That’s sad. You’ve obviously never worked in the service industry. Start your own pitting if something this silly upsets you.
I always enjoy stories of managers doing the right thing and recognizing customers who are not worth the effort.
I have, and servers who do that bug the crap out of me too.
To clarify: “I have several specials tonight, but I’m out of the fish.”
Oh, okay. I thought you meant servers who say “when people come into my restaurant” or something. Which is a common thing people do in any job: “When I go to my store” or “when people go to my company’s picnic”.
Sorry for flying off the handle. That phrasing bothers me too. 
Right-o. Most people refer to their company as “my company”, and I wanted to clarify that that wasn’t what I meant.
Actually I have.
I can personally verify that the single most difficult special request for a breakfast cook is “dry toast”. Simply because “make toast” is, to a breakfast cook, effectively a single action rather than a series of steps. The toast pops up, you grab it with your left hand as you simultaneously grab the butter knife with your right hand and smear that butter. It’s all one motion that takes about half a second, and you have repeated this motion over and over and over. It’s a task that the cook doesn’t even think about. Leaving off the butter requires active, deliberate concentration if you want to override your muscle memory. I eventually came up with a solution: when I scanned the ticket and saw the words “dry toast”, the very first thing I would do, even before I put the hashbrowns on the grill, was place a side plate on top of the butter container. Then when the toast popped up a few minutes later and I reached for the butter knife, I’d hit the plate and say, “Oh yeah! No butter!” I imagine it’s similar for dinner cooks and baked potatoes.
As for the OP and special requests … I currently work at the city convention center, where I’ve seen the chefs prepare meals for groups of 800+. In a situation like this, everybody gets the same thing, naturally. Unless they’re a vegetarian. The captains and banquet managers make sure to find out exactly how many vegetarians or vegans there are in the group, and report this number to the executive chef. The chef prepares that many vegetarian or vegan dishes for those people. These special dishes are every bit as nice and tasty as the regular dishes.
Invariably, there will be one vegetarian in the group who looks at the plate and tells the server, “Oh, I don’t want this. I just want a big plate of vegetables.” Um, well, that’s what you’ve got, fool. But the server will smile politely at this picky person who doesn’t realize that you don’t get to order ala carte at a bigass convention, and come back to the kitchen looking for plain old vegetables. Problem is, the executive chef has been doing these conventions for a few decades, and has become an expert at purchasing and preparing precisely the right amount of each item to feed the intended number of attendees. So there are no more vegetables in the pot. The server is then reduced to pulling unclaimed meals (dished up for people who decided not to show up) out of the warmer cart and scraping the vegetables off of several of those plates onto a single plate for the special customer.