Difficult Conversations-or Rather, Head Meets Sand

“Chicken enchiladas”
“Chicken enchiladas?”
“Uh…yeah… chicken enchiladas”

Our order complete we waited for our food. Dennis’ steak came first, followed by Thomas’ two tacos (pork and tongue). I eagerly awaited my enchiladas. When my plate came out I looked down and it didn’t look like chicken enchiladas. It was also missing the rice and beans that were supposed to accompany it. Instead I had sliced grilled chicken on a bed of lettuce surrounded by a circle of sliced avocado wedges. Clearly, this was the wrong dish.
“She though you ordered chicken EN SALADA” said D. “Now that I think about it, I wasn’t sure what you were saying either.”
“Shit, that’s why she asked me twice. Damn it, why didn’t I just point?”
“Well what are you going to do?
“I guess I’ll ask if they can switch it.” But I felt horrible because this was clearly not either person’s fault. I had probably mumbled my order just as possibly as the waitress misheard me. The waitress came over and I asked her I could switch my salad with enchiladas. She apologized saying she thought I had ordered the salad. She then left to tell the cook to prepare my order and everything seemed fine. One problem. She left the salad on the table.
“Yo why’d they leave the salad? Aren’t they going to take it back?” I asked.
“Haha they’re going to charge you for both!”
“No c’mon, they have to take it back. This salad will be gross by tomorrow and I don’t want to eat them both right now.”
“They’re testing you-you take one bite of that it will be on your check,” said D.
“Well I’m not touching it. I know it’s not their fault that the order went wrong but they should still take it back.” I said this confidently, but I felt wracked with guilt. Shouldn’t I just pay for both dishes? This was a small restaurant, the waitress’ English was far from perfect and my mumbling probably was the reason they screwed up the order. Of course the customer is always right and good restaurant service, I imagine, would dictate that they eat the mistake and keep me happy as a patron, but this wasn’t some four-star restaurant, it was actually just a few steps above a hole in the wall. What if they took it out of her pay? I’ve got a good job, I’m well educated, pretty privileged. Why don’t I just pay for the fucking salad? NO! This isn’t fair-I shouldn’t have to pay twice. Why are they doing this to me? Why don’t they just take the salad back? I wanted enchiladas, not a morel dilemma. They’ll have to take it back I told myself. They’ll take it back when they bring out the enchiladas right?
I convinced myself of this and sat back and waited. When the enchiladas came out I thanked the waitress for her understanding and accepted the order. She quickly turned and returned to the kitchen without so much as even looking at the salad.
“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” I asked Thomas and Dennis.
“They’re going to charge you for it.” D said.
“How am I supposed to confront this situation-I don’t even know if I should pay for this or not?” First, I wanted to avoid the difficult conversation and second, my privileged bleeding heart liberal guilt screamed at me to just pay for the damn salad and suck it up. I couldn’t even decide on a course of action. I just prayed they would take the damn thing back and not force things to a head. I ate the enchiladas, guilt-ridden, sweating, as I stared at the grilled chicken on the lettuce bed. I pushed it away and didn’t even so much as breathe on it. I was hoping they would get the hint. The three of us quickly cleaned off our plates and the only thing left on our table was the still pristine salad. It looked pretty ridiculous. “It looks pretty good, don’t you want some?” Dennis said.
“Shut up man, I’m not touching it.” We sat and waited for what seemed like an eternity for the check. A bus boy came and cleared our plates and we sat at a bare table save for that damn salad. Finally, the waitress came over and looked at me and asked,
“Do you want to eat that now or do you want to wrap that up?” The moment of truth had arrived. I could strap on a pair of balls and tell her I wasn’t paying for the salad or just give in and acknowledge my mistake and just eat (literally) the cost. I mustered up my courage and said.
“I don’t want to pay for the salad, I know it was a mistake but I do not want to pay for it.”
“I’m sorry, my English is not so good.” Ok, now my guilt was starting to lessen, she was trying to play me. She wasn’t a native English speaker and she clearly didn’t understand my mumbling of “enchiladas”, but she knew damn well what I was saying. So I said it again, slower.
“I am not paying for this.”
“Oh, ok.” She walked away to the back and talked to the cook and then she went to the front. The salad remained. 15 minutes went by as the three of us and the grilled chicken salad sat in awkward silence. Thomas and Dennis dropped their heads as if they wanted to fall off the face of the earth and never be associated with me again.
“We can never come here again, thanks Jason.” Dennis said.
“Can we just pay for our own stuff and leave you here?” Thomas asked.
“Why is this taking so long? Oh geez, am I going to get my ass kicked by the manager?” I started to actually worry. Finally, another waitress came over and looked at me, pointed at the salad and asked, “Was this a mistake?” I nodded sheepishly, barely making eye contact and she took the salad back to the kitchen. After nearly an hour of its undesired companionship the salad had finally left our table. “Well, we’re in the clear now right?” I asked. “They took the salad back, they said it was a mistake.” All that was left was to receive our corrected check and we could sail out free men.
Another fifteen minutes dragged by as we waited for our check. None of the servers came near our table and when they walked by fetching orders for other customers no one even glanced in our direction. Short of physically grabbing someone we couldn’t get anyone’s attention to give us our check. “Are they going to keep us here until I pay for the salad?” I asked. The awkwardness had reached a boiling point. We shuffled our feet, made bullshit small talk and watched as they seated new patrons, took orders and moved back and forth from the kitchen. Finally, one of the servers presented us with our check (the same woman who had taken my salad). We quickly looked at it to see if they had charged us for the salad and we saw a crossed out line that clearly said “chicken enchiladas” and appeared to formerly had said “chicken en salada. Success! They were not billing me for the mistake. We could pay and leave all this ugliness behind us. Or so we thought. The three of us each threw in our share of the check and we found that we were still about six bucks short. Confused, we each recited the amount we had thrown in against the prices of what we had ordered and each of us were comfortably covering our tax and tip. This was an odd situation because when any of us are out in our circle of friends we’re never short, always over. No one wants to be the guy short changing the group so this was weird. Then Dennis caught what they had done: “Shit, they included the salad in the total price even though they took it out of the list of items.” Now this was fucked up. What were we supposed to do? If we shorted the total, we were technically skipping on the bill Thomas pointed out. But the math clearly did not add up (“What the hell were they thinking? We’re Asian, of course we were going to add this shit up.” Dennis cracked) and they were still sticking us with the salad charge despite what they told us and even though they had crossed out the salad on the check. After some discussion, we arrived at a compromise, we’d throw in a couple extra bucks so that we’d come very close to the total written on the check (34 bucks instead of 34.70) but we didn’t throw in a cent more than that so that we were comfortably covering tax and tip for what we had ordered (not counting the salad) but were coming very respectably close to the total they listed on the check (which included the salad). We stuck the cash in the leather case, quickly gathered our things and filed out, not daring to look at anyone and hustled to the subway.
This dumb shit could only happen to my dumb ass. Why didn’t I just point at the item on the damn menu? Why didn’t I say something right away instead of sitting in awkward silence with a damn salad staring me in the face? Ironically, I’m hosting a brown bag reading at work on Difficult Conversations and I couldn’t even confront a grilled chicken salad. I’m still trying to figure out what my take aways from this scenario are. On the subway, Dennis and I joked about writing a business school case study about this entire encounter as a way to look at communication and decision-making. HBR, here we come! Maybe we could get funding to work on this and interview all the key stakeholders. The joking lightened my mood a little.

But I was still hungry; maybe I should have taken the salad to go.