An entitled customer reserves 36 seats at our restaurant, taking up two different time spots,

and forcing us to turn people away just to accommodate these two big parties.

But as a result, he and his group never showed up, causing my boss to freak out and ban this guy

and his family from our restaurant forever. Here's what happened.

So the place I work at has a 13 seat bar with several small high tops, a dining room that seats

around 40 people, and a covered patio that seats around 30 people. We use open table so we get

a lot of reservations, but we also get slammed with walk-ins, often having to turn people away,

or have them wait for an open spot. Also for some context, the term open table is a software

that people can use basically to make a reservation. So this family made a reservation for Friday at 6pm

under one name, and 645 under a different name. Big parties can't use open table at our place,

so they have to call and make the reservation, which means they had two opportunities to communicate

that tiny detail about them taking up two slots, just in case their event runs longer as they put it,

which may seem annoying in and of itself, but trust me, it gets better.

The reservations, by the way, were for 18 people, 18 people at 6 o'clock, and 18 people at 645.

It was graduation weekend, so having two large parties with the same amount of people was not

strange or noteworthy to anybody. Nobody really would have seen this as a problem.

We had four tables set up for their earlier reservation. The later one had to be outside,

since an 18-top would be taking up too much of the dining room, especially when they arrived,

and we could be potentially busy. So we had just about as many tables set up outside waiting for them.

Glassware, silverware, linens, menus, candles, water, you name it, we were ready.

But about 20 minutes after the first reservation was supposed to arrive,

they finally answer the phone and let us know that they aren't coming.

...