Dear Lady at the Cafeteria

Our table of ten people for dinner might have been loud in a regular restaurant.  In a room called "The Great Hall", where there were at least 400 people eating, I could barely hear other people at the other end of our table.  We were in the back corner of the dining room.  The table behind us were couples with children, and the table beside ours was you and your friends.  I am not sure what exactly my friends and I were discussing, but I am fairly confident it wasn't as bad as things we could have been discussing.  What I do know is that a lady at your table tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a slip of paper, telling me she had been asked to give our table this note:

Really?  What did we do that was so awful?  If we were using inappropriate language, I am fairly certain that the table with children that was physically closer to us would have said something.  We certainly didn't bring any animals into the building, but it seems like you rode in on a very high horse. 


If you are going to "anonymously" give us the note because you are too cowardly to do more than antagonize from afar, don't leave the notepad and pen in front of you.  It makes it fairly obvious who wrote this.  Had you bothered to simply come over and let us know that you were unhappy with us, and why, perhaps we could have had a little discourse on the matter and come to a happy conclusion on the matter.  You had to go middle school on us, and you are lucky that we did not follow suit.


No, the table of 28-32 year olds decided to act more maturely than the table of 60-70 year olds.  We didn't mouth things at you, and we didn't pass little derogatory mash notes to you.  Instead, the table handed me the note, knowing that I would do exactly this.

You are making a judgement call that the content of our conversation is "rude, crude, and socially unacceptable."  I am very sorry, but I am not concerned at all what your opinion is on that matter.  You didn't bother to consult me before you put on the striped muumuu you are clearly not pulling off, so I will not consult you on this.  You had no business listening to us in the first place.  You really must have been listening hard, because I could hear nothing from any other table other than the loud din of hundreds of people talking in a big room.  Yet somehow, you could hear what we was saying from thirty feet away, because you stared us down and started mouthing the words "Shut up" to a woman at our table.  That is pretty funny, because my mother always taught me that it is not nice to tell someone to shut up.  In fact it might seem CRUDE.


My lovely dining companion Andrea, an apparently rude, crude, and socially unacceptable librarian, pointed out to me that Miss Manners, a respected authority on what is socially acceptable says that it is RUDE to correct a stranger.  This is because you may have taken things out of context, and also because you have absolutely no right to govern the actions of others.  Doing something like that might not be ACCEPTABLE in SOCIAL situations.

So, next time you have your muumuu bunched up in a tiff, please take another sip of the large margarita you have in front of you.  I will have a sip of my diet coke, and we will all chill the hell out.  After all, we came here to have a good time.  Didn't you?