Bored Panda previously spoke to Marlon Joseph, a restaurant server of nearly two decades and host of the Modern Waiter podcast. He has his ways of dealing with different levels of irksome behavior. 

"If a guest gets rude in a personal way, I deal with it directly and tell them 'I’m going to need you to be nice to me for me to continue.'”

But if a customer is being a nuisance, Marlon makes them his least priority. “If they are being rude in an annoying way, I make them wait,” he said. 

“They will wait for me to take their order. They will wait for their food. They will wait for their check. I may even tell them their credit card has declined if that person is paying. I may even tell them we ran out of an item even though we have it.”

According to Marlon, people who treat waitstaff poorly are usually hungry, having a bad day, or both. But as he reminds the dining public, “servers have bad days, too.” 

"I do not think rude people are self-aware, especially if it is them being jerks. Most rude people in a restaurant are situationally on tilt,” he said. “So they use a measure of power to ease their aggravation.

“Unfortunately, a server may not want to give their best to a guest like that, and the result is bad service."

Society can be quick to judge a bad customer, and understandably so. However, experts are revealing potential underlying reasons for such behavior. According to psychologist Reena B. Patel, humans are naturally wired to feel rattled when things don’t go as planned. 

“You walk into a restaurant for breakfast thinking you’ll get seated in 15 minutes and instead you’re waiting 45; now, your whole routine is shifting, and the stress is building up,” Dr. Patel told the BBC in a 2022 interview.  

The BBC article mentioned the scapegoat theory, explaining why people look for someone to blame. It also touched on why service employees are the usual punching bags.

“It’s going to happen on the phone with a customer-service worker, or at the discount store or McDonald’s,” said psychology professor Melanie Morrison. ”People that are working those jobs often do not have a lot of power, and so they become easier targets.”

Dr. Patel says being a rude customer doesn’t define a person. But she also suggests managing expectations as one way to prevent scenarios from potentially blowing up. 

“Sometimes we don't make the best choices. But you can do things differently so you don't have that same reaction,” she said. “That might be as simple as waking up 10 minutes earlier to create a buffer in your schedule. 

“If things don’t go the way you want, you’re not so stressed about it. You don’t want to be rigid in your expectations.”

Dr. Patel also suggested focusing on the situation at hand and how to move forward from it. 

“Instead of the word ‘you,’ use the word ‘we.’ Ask the customer service agent, ‘How can we solve this problem?’ It diffuses that hostile energy, and then you trying to get what you want becomes more of a collaborative process.”