We took our seats on the banquette, as instructed, and waited for our table. I smiled at the term. Anachronisms abound in the restaurant business. Maybe we were just lucky that there wasn’t a chifforobe or an armoire.

The restaurant was fully booked and had been for weeks. It doesn’t matter what holiday it was, but let’s just say it involved a necessary reservation and a prix fixe menu — things that were clearly posted on their website, mentioned on their voicemail and reiterated by the front desk. The conclusion was inescapable as they say.

The other couple walked through the door with purpose, weaving their way toward the host stand through the assembled throng.

“Hi, we just want to get something to eat really quick,” said the woman.

“Do you have a reservation?” asked the host.

There wasn’t a direct answer, instead there was a lot of equivocating.

“Do we need one?” she asked.

“Nobody told us that,” replied her male companion.

And then the bombshell.

“Why?”

Why is always an interesting question in the restaurant business because does it really matter why? The explanation to a question like that never truly satisfies, partly because an explanation is not what’s really wanted.

“Because today is a holiday,” replied the host, unfazed.

“We have been fully booked for weeks, and we have a special menu,” he added.

“But there are all those empty tables.”

“That’s because I haven’t taken people there yet,” replied the host.

The “because I’m standing here talking to you” just sort of hung in the air unsaid.

People often just can’t help themselves, especially people who haven’t helped themselves by making reservations.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if a restaurant has no online reservations available, or there weren’t any available when you called, that restaurant is probably going to be busy. But it’s shocking how many people will complain about waiting when they knew that going in, and had to weave through a crowd to get through the door.

“What do you mean? 40 minutes? That’s ridiculous.”

Ridiculous to you maybe. But fantastic for them. What’s the old Yogi Berra-ism? “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded?” Only they do, and they are there now.On our way to our seats, we walked by that couple now seated at the bar, far enough away not to have anyone’s backside towering over us but not so far away that we couldn’t hear everything that they said.

“We’ll have two hot waters and split a hamburger,” said the man before even looking at the menu.

“I’m sorry, we have a prix fixe menu tonight,” said the bartender. “So, we don’t have hamburgers.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a holiday and we have a special menu,” replied the bartender.

“Nobody told us that,” replied the man, in spite of the fact that everyone in that room, including us, had heard them be told exactly that.

“Can’t they just make us one?” asked the man.

“Sorry,” said the bartender.

“We’ll just have a side of fries,” replied the man.

They didn’t get them. They then spent the next hour and a half eating two helpings of bread and badgering the host about every table that opened up.

There were dozens of questions, and dozens of complaints. And when that was over, they started in on each other.

“Why didn’t you make reservations?”

“Why didn’t you?”

There are some people who just cannot take or accept personal responsibility — ever. And when they find each other, the sparks fly. And when sparks fly, people around them tend to get burned.

If the customer is always right, then the employee is always wrong. And that can be a tremendous burden to bear, especially when that employee has to wait on other people at the exact same time. Those other people don’t know that that question has been answered a dozen times already. They just see exasperation. They don’t know those people didn’t make reservations. They just see the upset.

And as a service professional, you often can’t explain that in order to make one group of people happy you’d have to make another group unhappy.

“Couldn’t you just give them a table?” people will sometimes suggest.

Sure, we’ll just give them yours.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• Thank you to that couple. Thanks for not making reservations, thanks for complaining loudly and thanks for making everyone uncomfortable with your behavior.

• “A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day,” said the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in 1992.

• Reservations are not guarantees. They are actually best guesses based partly upon the actions of people who the restaurant doesn’t know.

• Other people’s problems often seem so abstract — at least until they start to affect you.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com.