I will try to keep this short — this happened a little over a month ago. Since graduating from high school, my autistic son has been working in the food court of Hollywood Casinos. Last year they renovated the entire food court with the menus of each restaurant revamped or improved. My son was excited to try out the new offerings, so we went for lunch on his day off.
We headed over to the stall with the American food and stood behind the railing to look at the menu. There were 2 women in their 60’s to our left, also looking at the menu. One of them was loudly exclaiming, “Look at those prices! That is ridiculous!”. The second woman said she was going to get a hot dog and a drink, and asked the first woman if she was going to get anything. Again, the first woman loudly exclaimed, “I’m not going to pay that much for a burger. It’s too much. How can they charge that much for a burger! It’s just a burger! No, I’m not going to pay that!”.
Meanwhile, my son had made up his mind that he wanted a burger and I had nudged him to line up behind a woman, who was waiting in line behind two men. The line was moving a little slowly, since the staff were still getting used to all the changes. The loud-mouthed woman and her friend got in line behind me.
The 2 men were very friendly and struck up a light conversation with the woman in front of us. One of them told her that whatever she wanted, he was going to buy for her. His friend piped up “it’s okay, he does this alot” (to reassure her that she was not being hit on). She accepted his kind offer. The man then turned to my son and me and told us he would like to buy our lunch as well. My son immediately thanked him for his generous offer, but declined. I complimented this man on his generosity and kindness and declined, also. I told him my son gets an employee discount, and we were good with that.
Well, guess who was listening to all this going on? The loud-mouthed, complaining woman behind me! She tried to move closer to try to get noticed by this generous man, so I repositioned myself to block her. No free lunch for her!
If she hadn’t been so busy bad-mouthing the place and complaining about the prices (loudly and obnoxiously), she would have ended up in line in front of us and would have been offered to have her lunch paid for by the generous man.
One more thing — while we were waiting in line, she started complaining about how slow it was moving, saying “how can it take so long to make burgers?!”