Cricket!

Note: This incident was stressful when it happened, but by the end of the night it was HI-larious!

I hate my job, but I do like most of my co-workers. One of them happens to be Arnie. He's this short, little, reserved, Italian guy who's about my age. He's a character and he cracks me up. One day he came to work with this thick mustache. It looked like a mustache that porn stars would wear in the 70's or that of Freddy Mercury from Queen. Granted, I hadn't seen him for a few days prior, but it was all his own hair. He got a lot of flack for that mustache, but man, he wore it with pride - until he decided to shave it off.

As a server, you will every so once a while, deal with a freak incident. Arnie was the lucky bastard tonight! One of his tables had ordered a salad and it is BJ's rule that we have to check on our table a minute after the food is dropped off. Arnie stopped by his table, occupied by a couple, and asked if everything was alright. The girl said, "Something tastes weird." She then proceeded to spit the contents of her mouth back onto her plate. Arnie took a look and realized that she had spit out a partially eaten carcass of a giant cricket! Yeah, PANIC!!!! As procedure, Arnie grabbed a manager to help deal with the situation. In an effort to be helpful, he grabbed oranges, limes, and lemons to help the poor woman rid herself of the taste of cricket. When those didn't work, our manager told Arnie to get her some soda water with bitters.

Nothing could get any worse, right? Riiiiiight...

The woman then breaks out into hives! She apparently had an allergic reaction to the bitters in the soda water! Poor Arnie was freaking out!!! Of course, their entire meal was complimentary and they left pretty quickly. Luckily, they were really calm and nice about the situation because they were regulars and understood that this was a freak incident. I felt bad for Arnie in the moment, but after a couple of hours, I could not help but laugh about how a bad situation just got INSANELY worse.

Poor Arnie got so knocked off his groove that throughout the night he kept introducing himself as a new server to tables that weren't his, and refilling their drinks. I was giggling at him all night. Arnie's fine. He's such a trooper!

I've now started calling him Cricket. :0)