I have a friend. Longtime friend. Upper middle, sophisticated, intelligent. Big deal business consultant. His family is well ensconced in the Northshore Suburbs of Chicago. (Also underground comic geek; thus our original connection.)
He has the worst table manners imaginable. Fingers in the food, spraying bits as he speaks, horrifying smacking sounds, the whole nine yards. Just abominable. Truly incongruous and embarrassing.
So, he gets divorced. And starts dating. Never has a second date. Can’t figure out why. I’m this close to telling him why, when he seems to have hooked one. She, too, is Northshore aristocracy. She’s a lawyer, Ivy League sheepskin. You couldn’t GET any more intelligent and sophisticated. But still, she’s willing to go out to dinner with him a second time. I’m already impressed with her.
So finally, when the time is right, I join them for dinner one evening. Please pause for a few moments of wide-eyed speechlessness. Man, I wish I’d had a video camera that night. Next to her, he was the fucking Queen Mother at high tea. She was like a spastic monkey winning a food fight. It became very clear to me, halfway through the salad course, that noise was a necessary part of the eating process for her: a leaf of lettuce, and she has to give it a gum-popping smack with every chew. Smack-smack-smack-smack-smack. All while carrying on a conversation about recent Supreme Court cases.
A match made in heaven. Yes, they got married. Yes, they have kids. No, I’ve never seen the kids eat. No, I don’t want to.
Generally, I try to have good table manners, but some foods do take out the beast in me, such as Nachos or, especially, chiken wings.
This place in Dublin sells the best wings in the freakin world (I imagine, I’m not very well travelled) and the come smothered in barbecue sauce, with a side of blue cheese sauce for twice the messiness. They are so delicious, it is a sin to wipe your fingers on a napkin… not a drop of sauce can go to waste. I felt really self concious the first time I got stuck in, until I realised… EVERYONE in the restaurant was eating wings, and I mean EVERYONE. I knew this restaurant was famous for their special wings, but this was unbelievable. Every table had a basket full, and every patron had a messy face, and was sucking their fingers and making a hell of a noise. And this was not a slobby burger joint, but a fairly upmarket place. But with everyone sucking and gnwaing, It sounded like the suckling pen in a pig farm. So, when in Rome… I attacked the basket of wings like Taz. Something tells me Phlosphr should avoid this restaurant… It would seem like the seventh level of hell…
Both my parents are very loud eaters. Everytime I bring it up they look at me like I’m crazy. “Haha, yeah, you can hear us eat!” I have no idea how I picked up such humble table manners growing up with them…
Slurping sounds have made me leave the room in a fit of rage more than I can count. I am not trying to be a dick and I always try to cover for the reason I have to leave but it causes a visceral response in me that includes a really fast heart rate and the urge to punch someone. I am never mean to the person that is doing it but I will refuse to eat with them ever again.
The worst for me though is sloppy kissing sounds. I absolutely cannot take it in movies or in real-life even if I am a part of it. Likewise, my 100 pound dog has recently taken to giving himself tongue baths and I try not to throw anything at him anymore because I know he can’t understand but it drives me crazy in a very deep way that I can’t seem to work through. The sound makes it feel like someone is tickling me while touching me with live electrical wires at the same time.
I don’t have many neurotic hangups at all but that is one that just shakes me to the core and I can’t seem to do anything about other than practice torture endurance but that only puts off the response and makes it stronger.
This matches what I saw in a Lifestyle Food (our version of the food network) docco about making tea, but I can’t speak for anyone who slurps and snarfles while eating other food/ drinking other beverages. Maybe it’s a similar technique?
I get the same reaction. I don’t react to most thing, but that sound just fills me with the burning rage of a thousand suns. The worst is when I am on the train at rush hour and it is completely packed, there is simply no place for me to move to, and the person sitting right next to me starts smacking their gum and chewing with their mouth open like some cow. At times they have been so loud, that even by listening to my iPod with the volume turned way up, I can still hear her smacking over the sound of my music! How is that even possible!?
Oh, just remembered an even worse one! I was seeing Light in the Piazza at Lincoln Center, and suddenly at the beginning of the first act, this woman two seats down from me pulls out a piece of gum and starts smacking away! Loudly! And we’re in the front row! She must have spit it out during intermission because it luckily didn’t continue after. Argh, nasty rude people!
How are good (or I guess I should say “Western”, so I don’t get charged with being racist) table manners antithetical to “enjoying your food”? Pretty much everybody I knows enjoys their food, but don’t feel the need to make disgusting animal noises while doing so. Same goes for “eating enthusiastically” - I rarely see people filled with malaise by the act of consuming their food. Rooting around like pigs in a trough and allowing bits of your meal to smack others in the head, though, is bound to turn some people off.
Listening to someone who slurps and smacks is like fingernails on a chalk board. I can’t stand it. It drives me batshit.
I work with a guy who a)smacks b) slurps and c)grunts. Yes, he grunts. Like he is having sex. It is disturbing. I used to sit directly across from him and there was no where else to sit. After about a week of me listening to him smack (while dreaming of hitting him upside the head with a baseball bat) I spoke to him about it after work on the way to the car. I explained that he is really loud when he eats and that it was really bothering me. I did it as nicely as possible, though it is kind of hard to bring up the subject without the other person being somewhat bothered. I guess he got pissed and told one of his friends. Apparently his friend agreed with me because his friend told him that he was loud and that it was obnoxious.
So, what happens? Nothing. He continued to do it and I started asking him to be quite. One of my coworkers even started agreeing with me. She sits a good 20 feet from the guy and started telling him that she could hear him and it bugged the hell out of her as well. He still does it. I managed to get a desk further away from him, thank og, otherwise I’d have killed him by now but it is still really annoying.
The really bad thing is that he will eat for his whole shift. He’ll sit there and munch on something for the full 8 hours. I could handle it for a half hour, though it would still bug the crap out of me. I talked to him last week and told him that I can handle it for a half hour or so, but not the whole shift, and if it kept up I’d go to our boss about it. I told him I’d rather not have to do that. I really don’t want to have to do it because the rules about eating at our desks is lax and I’d rather not have that change but I just can’t stand it anymore. Hell, I am getting annoyed just thinking about it. It is, by far, the most annoying thing I have to deal with at work and that is saying a lot. I deal with tons of annoying crap everyday.
The great thing about being raised in a small house brimming with people is that you learn to tune out slurping, farting, vomiting…it’s all in a day’s work, you know?
My roommate (also coworker) doesn’t make noise while eating if other people eat at the same time.
But if he’s the only person eating, whether it is at home or in the office, then he eats with his mouth open and you can hear him across two closed doors.
I either pick up a breadstick or move three closed doors away…
You’d have loved this guy I knew who (and fortunately I didn’t have to actually witness this, a friend told me about it) removed his dentures at the dinner table and picked food particles out of them–and ATE the particles.
The only time I insist on doing this is at the end of a bag of crunchy cheeze doodles, because the salty orange residue is the best part. However, I am usually alone when I do it, or I keep it relatively subtle.
Shagnasty, I know whereof you speak. Slurping, smacking and those - squishy- sounds coming from someone who is eating send me into an infuriated tizzy - but I keep it under wraps. I leave the table so I won’t be tempted to throw the table centerpiece at the offender.
Simply put, I cannot withstand listening to someone slurp while they eat. It provokes in me just a tremendously deep sense of disgust and general pissed-off-edness that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to overcome. sigh. When Mr. Silver1 gets going on a good dish, I leave the table and go to another room.
The Silverjuniors have been taught (by me ) good table manners but I understand that I’ve got to set age-appropriate expectations on their table manners. However, Mr. Silver1 ought to know better so when he gets to slurping, he gets the stinky eye from me. :rolleyes:
Thank you for this description, it helps encapsulate my feelings so well. Up to a few months ago, I had a roommate that was absolutely disgusting when he ate. The worst part was how he would shove food into his mouth with both hands and his nose about six inches from the plate. He would so ravenously shovel food that it made a sound like a cow shitting into a meat grinder. At random intervals, the eating rythym would align with his belabored breathing pattern so that he was shoving it in just as he was inhaling and it would make a sound *Just Like * Homer Simpson at his most gluttonous. I often found a reason to be elsewhere.
I just endured the sound of my boss eating an apple. This is after he’s already eaten something out of a plastic cup and scrape scrape scraped the bottom of it. And then there were the chips he ate, and the sandwich he scarfed.
I sort of feel like I’m losing my mind. And there’s probably nothing I could do that would annoy him as much as his eating annoys me. Actually “annoy” is too nice a word for what his eating does to me.
