I have a story that is not meant to be agenda-based or anything:

So this one time me and my closest friends went to this really nice dinner (not something a bunch of 20-something grad students do often) for our christmas exchange of presents. Our server must have been in a bad mood or maybe he only had that job at such a well-respected restaurant because he was the manager's nephew or some shit, but he was so sour that we straight up felt so awkward we wanted to die every time he came over. And we're an easy-going bunch who would joke about a bunch of stuff with him and everything, but this guy was having none of our happy fun times.

He got a couple of things wrong and forgot a couple of things, but that's not really what we disliked about the whole thing. Like, at one point my friend ordered a glass of wine and then like 20 minutes later, he was like, "I don't wanna be a bother, but I was wondering about my wine?" And the dude was like all stone-faced, and said in a complete monotone, "No" . . . a long pause went by where his face stayed completely still like he was thinking something over, then he completely unapologetically said, "Sorry." Like, we literally watched this man have to will with all of his might to be able to admit that he screwed something up.

I don't know, I'm not explaining this well, but every salad he brought over, every drink, every everything, we were like, "Oh fuck, he's here again, omg I feel so awkward right now, please go away so we can be happy again and pretend like you don't exist." The table next to us also seemed to be having a rough time with the server, and I think that they were actually have more tangible problems, but I don't remember what they were, so you'll just have to take my half-remembered word for it.

Anyway, at the end of the night, we decided to go talk to the manager about how we loved the food, and we love the place, but this server you have on staff is a real buzzkill. We were expecting a real man-to-man, heart-to-heart over the whole situation, but when we went up, the manager was just like, "Mike was your server? Oh he's great!" Or some crap, I don't remember but it was really dismissive. Maybe he thought we were just a bunch of 20-year-old cheepos looking to get free breadsticks out of the deal or something, so he shoo'ed us away and pretty much didn't believe us that we weren't pleased with our server? Lol, I don't know. it left a bad taste in our mouth.

So, we did the only thing that a good group of self-respecting people could really do in the situation. My one friend always had a massive stack of 1-dollar-bills in his pocket, so we all paid him, and he in-turn paid for the bill in like 200 singles, which included a 20% tip for the server.

This, of course, isn't to say that this is how this situation should always be handled, and I'm not at all pretending that this is really relevant to this thread, but I'm just reminiscing on a fond memory of mine.