The Most Miserable Woman In The World

Is a woman I served yesterday. She gained this title even before she started crying at her table, making her son and parents visibly uncomfortable.

Which brings cause to point out that this was not a young woman. She was not some mewling lass in her early thirties with the kid she'd obviously birthed in her late teens. No, this was a woman in her fifties, with a son in his mid-twenties, and her elderly parents.

This title, The Most Miserable Woman In The World, she earned almost immediately. It was the way she awkwardly ordered her glass of sparkling wine, fumbling around at the notion that perhaps her father should buy a whole bottle for the table. His response, with quickly eroding patience? "Order for yourself. I'm having a beer."

Then, when it was time to order dinner, each option presented to her was rife with pain. Initially, she wanted a greek salad (which she tried to order when I was taking the drink order). Then, she rambled on about how she'd been thinking about shrimp all day, and did the shrimp skewers come with a vegetable? (All of this said in the most pained, belabored voice one could muster on a Tuesday evening). I informed her that the shrimp skewers were just an appetizer so they did not come with any vegetable, but she could put together shrimp skewers and a vegetable from the build your own section of the menu. So she ordered a salmon filet with spinach. (!?)

As their dinner wound down and her sparkling wine took hold (it really seemed she deteriorated exponentially from a single glass of the stuff), and I passed by the table as she was crying, about something related to her son getting a room but grandma being willing to let him come over or something, I heard him utter, "Mom, you've been crowding me for a long time now..."

I scurried out of the room right quick after that. Christ.

Later, after I'd said something to my boss about this being The Most Miserable Woman In The World with his response being that I had no heart, she walked by him cussing on her way to the bathroom and said loudly to him, "Oh, I'm just mad at my dad, he's breaking every promise he ever made to me."

Which might make you think she's maybe just batshit crazy or something. But I didn't get that impression either. Maybe in the sense of being super pathological, like borderline personality, but no genuine loss of sanity. Just bone-deep insistance on being The Most Miserable Woman In The World. Forever. No matter how embarassing or uncomfortable or energy draining she is to everyone around her. I felt sapped spending less than ten minutes directly interacting with her. A lifetime? Being the child raised by that? This is why I think parents should be able to kill off defective young... (after a lengthy process, of course).

The super amazing final straw, which I missed, but was relayed to me by my coworkers (she had the wherewithal to alienate each of us in turn which was nice) went as follows:

Woman looking at floor, which is a mix of tile and cement, trying to talk to my boss, who is on the phone--"What kind of art is this? I'm an artist! Do you call it post-modern? Modern trash? Modern ghetto?"

OMFG.

Most Miserable Woman In The World, I salute you.