Thanks, Dallas.

We have a table of regulars that everybody hates to wait on. Oh, they tip fine -- sometimes quite well -- but they just give everyone the creeps. It's 20ish woman and what we thought were her grandparents; turns out they're her parents! Either they started old or they didn't age gracefully. Anyway, the dad is quite a nice old man; the mother talks over you and doesn't let you get a word in edgewise; and the daughter used to twitch and act like a strung-out crackhead all the time. She's gotten better lately, but she still is just ... odd. I can't even describe what else is wrong about them, they just weird everybody out.

Not regular sweet tea, but doesn't it
look delicious?

I groaned when I saw them settling into one of my booths, but of course I put a smile on. The daughter, when we got to her drink order, asked for "sweet tea and water."

"I'm sorry," I said, "but we don't have sweet tea."
"Uh, yes you do, actually." she snipped. Excuse me? Which one of us has worked here for five years? I think I'd know if we had a vat of sweet tea in the back, especially since it's suddenly all the range up here.
Even thought I wanted to throttle her, I calmly listed our flavored teas, which are the closest we have to a sweet tea.
"Well, I've had it before," she insisted.
"Yes, that other little girl got it for us!" Mom chimed in.

Something deep in my memory stirred .... oh god dammit, Dallas! So I had to ask around and see if anyone knew what she had done to make sweet tea for this bitch. Turns out, she used our expensive bar syrup! Instead of just telling her customers that we don't have sweet tea, because we fucking don't, she used the bar syrup with regular tea. We charge $3.99 for our drinks with bar syrup! And knowing Dallas, she didn't even charge them for the regular iced tea. She's in the camp who gives free shit to get tips -- something I've found doesn't really work because people don't even look at the ticket or notice half the time!

So I made the bitch her "sweet tea" -- not the super-saturated tea you get when you make proper sweet tea, but fucking tea with sugar, which she could have put in at the table her damn self. But I also used the sweet tea button in the computer (yeah, I don't know why we have a button but don't serve it. We also have a button for salmon we don't have, and tap beers I've never heard of). Hope you enjoyed that $3.30 glass of tea, bitch. Next time, try this instead: