Ok, so maybe this doesn’t exactly rise to the level of hatred, but it’s still annoying. You’re at a restaurant, your food has been delivered, and you’ve just taken a big tasty bite when your waiter returns to ask, “How is everything?” There is no suitable response other than the one pictured here. Do not answer with your mouth full. Do not hold up one finger, the international “Wait one second, please” sign. Do not then point to your mouth to remind the person that the wait for your answer shouldn’t be too much longer. Do not speed the process along by swallowing food whole, even if you’re reasonably sure your server knows the Heimlich maneuver. Do not spit food back onto your plate to answer. Just give the thumbs up and get back to the business at hand. And by all means, give your hard working server credit for deliberately waiting to ask until just after you’ve stuffed enough food into your pie hole to feed a small African village for a week. Otherwise you’ll send them off looking for ketchup, and when they return with it, you’ll then ask for extra napkins, and when they bring those you’ll want your tea topped off, and on and on it goes.
A close second to the ill-timed question on the hate-o-meter: the server who brings your food and vanishes until it’s time to present the check. Remember the Black-Eyed Pea restaurant on Washington Road (where California Dreaming is now)? Back in the day our waitress there brought all our food (my wife and three kids) and then disappeared to fetch five sets of silverware. Or so we presumed. We presumed wrong. After an interminable wait as our food slowly cooled off, I had to get up and go find silverware for us all. You have no idea how weird it feels to sit before five plates of steaming food and do absolutely nothing for minutes on end. People were staring at us.
Given a choice, I’d prefer the ill-timed question over the disappearing act.