Jeff Burkhart: Learn to read the room

We had already stood and waited for 20 minutes with our drinks at the bar. We just picked the wrong spot. The group that had arrived just five minutes ago hadn’t. Two people got up from the bar, and the newly arrived group slid right into the seats even before the original couple had left.

I would say it was seamless, except that it wasn’t. The woman getting up caught her purse strap on the stool’s handle, and the woman sliding in only got halfway there before she had to stop and half perch on the stool to make room for the other woman to unlatch her strap. Then, there was an awkward moment when both of them were on the same seat at the same time.

“Get in where you fit in” might be a mantra for some people, but so is “wait your turn,” only just try telling that to someone in a bar — or a supermarket. Perhaps that’s why nowadays when a checker opens a new line, they often come and get the next person in line. If left to our own devices, many, if not most, will just cut in front of the people who had been waiting longer. Better to short circuit the problem proactively than to try and deal with it later, because there is no one more righteously indignant than the one trying to get away with something.

We might have left because of that, as so many people often do, but the two people in front of us got up just a few minutes later — with the woman taking a protracted drink of water while standing with one hand still on the bar. After adjusting her sunglasses on her head, with one hand still on the bar, taking another protracted drink of water, switching her hand on the bar and then another clothing adjustment, she left.

“Are you going to sit there?” asked someone who had just walked in the door as we prepared to sit.

“Uh, yeah,” I answered.

“Oh, because we really want to eat,” he replied.

“Uh, so do we,” I replied in turn.

“Oh,” he said, standing there looking at me.

“So, I am just going to sit down now,” I said after an uncomfortably longer period of time than was necessary.

The bartender was busy. Anybody could see it. She kept up a vigorous pace, using two hands for this, one hand for that. At one point, she knocked over a shaker cup and managed to catch it all in one motion. She had a grace about her, not like a ballet dancer, but rather like a running back slicing through the hole in a defensive line. Only a complete ignoramus would be oblivious to the level of concentration needed for her to multitask on top of even more multitasking.

“Uh, can I get a bottle of wine?” asked the man who had been looking at me awkwardly just a few minutes before.

“Give me a minute,” said the bartender, not looking up from the three things she was already doing.

“Uh, excuse me,” said the man.

“Yeah, just a second,” she said.

“Hello? A bottle of wine?” he replied, waving his hand.

“Just a second,” she said.

“Wine? Over there?” he said, gesturing towards the front door somewhere beyond the crowd of people.

I felt her pain — viscerally. I have been there. One of the truisms in the restaurant business is that you will get the worst type of customer at the worst possible time. The server whose sick child is waiting for them at home will have the table that refuses to even look at the check, even though they have been the last table in the restaurant for half an hour, and the check wallet has been sitting on their table for 10 minutes.

The day your dog dies will also be the day the neediest hot tea drinker in the universe will descend upon you.

“Can’t you pick some fresh mint leaves off of that bush I saw coming in?” they will ask.

“Can I get less water in this pot?”

“Do you have any unusual sugars?”

You can just about guarantee it.

“What can I get you?” asked the bartender after having returned from the wine room, and then having to go back and get “big” wine glasses and an ice bucket.

“I’ll have a bottle of Modelo,” I said. “No glass.”

“I thought you were going to get a mixed drink,” said my friend.

“I changed my mind.”

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• Empathy is not always having to do something, sometimes it’s just not doing something.

• Read the room. If only …

• You are not unique if you are in a room full of people wanting and doing the same thing.

• Entitlement is an illusion built on equal parts self-centeredness and insecurity.

• You may not be able to change the world, but you can change how you fit into it.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com