Gimme some sugar

Stereotypes are a common thing in this business.  I guess the same could be said for life in general, but trust me, there are some serious common threads in the stereotypes we hold as indentured food servants.  

We've all rolled our eyes at the group of teenagers who sit down at our table.  We've all watched people walk to their table, all the while praying in our heads "please don't seat me with them, please don't seat me with them."  There's the whole racist aspect of this business which i vow not to come anywhere near, but we ALL know it's there.  

There's the elderly couple most avoid (but i personally love to chat it up with), the not-so-well-to-do family, the mall moms who need at least three high chairs and a couple booster seats to add insult to injury, the folks who oh so obviously just spent the last twenty minutes hot boxing in their car before they decided to indulge in some fried goodness.  There are so many more that i don't have the time to list, but they're all customers and consumers that we must entertain.  They're just a part of this big old melting pot of people i encounter every day.  

But, there is one who stands above the rest for some reason:  

The Diet Coke drinker.  

Those of you who have never had the experience of waiting on a diet coke drinker have no clue what i am talking about.  And those of you who drink diet coke are probably about to get really pissed at me.  Sorry. 

I don't know what ingredient in Diet Coke causes its drinkers to mutate into some "outside the bounds of a normal human being" mode, but there just HAS to be something.  Maybe i'll get a research grant for it someday.

Diet Coke drinkers are some other kind of asshole.  I might just hold some inert animosity because i am an AVID Coca Cola Classic fan, and the taste of Diet Coke makes me want to write Coke a personal testament as to why that crap should be taken off the market and is a disgrace to all things Soda.  Maybe I'm just being a total jerk about it, but seriously...

"I'll have a Diet Coke" (please note that there is no 'please' following this statement.)  This is usually the point where i roll my eyes and walk to the back to prepare myself for the first of MANY more Diet Cokes to come.  By the time i set the first one down, it's typically only moments before I am sent right back to my CO2 foxhole to retrieve another.  

It's kind of like exercise when it comes to how many reps i need to do in the usual twenty minute to an hour long dining experience.  It's usually somewhere around DC number three or four when i start to ration out ice like it's a hot commodity.  Anything to give my artificial sweetener fiends another sip or two before i have to do more work.  

Maybe they're trying to drink enough to equal a "real" Coke.  Maybe they were trying to impress everyone by ordering something "diet", and upon realizing what a bad idea it was, they figured that maybe they could get drunk off of that horrible tasting shit if they just went over the brink and drank way too many.  Most likely, they're just trying to make my life even more of a living Hell than it already is, and with each mug of "carbonated asshole drink" i set down on their table, they look to their friends and giggle with delight at my suffering.   

My favorite thing about DC drinkers?  They almost ALWAYS order the worst item on the menu (if we're talking nutritional value here.)  "Country Fried Steak, huh?  Oh, extra gravy and garlic bread?  Lemme guess, Diet Coke?  Awww, yup.  Be right back."  I promise you that Diet Coke is not going to counterbalance the 2,300 calories that you just lapped off your plate, big fella, so yeah, go ahead and drink eight of 'em.  

I feel some kind of satisfaction when i walk by a table that's not mine with an empty mug of dark-colored soda, and have the satisfaction of doing the old "finger guns" in the direction of their little ice mausoleum and say "Diet Coke, right?"  

And ninety-nine times out of one hundred....

BAM!  You are officially deemed "one of them" in my eyes.  

Coke Zero?  Whole other ball game to be played a different day.