“Don’t they want to make money?” the woman asked her friend as they stood at the front door 45 minutes after we’d closed.

It’s common enough for people to say things like this to service people. My all-time favorite was the person who banged on the window two hours before the restaurant opened.

“Let me in!” he demanded.

“We don’t open for two more hours,” I told him.

“I need to come inside,” he said.

“I don’t have the key,” I said.

“You have to let me in,” he said.

“I literally cannot open that door,” I said.

“I will come around the back then,” he said.

“We can’t let you do that,” I said.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because we’re not open, and we can’t let people who don’t work here in the back. It’s unsafe,” I said.

It turned out that he wanted to make a reservation for a day that we were completely booked. I can only imagine how that conversation went.

One truism in the restaurant business is that often the very first or the very last person in the restaurant will be the most trying. It’s almost as if they know what they’re doing.

“Why don’t you just ask them to leave?” someone is sure to say.

Go on, try that. I dare you.

Working with the public will teach you many things, the most important of which is that people don’t want to hear what they don’t want to hear.

That applies to food modifications and drink modifications as much as it applies to reservations and bar seating.

Ask any host or hostess, a large portion of their job is telling people that they aren’t next, no matter what they think.

Sure, you can spell it out for them and point it out. “You’re behind those two, that group over there and that woman right there.”

“Can’t I just take that seat when they’re done?” they will say, pointing at someone at the bar.

“Again, you are behind those two, that group and that woman there,” you’ll say.

“I thought it was first come, first served,” they will say.

“It is. You weren’t here first,” you will say.

“How rude!” they will yell.

It happens every single day in every single restaurant, be it a place in line, a bar seat, a cocktail table or a reservation.

You can’t let it get to you. It isn’t personal. But sometimes it feels that way, especially when the person is pointing at you, and saying, “You, you, you.” Then, it starts to feel personal.Carl Jung once said, “The most dangerous psychological mistake is the projection of the shadow onto others. This is the root of almost all conflicts.”

I’ve had people scream in my face and threaten to beat me up — and write bitter rants on social media.

In order, the sentences I uttered that caused those to happen. 1) “I’m sorry, you can’t pour your full drinks onto the floor.” 2) “Are you driving?” 3) “It’s company policy: You can’t reserve a seat at the bar by phone.”

One would think that none of that needed to be said, much less disagreed with — or argued about. But then, one would be wrong.

And then comes the reductio ad absurdum (reducing to the absurd) argument: “Don’t you want to make money?”

I do. We do. But we also want to go home when we’re closed. We also don’t want to work when we aren’t on the clock. And we want our breaks and our time off, too. You know, just like you do.

Which is why when people ask me what I would do in certain situations, I always turn it around and ask them what they would do.

There’s always the disingenuous person who outlines a scenario in which there’s no way they would do what they’re saying they would do. And then they expect you to do that.

But if people were any other way, then we wouldn’t need laws, government and courts — especially courts.

“Excuse me,” said the man at the bar. “The menu board says this wine is $12.25. Why did you charge me $12.50?”

I got that person their 25 cents back and apologized for the oversight on the price change. Then, he stiffed me completely on the tip. Personalizing the attack makes that second part so much easier.

“It’s not about the money,” he had said. “It’s the principle.”

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• It was, in fact, about the money — principally, the tip money.

• Restaurant people have to be eternally optimistic. Otherwise, the pessimism will drive you right out the door.

• “It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves,” also said Carl Jung.

• “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” said the bouncer at the nightclub down the street from my house every single night at every single closing time.

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