We went to IHOP for dinner tonight, because I owed Sarah breakfast for dinner, and some really interesting stuff was going on at the tables near us. At the table behind Sarah, the guy spent the whole time talking about Coke, as in Coca Cola. First he talked about the Coke Freestyle machines and how they're super cool and how they were designed by Ferrari (I don't actually know if that's true). Then he spent an inordinate amount of time talking about New Coke and about where it was a great or terrible business decision. He has apparently written at least 3 papers about Coke and, from what I could observe, was drinking a Coke during the meal. He was with a woman. I presume they were on a date, since I'd think that if you were in a relationship with someone you would have already released your Coke craziness on them before you managed to make it to that point.
At another table nearby, I first noticed that the guy was just staring at his phone and completely ignoring the woman he was with. As I paid more attention, things started to seem more unfortunate to me. I could tell that she was talking to him, but that he was hardly saying anything, if anything at all. She was leaned forward, staring at him directly, really trying to engage with him but he continued to ignore her. She was even holding his free hand across the table as she was trying to engage him in conversation. I only saw him make eye contact with her briefly. Even when their food came, phone.
It really seemed like she was trying to talk to him about something important. Sarah said it seemed like he felt guilty about something. I felt really bad for her. I wanted to go up to her and say something like, "Are you okay?" when he went to the bathroom. I wanted to tell her that he would probably always be a dick and that she shouldn't be with him, but I felt if I did so it wouldn't be well received and would be an incredibly awkward gesture. Now I kinda with I had said something to her. She deserves better.
The last weird thing was that at one point our waiter asked us if we would like to make a donation to the Arkansas Children's Hospital, which we did take the time to do. The weird part was that he told us that his manager isn't only making them ask patrons to do this, but that if they don't perform successfully at soliciting these donations from people that they will lose shifts, since the donations are a big tax writeoff for the company. I just thought that was horrible. I'm not at all surprised that a manager would do that, but I'm very disappointed that they would do that. I left a fairly nice tip for our waiter for having to put up with that kind of shit.
