know me?”

All of his girl friends giggled as if he was some important dude. To me, he was just another metrosexual-looking douche with Fallout Boy-hair, a lip-ring and jeans that looked like my little sister couldn’t even fit into.

Me: “Uh…know you? Do you go to (name of my school)?”
Him: “Naw, man. I’m in Bury The Hatchet. We play around here all the time.”
Me: “A band?”
Him: “Yea. I play drums.”
Me: “Unless you can show me an over-21 ID or you’re John Bonham’s grandson, you’re not getting a beer.”
Him: “John Bonham? Who’s John Bonham?”
Me: “Are you kidding me?”
Girl 1: “Isn’t he the drummer for New Found Glory?”
Girl 2: “No, he’s the drummer for Blink-182.”

Go. Fuck. Yourself.

Me: “How about this…three minutes each. Drum-off. You beat me, I’ll buy you a beer every time you come into (name of restaurant). Here’s my address. Oh, and you got your cell phone on you? My number is (my number).”
Him: “How long you been playing?”
Me: “Should it matter? You’re in Bury The Hatchet, right? You’ve gotta be good!”
Him: “I don’t drum for just anyone.”
Me: “You should make it far in the music industry.”

It’s been pretty rainy the last few days where I live and therefore business has been entirely way too slow. And I don’t mean the “Oh, I only made 20 dollars less than I usually do” kind of slow. No, no, no. I mean the kind of slow where I get sat my first table 90 minutes into my shift and it’s a 19 year old blonde with a book and a temperamental attitude.

So she sits down and is nice enough at first. She smiles, says “thank you” when I drop off her soup to start her meal and asks for things with words like “please” and “may I bother you for a (fill in the blank)”.

But as the night wears on and she’s finished her Vegetable Dinner (who goes to a Japanese Steakhouse for a Vegetable Dinner?) she pulls out a notebook and starts highlighting her book as if she’s studying in the restaurant.

It’s slow and there’s only one other table around her, so I could really care less how long she stays or what she does while she’s there.

Well, the table next to her is ordering drinks left and right and getting a little loud. Nothing too out of control, but you could tell they were having fun.

The girl beckons me (that’s the only word I could think to describe her arrogant flick of the wrist) and tells me:

Girl: “Can you tell those people to keep it down. I’m trying to study.”

Let’s go over a few things here:

1. She ordered a 9 dollar dinner and a free water to wash it down.
2. “Those people” have ordered over 100 dollars of sushi, appetizers and drinks.
3. She has been at her table for near two hours now.
4. They just sat down.

Me: “Sorry. I can move you to another table if you’d like to study. Or maybe you could sit at the bar. There’s no one sitting there yet.”
Girl: “Do you think people will be at the bar in the next hour or so.”
Me: “There’s no way of knowing it, but my guess would be that there will be.”
Girl: “Unbelieveable. I’ll just take my check.”

$1.10 tip. Even a blonde could have figured that’s not good.

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of emails about this whole “Gas Out” day scheduled for May 15th of this year. Surprisingly, most of them have gone like this:

“Put this on your website because we want lower gas prices and you get a lot of people every day to visit your site and we want LOWER GAS PRICES!!!1!! GO GATORS!”

I’d tell you the email address of the guy who sent that, but that’s just cruel. Suffice to say, it had the words “bro” “surfer” and the numbers “1″ “6″ and “9″ in it. If you’d like to thank him for ringing the bell of truth in my inbox, you are more than welcome to shift those around and try ‘em out.

I’ve even gotten chain messages on Myspace, group invites on Facebook and random IM’s from the “babicake”’s and “sexycalikitten”’s of my AOL buddy list.

Let me just reply to all of you with this:

You stupid fucking hippies have no idea how basic economics works and if you think not pumping gas on one day will do a damn thing, you’re sadly mistaken.

How do I know this? Because I’m smarter than most of you out there. How do I know that? I’m about to graduate college. Only about 1 in 3 of us Americans do that. Eat it.

Let’s examine the goals of this event/group/day/stupid frickin’ thing for a second. The only pretense of this group is to not buy gas for an entire day. Sounds good in theory, right?

Wrong! It doesn’t even sound good in theory. Communism sounds good in theory for Christ’s sake and people are dying all over the world because of that shit.

If, for instance, you weren’t going to use gas for an entire day, then we have something that could put a dent in the ever-increasing profits of oil companies. But to just not purchase gas doesn’t make an ounce of sweet, sweet gasoline…er, sense.

Stay with me here, guys. I’m about to use an example: No one buys gas on May 15th. But you still use the same amount. You are still using THEIR PRODUCT, FOLKS, WHETHER YOU PURCHASE IT OR NOT. All you’re doing is making it so that you will have to buy more gas on May 16th and 17th than you would if you had filled up your tank on the 15th.

Not only that, but gas prices are rising at an exponential rate. If you put off buying gas a few days, the price will most assuredly rise a few cents a gallon. Doesn’t sound like that big of deal, right? Fill up your tank at 5 more cents a gallon.

Well, the more successful your little “Gas Out” day is, the more money you’re putting into THEIR pockets. All YOU’VE managed to do is prolong that money getting into their pockets a day or two later.

The same amount of gas is being sold, just at a later time.

And at 5 additional cents a gallon for millions of idiots, I’m sure they won’t mind.