Making a scene

In My Humble Opinion
1

So me and the SO are out shooting pool last night, and while I’m bent over to take a shot, a gal walks by, and strokes my arse.

The SO went ballistic, a brouhaha ensued, and we were escorted out. I was not a happy camper, as I was winning the game we didn’t get to finish.

I won’t go into the details of what she did, but an innocent pool stick almost lost its life.

I told her she made a scene, and caught hell for it, but she’s Cleopatra. Queen of De Nile.

Anyone else caused, or been the victim of someone causing a scene?

2

A friend of mine always deliberatly makes scenes when we’re out. I find it hilarious and he loves the attention. Like when we were shopping he loudly stated to the woman behind the till that the clothes he was buying were for him to wear. (They were woman clothes, actually for his girlfriend). I didn’t stop laughing for ages.

3

My husband and I were having drinks at McSorley’s Old AleHouse in NYC. Our favorite place to go during the week, it gets extremely crowded on the weekends. On most nights the crowd at the bar is four deep, which leaves little room between the bar and the tables to walk.See here.

Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar with McSorley’s when it is busy you need to share a table with other customers. Unless your lucky enough to get one of the tables for two near the windows, in our case, we have never been that lucky.

So, he and I are sitting at one of the larger tables getting pretty snookered. A large group of eight walks in and the bartender/waiter asks if it is okay if they sit with us. No problem. Four older couples, all from Spain. With the little English they knew and the little Spanish I learned in high school we were having a good old time chatting with them. I even offered to take some pictures of them using their camera.

After about an hour or so, it was beginning to really crowded and my husband and I had to get going. He went off to the bathroom and I asked for the check. As my husband was walking back the waiter handed me the bill which came to $74.00 or so.

My husband was standing behind me getting money out of his wallet. He handed me a fifty-dollar bill and proceeded to go into his pants pocket where he had placed some smaller bills earlier in the day. I placed the check and the fifty down on the table and turned my head towards him to get the remainder, after a few seconds (and I swear it was only a few seconds). I turn back and the fifty is gone and a five-dollar bill is in its place. Meanwhile, out of the corner of my eye I notice the guy that was sitting next to me reaching down under the table and picking something up that had mysteriously fallen on the floor. The lighting is not so great at McSorley’s and, again, I was pretty snookered.

To make a long story short. When I told my husband what I suspected I could see the blood vessels on his temples begin to throb. Oh Shit!. We explained the situation to the waiter and he claimed that since neither he nor anyone else had seen what happened there was nothing that really he could do. (This particular waiter knew us well, so we took his word for it)

I successfully got my husband to calm down and we paid the bill. On the way down the street I kept saying to him. “It’s okay, I got the five, so they technically only stole $45.00 from us. It’s okay.” Snookered logic.

So, we get about halfway down the block, I’m yakking, and suddenly I get the feeling I am talking to myself. I turn around – he had dropped his briefcase and was running up the block back towards McSorley’s. There was a crowd of people outside waiting to get in and they all scattered when he approached the bar. I ran after him and grabbed him from behind in an effort to stop him from going back inside. The buttons were flying off his dress shirt in all directions and I somehow I managed to keep him from going back inside. * At the time he was about 230lbs of pure muscle. I’m still holding him back and he’s screaming “No one robs money from him” and the like.

Through the window I could see the guy speaking to the waiter and pointing out the window at my husband. The waiter comes out and tries to calm my husband down. I began to collect the buttons that flew off his shirt and then I walked back down the street to retrieve his briefcase before it disappeared. The whole neighborhood had come out side to see what is going on. Even the people that were waiting to get in and scattered when they saw him coming were still standing in the middle of the street.

We didn’t go back to McSorley’s for a while after that.

4

I used to be the type that, when the SO pushed my buttons so hard I couldn’t swallow it anymore, I’d save it for when there wasn’t an audience. SO’s came and went, and the policy stayed.

Enter SOB. SOB does NOT like my way of anything. Dressing. Health-watching. Interacting with my family. Having friends. Walking without tripping into the wall. Thinking. Breathing. SOB would routinely pick me up from work, and say the meanest things he could think of, just to make me yell out loud. One day, I tore MY car keys out of the ignition, I was so mad at him (he was driving). We got out of the car, and had a screaming match on the side of a residential street. I told him to be moved out by the time I got home. The guy on whose lawn we were carrying on the uncivilised conversation was seriously contemplating calling the cops. He may have. I walked home, SOB followed me in MY car, and the police followed him in theirs. SOB moved out that night.

I now shoot warning shots: I don’t like public temper tantrums, but I’m good at them. Treat me well and you’ll never have to know how good.

5

I wasn’t the person who caused or was part of a scene being made, but this pissed me off.

I was at the pizza parlor, picking up dinner before work. I had to wait a bit while my food cooked, and at the next table was a father with his son who was about 9 years old, both of whom were waiting to pick up food also.

The dad kept poking his son’s shoulder or ear (I was trying not to look) and the kid kept saying “stop it” over and over, and the kid really didn’t sound amused. I found them so irritating and wanted my food to just be ready. The dad goes into another bout of flicking the kid’s ear or whatever with the son saying “stop it” and I do finally look over quickly, and the father turns to his kid and sternly says “listen, keep your voice down, you’re gonna make a scene.”

I wanted to yell at the father “YOU’RE THE ONE MAKING THE SCENE! LEAVE HIM ALONE YOU JACKASS!” But I held my breath. I felt bad for that kid.

6

I was sitting at a bar with my best friend, and I had on a pair of pants that gapped at the waist in the back when I sat down. (Okay, so it’s really hard to find a pair that doesn’t do this, so I just make sure my ass is covered.)

Some joker and his coworker were sitting next to us at the bar, and apparently Joker A thought it would be funny to ash his cigarette down the gap in my pants.

I didn’t even feel it; I had no idea what was going on at all…which is why I was extremely confused when my beloved, normally mild-mannered best friend stood up so fast her bar stool spun out behind her, and just started screaming obscenities at our fellow bar patron, aka Joker A.

“You fucking asshole, what the fuck is your problem! You don’t have a sister, or a mother, or what, you think you can treat a woman like that, you fucking asshole motherfucker!”

Me: blink blink “What?”

Apparently Joker A was “just joking,” and while he profusely apologized to me, my friend didn’t stop screaming at him until he was ejected from the building.

And she didn’t calm down, either, until a drink or two later.

So yeah, I guess you could say I was the reason a scene was caused. :smiley:

7

I made a scene at Walmart once. A woman was standing up on the shelf so she could reach something higher. I was wheeling by, and she jumped down and landed on/in my cart. I asked her if she was OK and she mumbled something about how SOME people should watch where they’re GOING. Well, I was about 12 hours into a mean bout with PMS, so that’s all she had to say. I lit into her like a raging banshee, telling her to take her fat ASS the fuck out of my sight before I really give her something to whine about, blah, blah, blah RAGE, RAGE, etc. Her husband and kids were in the next aisle and heard the commotion. He started walking toward me and I told him DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT BUTTING INTO THIS CONVERSATION, YOU FUCKING LOSER. He backed off in a hurry. It was wonderful to see this woman freak when she realized her husband wasn’t going to defend her. And all of this on Mother’s Day. I do feel as though I over-reacted, but at the time I simply couldn’t contain myself. I relayed this story to my sister in law, and for Christmas, she bought me a miniature shopping cart with a gift certificate for Walmart. Heh.

8

I’m not a scene-maker, far from it. I hate it. I hate it when I do it, and I hate it when others do it. I don’t have much of a temper at all. But . . .

Twice in the last decade I’ve done it. Both times in restaurants and bars, and both times when the staff was so snotty and abusive I cannot understand how they were still alive.

First time. In Fez, in the Time Cafe (New York City). I’m having a drink in the bar with a few friends. I order a Bushmill’s on the rocks. The waitress brings my drink. I sip it. It’s not Bushmill’s. It’s Black Bush, a premium version of Bushmill’s that I don’t especially like. I point this out to the waitress. She says (and I am quoting exactly here – I still remember it) “We’re out of Bushmill’s. That’s what we have, and that’s what you’re going to drink.” For a split second, rage overrides my rational brain. I pitch the glass, hard, into the mirror behind the bar. It cracks. I am then roughly escorted from the bar by the larger male members of the staff. I mean, if the bitch had said, “sorry, we’re out of Bushmills – I thought this would be OK,” I wouldn’t have given it a second thought, but what she said was utterly unacceptable.

Second time. Mekong (a restaurant in NYC, not the river in Viet Nam). Again, I’m meeting a party of friends. Eight of us will be dining there, if I remember right. It’s a good restaurant. I’ve eaten there a number of times before.

My then-girlfriend and I are the first ones there. We sit at the bar and order a couple of drinks. I put a twenty on the bar. The change is $10. I leave it there.

More friends drift in, and the hostess comes over to tell us that our table is ready. I turn around to see where it is. I turn back to the bar to pick up my change (with every intention of leaving a decent tip). It’s gone. The thieving bitch behind the bar says “if you leave the bar, it’s my tip,” and won’t give it up. I control myself, and we go to our table.

The food is good, but service is horrendous. Orders are mixed up. Dinners arrive as much as twenty minutes apart (I hate this. We went to the restaurant to eat together). One particulary messy dish is actually dropped in the lap of one of our party.

We finish. We call for the check. It comes. It says, as is standard practice in many restaurants, that an 18% gratuity is automatically added to the bill for parties of six or more. Between the service and the outright robbery at the bar, I decide that there is no way in hell we’re going to pay it. I tell my friends to meet me outside, that I’ll take care of the check. I call the manager. I give him, in cash (don’t want him to have my credit card number considering what I’m about to do), exactly the amount of the bill. No tip. I tell him I’m not leaving a tip, no matter what. He can call the cops, he can have the kitchen staff kick my ass, but I’m not tipping. He insists. Our voices rise. Patrons start to gape. I tell him that I was robbed at the bar, that the service was amateurish at best, and that my offer to pay the check without the mandatory tip will stand for about another ten seconds. Then I’m leaving without paying for the meal, either. He backs down. I pay the bill, and the bill only.

So there you have it. Two scenes. One worked. The other didn’t.

9

LMM, you’re my hero.

10

I’m not the “scene” type. My temper rarely gets the best of me in such situations, and I don’t like confrontations so I don’t like to complain at restaraunts and the like. if it sucks, I just won’t go back. That’s probably the wrong action to take, and it won’t help the restaraunt/whatever-store improve, but that’s just my style. I guess I’ve never been screwed over enough either to warrant such a flare-up.

11

LMM,

How you handled Scenario No. 2 is exactly right, IMHO. While I am the first to admit that the occasional dining room manager can be a tad myopic when their staff gets up to crap like that, I would also like to think a good manager would have caught on, and waived the 18% add-on in lieu of positive customer relations. :eek:

My question to you is this: You had been there several times previous to that, and clearly enjoyed the food and the service. Have you been back since? If so, how did THAT go?

12

The one that comes to mind is one involving Mr. S. Suffice it to say that he did something that (rightfully) deeply offended another patron, and we left. The other party was wrong, but Mr. S’s reaction to it was worse. He was immediately ashamed of what he did, and apologized to the other party, to me, and to the owner of the establishment. (I might add that the other party never apologized for the initial offense, and that the owner later told us that when they came in, he thought there might be trouble.) The owner very graciously accepted Mr. S’s obviously heartfelt apology, but Mr. S is still so embarrassed that we haven’t been back. Too bad, because it’s a nice place. We don’t even discuss it.

13

I was sitting at a light and had my teenagers in the car. 3 teens walk in front of my car. One kid has a pair of binoculars and is looking at us through them. My 17 year old jumps out of the car and starts yelling at the kid with the binoculars and proceeds to call him a pussy for looking through them. He antaganizes this kid but it is obvious this kid is afraid of my 6’2 son.

I coax my son back into the car and he says the kid with binoculars was saying “can you see me?” as he looked at us.

I don’t get it. I don’t see what the big deal was. But it was embaressing and I realized at this moment that the kid could snap at anything and now I am afraid to take him out in public.

14

Not me but my cousin - we were both in high school, and he’s about 3 years older than I am. Normally, he wasn’t on the same bus as me, but he’d stayed at a friends that night.

So the bus is tooling down a residential street, coming towards a T intersection (we’re on the top part of the T). All of a sudden, a car comes flying down the other street, through the stop-sign at the intersection, and into a driveway on the other side. The bus-driver had to jam the brakes on pretty hard to avoid an accident, and everyone is pretty confused about what’s going on.

The bus has just started moving again, and my cousin yells out “Stop the bus!”. The driver thinks someone was hurt, and stops. My cousin goes flying down the aisle of the bus, out the door, and runs up to the car. The driver was a middle aged woman, and my cousin (who’s maybe 17 at the time) starts giving her holy hell. He must have yelled at her for two or three minutes straight, and she never says a word. The whole time, the driver is trying to get my cousin back on the bus. When he finally got back on, everyone started cheering and clapping.

15

Like Kalhoun’s, my story involves the Wal-de-Mart …

I was looking at a package of hair dye, trying to figure out if I wanted to color my hair myself, or just have my hairdresser do it for me. (Basically, I was trying to cheap out, but I am chicken.) It was the last box in that particular color. I picked it up just as a really large woman (in every possible way) came barrelling down the aisle. She was apparently looking for the same color I was holding in my hand. She saw me standing there, reading the label, and then she reached over and took the box right out of my hand.

Now, personally, I think that was bad enough, but she started calling me lots of not-nice names and just generally screamed and yelled at me like I had kidnapped her children or eaten the last Twinkie on Earth or something. I just stood there and tried to remain calm, while I actually tried to explain myself to this psycho hose-beast.

She would have none of it, and she actually SLAPPED me in the Wal-Mart face and called me the “c-word”, in front of Og and everybody, for no good reason. I really hadn’t had a chance to say two words. People were looking at ME like I had done something wrong, which obviously I had, because everyone knows that only horrible, wretched, scum-of-the-Earth types would dare to flagrantly read the label in the middle of the hair care aisle.

I didn’t slap her back, or even say anything to her, but I did raise one HELL of a fuss with the Wal-Mart people. I snagged a salesperson and made them take me back to security so I could file a complaint against Psycho Suzie. I didn’t raise my voice or anything, but I refused to leave the store until someone looked at the surveillance video to see if they recognized her. Turns out, Psycho Suzie was a frequent shoplifter who had also accosted other customers in the store in the past. Once I got her name, I actually filed criminal charges against her.

(OK, so it wasn’t a GOOD scene …)

16

I once came to Microsoft’s defense on a Linux user’s group list.

Man, talk about the shit flying fast and furious…

17

Well, I felt my WalMart incident warranted SOME sort of reaction…just not quite as strong as I laid it out. Psycho Susie should have been arrested and barred from the store on her initial attacks. That shit is scary!

18

I don’t normally make scenes and find most to be embarrassing, to say the least. I rarely complain, and when I do, I’m polite about it. Every few years, though, something just sets me off, and then I’m gone.

While my son was still a toddler, he developed a horrible, weepy, rash. ALL. OVER. HIS. BODY.

I made numerous trips to the doctor over a period of about four months. I kept asking if fleas could be causing this, because they would literally jump up on him whenever he went outside. I was told over, and over, no it’s not fleas.

First trip, I was chastised by the doctor for bringing him in with active chicken pox. Guess what, it wasn’t the chicken pox. Next several trips, I was merely given various cremes. They didn’t work. Next, I was told it was scabies, and now we all had to treat ourselves with pesticide. (This was after several trips to the doctor, by the way, where I was FINALLY referred to a dermatologist). Dermatologist told me it was scabies on three separate occasions, and of course, each time, we were to douse ourselves with pesticide lotion (my two year old, five year old, husband and myself). Meanwhile, throughout all of this, my poor two year old is just miserable. The dermatologist told me if this latest course of pesticide didn’t work, to come in immediately, after seeing son’s pediatrician.

Well, the pesticide didn’t work. I am now good and pissed because we have been jerked around for four months. I drag my poor son into the pediatrician, AGAIN. Pediatrician states, “Well we can’t send him to the dermatologist again.” I asked why not and was told that particular doctor was on vacation. I asked about a back-up physician. Well, the back-up physician was getting ready to leave for the day (AT FREAKIN’ NOON!).

Now, that was IT! I was gone. I told him and his nurses in no uncertain terms, with very salty language, and obviously very loudly, that since they couldn’t figure out what to do about my son’s suffering they were going to refer me to an outside physician NOW, THIS MINUTE, and I expected an appointment to be made for me in the local area. There was a lot of yelling done by me. The nurses and the doctor just stood there and gaped. They couldn’t believe how I was going off. One even said, “I just can’t believe this. Mrs. Taters is always SO polite and quiet”.

Well, I got an appointment with an outside doctor within the hour. Furthermore, the problem was caused by fleas. In fact, it was the first question asked. My son had a bad reaction to bites. One bite and fifty more welled up around it.

Furthermore, I received a letter of apology from the HMO. Most importantly, my son didn’t have to suffer anymore. We got the appropriate treatment for him and the fleas didn’t bother him nearly as much.

So, sometimes making a scene is worth it.

(You know, upon reading this, you might all think those fleas came from my home. I had a cat, but I was diligent about flea dips and medication, and bombing the house every few months. So, while there might have been a very few fleas inside, it was outside where my son was attacked by them)

19

Haven’t been back. Too bad. The food is good, quite good. Kind of nouveau Vietnamese/French.

I would have overlooked the rotten service, especially since I didn’t tip, but the outright theft at the bar was too much.