Here’s the website for the Rooty Hill RSL, one of the biggest, and probably the best-known RSL club in New South Wales.
A few years ago, I was getting on the bus in Dublin’s City Centre. It was everyone’s going-home time, so the bus was packed. I was on the steps waiting to pay the driver, but had to wait for the people ahead of me to shove their way into the throng. Someone outside the bus pushed me - hard - to move forward. I whipped around. It was a Little Old Lady, scowling at me. “Move ahead!” she said.
“I BEG YOUR PARDON?” It had been one of those days, and I was damned if I was going to be shoved by anyone. “WHAT DID YOU SAY?”
She dropped her eyes and muttered something.
“I DIDN’T THINK SO!” I felt bad about browbeating a L.O.L., but you’re right - an asshole is an asshole, and sometime’s they have to get called on it.
When I got to the driver, he asked me if she had pushed me. I said yes, and he yelled at her, “I’ve told you about that before, haven’t I?”
Age doesn’t count, in the rudeness game.
It sounds like the main difference between a country club and a service club is the amount of money it takes to join and the sort of activities that are used as enticement to join. Is that about right?
And count me in among those who think it’s fair to call an asshole an asshole, regardless of their age (or anything else, really).
In practice, that sounds a lot like our Indian Casinos out here (Oklahoma). Gambling, lower cost drinks, food, entertainment, etc… Not all in the same place, mind you. You eat in one place, gamble in another, and the band is playing next door, but it’s all in the same parking lot.
That could be right, although my knowledge of US country clubs comes strictly from TV and movies; i have no personal experience with them.
Sounds a lot like a country club to me. A lot like the one I used to belong to. But I hope the food is better. 
Your impression is probably a lot more posh and elitist than reality, at least in my experience. The ones I’ve been to weren’t terribly snooty.
It sounds like a lodge, or a club, like the Elks or Jaycees, maybe? When my mother was growing up, the local firehall had something like that, and my grandfather joined just to go up and play cards and drink beer. You didn’t have to be a fireman or whoever to join.
When informed he had wrongly deduced it was abandoned, he should have gracefully moved to another table rather than try to claim jump. It seems to me that he was the lout, not the elderly lady.
It’s also sometimes said as “first up, best dressed”: the allusion is to a large family with more kids than clothes, which might well date the expression to Depression times or earlier. You get up first, you get the nicest clothes, and the late risers get what’s left.
I don’t think there’s anything quite like the Australian clubs in the U.S. They are cheap enough that almost anyone can afford to join them and eat and drink at them. The original point was to have an establishment licensed to sell alcohol, but without the restrictions imposed on hotels (the other places licensed to sell alcohol). So they are formed around some social purpose (e.g., returned servicemen, a particular sport, etc.), but people will join regardless: e.g., people will join a bowling club (lawn bowls, not 10-pin) without any intention of playing bowls, but just to eat and drink there. They often put on various entertainment, and almost always have some kind of gambling allowed – though heavily regulated and taxed.
One bit of trivia: 75% of the deaths caused by earthquakes in Australia occurred in one of these clubs, the Newcastle Workers’ Club. (That’s 9 people out of 12). And if the earthquake had been 12 hours later, the death toll would have been many hundreds, because a big concert was scheduled for that evening in the auditorium that collapsed.
You should get your club to do what mine did this week - host the Wiggles. They had three shows on Monday and the place was jam packed with 3-year-olds and pushy mums with prams. Even I thought it was hell - you should have seen the regulars. There was so much tsk tsk-ing and head-shaking going on it was hysterical, especially when the whole crowd moved to the coffee bar/regular bar area afterward to get a latte and babycino. The Bingo players and the old men playing Keno may have been scared off for a few weeks.
Good golly. They know they’ve got the same customer coming in every single day, and they know she always sits at the same table, and they can’t be bothered to keep a “Reserved” sign on that table in order to avoid the completely predictable conflicts like the one described here?
I vote we divert this Pitting to the services club management. If you’ve got a regular customer who patronizes your establishment every day and always sits at the same table, then why the hell wouldn’t you assume she’s got that table permanently reserved and treat it as such? Shoot, make up a special personalized “Reserved” sign that says “Reserved for Mrs. [Crazy Old Lady]” and put it out every day; she’ll be tickled pink.
If the table’s too “good” to allocate to a regular customer, because it’s for four persons or in a really good location or some such, then the management should arrange to reserve a smaller table for her instead. If she’s really just too much of an annoying nuisance to deal with, then the management should revoke her membership. But if they’re going to accept her patronage as a regular customer, then they should go to the trouble of trying to accomodate her as a regular customer, in a way that won’t lead to her having unpleasant public fights with other customers.
Actually, I guess we should save some of the Pitting for the crazy old lady who acts bitchy to strangers just because they didn’t know it was HER table. And some for Martini Enfield for his rudeness in calling a stranger a “cranky senile old cow”, even if she was rude to him first.
How about they just treat her like they treat every other member, and make clear that seating in this particular place is on a “first come, first served” basis? If she’s there first, and puts her coat (or whatever) on the chair, then the table is hers that day; if she’s not, and someone else arrives first, then bad luck.
Clubs like this have thousands of members, and plenty of them are retired and go to the club every day, or at least a few times a week. If management reserves a “special” table for every curmudgeon who wants one, there’ll soon be no seats for anyone else.
But if a regular customer is coming in for lunch every day, then evidently there is room for her to have a table to herself every day. Or is this one of those cafeteria-style places where separate parties sit at common tables and it’s selfish to expect to keep one to yourself?
Sure, assign the daily regulars to smaller one- or two-person tables so they don’t hog all the good locations, but it seems perfectly reasonable to treat them as though they have a permanent reservation for the table you assign them.
That way the regulars are happy, because they get their accustomed table reserved just for them every day, and the non-regulars are happy, because they’re not having fights with cranky old cows who expect them to magically intuit which is their special table, and the management is happy because they’re taking everybody’s money and not having to break up any fights. Win-win-win.
This would be my suggestion, too. Management should make up signs “Reserved for Mrs. xxx” for all the regulars, and keep them at the register. Then when she comes in, she can take her sign and put it on her table. Or if they want to be real nice, the server can do this just before the time she arrives every day. When she leaves, the reserved sign goes back to the register and the table’s open for anyone to use.
It will make her, and all the regulars, real happy.
And it will make others happy too, since they won’t have to go thru arguments like this at dinnertime. (Here in Minnesota, at this time of the year, it’s common for people to not have any coats that they could use to mark the table as used, so this might be a problem for anyone.)
Simple, cheap solution to the problem, that the management could easily implement to make things work better. They did respond pretty well to this incident, but they could do better in the future by preventing such problems.
But…you guys are missing that having reserved seating is specifically against the club’s official policy.
From the OP:
You’re asking the management to change policy all by themselves, which they probably don’t have the right to. You can’t have Management suddenly making “Reserved” signs available to certain select customers, because it goes directly contrary to official stated policy, which according to the OP is made clear when you join: “no reservations”.
Also, there’d be an enormous problem with deciding who was entitled to one of the magical “Reserved” signs. Management would have to decide, all by themselves, what constituted “regular” attendance, and who should get a sign. How often do you have to eat there, in order to qualify as a “regular” and get a sign at “your” table? Once a week? Twice a week?
Big mess. I predict that the “Reserved” signs would start going to whoever paid the biggest bribe, and whoever made the biggest stink whenever someone sat at “their” table.
No, they wouldn’t. They’d be mighty pissed off to see that other people evidently had reservations, when the club’s policy says, upfront, “No reservations”. They wonder who they had to know–or bribe, or kill–to get a “Reserved” sign kept behind the counter for themselves.
I used to go to an AA clubhouse in Sulphur Springs, Texas for meetings. We had an older gentleman in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. He could understand the meetings, but would flip out if he couldn’t get his regular seat. The group members understood this and sat elsewhere. (The seating arrangement was chairs around a conference-style table.)
So one night, this guy comes in and sits in JR’s seat. Naturally, JR flipped out. The leader explained the situation; that JR had to have his regular seat or flipping-out would ensue. The guy was being a total asshole about it and said, “Well, I don’t see this guy’s name on it, so it must be up for grabs.” Keep in mind, the room still had plenty of seats open, so the guy was just being a dick.
The next meeting, someone had taped a “Reserved for JR” sign on the table in front of his seat. As far as I know, it’s still there as a memorial.
Robin
They could just make signs for every table - you pick up a sign, put it on the table, then go order your food.
I don’t know if that would work out any better, but you wouldn’t have to leave stuff at the table to show it’s taken.
C3, what’s a babycino?