Author of the week: Steve Dublanica

It’s probably best that Steve Dublanica has given up waiting tables, said Teresa Budasi in the Chicagosuntimes.com. After four years of pseudonymously sharing his resentments on a blog called “Waiter Rant,” the 40-year-old New Yorker has announced his retirement from white-cloth table jockeying just as his “hilarious” book of the same name hits the market. Among its confessions: Dublanica—known online simply as “The Waiter”—has taken his revenge on rude diners by passing gas as he passes by their table. He has embarrassed haughty customers by telling them their credit cards failed to clear. He has phoned local police when a driver is about to hit the road after a drink too many.

“If there’s anything to be learned” from the book, said Carla Spartos in the New York Post, “it’s that there are consequences” that a customer will suffer for “behaving like a self-entitled jerk.” In Dublanica’s mind, he was no more vengeful than the average waiter. “A misconception people have of me,” he says, is “that I give a hard time to every customer. But that’s not true.” A good 80 percent of his customers were perfectly nice, he says. He exacted revenge only on the 20 percent he concluded were bad tippers or psychopaths. To hurt those ne’er-do-wells, he didn’t even have to get creative. Win just one scathing staff comment on a restaurant’s computerized reservation system, he says, and you’ll never get a good table again.

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