A tip for restaurant servers

If you're serving people in their fifties and older, and you really want to piss them off, then by all means refer to them as "young lady" and "young man."  This works particularly well when you're ten to thirty years younger than they are, so that your very presence helps make the point that even as you're faking sincerity the whole comment is patently fake.

Really, there's nothing older people want more than for you to remind them that they're old.

Okay, maybe somewhere someone enjoys this sort of fake compliment, but the people I've eaten with most certainly do not.

Doing it to me is a surefire way to start the tip meter on a fast track downward--and I am in general a very good tipper.

Yes, this happened to a group of us recently, and, no, none of us enjoyed it.