A Statement Regarding Last Weekend’s Incident At The Applebee’s

You may ask me to leave your Applebee’s, but I will not tolerate being treated like an animal. I have rights. The Bill of Rights, ever read it? Maybe if you had, you could tell me what it says. Then we’d be able to have a conversation about which of my rights you’re violating. Probably a lot of them.

I’m a reasonable man. I’m willing to apologize for my mistakes and I expect the same from you. I should have told someone about the situation I left in the men’s restroom. I didn’t because I was burdened by shame and embarrassment. Perhaps society, and not me, is to blame for that. I should not have held my breath and waited just inside the bathroom door for someone else to come in. My plan was to wait for an innocent person to enter, then I would burst out of the door and report the ‘situation’ in the men’s room to an employee, thus framing this innocent person for my mess. That was an immoral plan created in haste.

Obviously, the plan did not account for the possibility that the next person to come into the restroom would be your assistant manager. However, she did not need to come flying out of the bathroom mere seconds after entering, shouting to the entire place, in front of my wife and kids, that “the guy at table three did an absolute splatter blast in the bathroom.”

And whose fault was the bathroom wall Pollock anyway? Me, the guy with the totally normal digestive system, who has visited forty different chain restaurants in the past week without having this issue? Or your server who kept bringing out more and more jalapeño poppers? Over serving laws don’t just apply to bartenders (probably). If not for your establishment’s greed and reverence for the almighty dollar, maybe common sense would have stepped in and I’d have been cut off before things got to the point where, to quote the incident report, “it looked like a poop grenade went off and the walls were covered in shit shrapnel.”

If I could go back in time I would certainly make some changes. When the assistant manager came storming out after me, screaming, I should not have shoved her back in the bathroom and wedged the door shut in an effort to silence her. I panicked. When you embarrass someone in front of their children and their (now soon to be ex) wife, whom you were trying to…