You know what sucks? When human beings, for no reason other than to be awful to one another, do things to deliberately hurt a stranger. It sucks even worse when that stranger’s just trying to have a nice dinner out and has to end it in tears because someone’s made fun of their body on their receipt. And what sucks most of all is that this really happened: A woman in Arkansas was recently shamed for her weight by a bartender at a local restaurant she eats at on a regular basis. Why? Anyone’s guess.
According to KARK in Little Rock, Rebecca Rummerfield first noticed something was wrong when she received her tab at Casa Mexicana, a restaurant she eats at three times a week. Someone had written “X Gordo” on the receipt, which loosely translates to “extra fat.” Because she goes to the restaurant regularly, Rummerfield told KARK, everyone there knows her by name. And even if they hadn’t, there’s no reason that someone should describe a customer in such derogatory terms –especially on a receipt that they would see. But if the receipt itself sounds bad, what happened next was worse:
Rummerfield immediately confronted the restaurant’s manager. “He said it was someone else’s tab,” she said. KARK 4 News also spoke with the manager who did not want to go on camera, but told us the same thing. He called the entire ordeal a misunderstanding, a joke meant for someone else. But Rummerfield said she got a different answer from the bartender.
“I went back to the bar and said, ‘Well, why did we pay someone else’s tab? Can we get our correct tab?,'” Rummerfield said. “And that’s when the bartender proceeded to tell me that he did write that, and he did mean it in a derogatory fashion.”
Was the guy just looking to get fired? If so, he certainly accomplished his mission. He was promptly let go, but that didn’t do anything to assuage the feelings of shame that Rummerfield, who’s in the restaurant business herself, developed after being called names at one of her favorite places. “It really hurt my feelings because I have a thyroid disease and I used to be extremely skinny. But my weight is out of my control right now. I take medication for it,” Rummerfield told KARK.
While she won’t be pursuing any further action — something the manager says Rummerfield promised if the bartender was fired — it’s unlikely she’ll ever return to the eatery, no matter how good the food is.