Over the past few days a little drama has played out on Facebook. It involves a restaurant, a waiter, his apparent contempt for the military, a public rant \u2013 and how that backfired.<\/p>\n
Sometime in the past week or so in Hawaii, a waiter at a restaurant served a party at one of the restaurant\u2019s tables. The party at that table purportedly ran up a $60 check and left a very small tip.<\/p>\n
The tip was reportedly small enough that it seems to me to have been a deliberate message that the service was poor.\u00a0 But I suppose I could be wrong; maybe the individual paying the bill was simply an a-hole, or meant to leave more and simply forgot.<\/p>\n
The waiter was upset. Hey, I can understand that. A tip of less than 1\/2% is<\/em> pretty bad.<\/p>\n But what the guy did next was, well . . . maybe not such a good idea.<\/p>\n The waiter had determined that at least some people in the party that had left the small tip were military. So the guy later went on Facebook and posted a rather irate, insulting, and profanity-laden diatribe concerning the people involved in the incident specifically \u2013 as well as about the military in general. (The diatribe can be viewed here<\/a><\/em> \u2013 be forewarned that the language contained is very coarse.)<\/p>\n Did I mention he seems to have posted this diatribe under his own name?\u00a0 Or that this restaurant is located just a few miles away from both Schofield Barracks and Wheeler AFB – and gets a lot of military business? Or that one of the restaurant’s co-owners is the son of a World War II and USAF vet who served in Europe at the Battle of the Bulge?<\/p>\n Predictably, the Facebook outburst got widely noticed. But I\u2019m pretty sure that didn\u2019t work out precisely as the waiter had intended.<\/p>\n