Man goes berserk at Ruby Tuesday over State of the Union address

I’ve eaten at the same Ruby Tuesday at least once a week for the past few months, thanks to the fact that it’s right around the corner from my house, it’s open late, and it has free wireless internet access. Every time I go, it’s the same thing: one television in each corner of the main dining room, each turned to a different channel, with closed captioning turned on and the sound turned off. Typically one’s tuned to ESPN, and the other three are tuned to major networks.

Last night the State of the Union comes on all four major networks, and since I know he’s not going to say anything I haven’t already heard him say, I decide to head out for dinner. And since it’s late and I don’t feel like driving, I end up at the usual Ruby Tuesday. As could have been predicted, one of the four TVs was showing some kind of sporting event, and the other three were showing the State of the Union address. As always, closed captioning on all of them, but no audio.

Not five minutes after I arrive, the guy at the next table flags down his waiter and asks for the sound to be turned on for the State of the Union. The waiter agrees, and turns on the sound for all three TVs that are showing it, but it creates this awful echo effect so he turns off the sound on two of them and turns the third one way up.

I found it annoying that I was being forced to listen to loud television audio in a restaurant which never has television audio at all, as I don’t care for loud noises in public places, but I didn’t say anything. But someone else at another table finds it annoying and asks for the audio to be turned off, pointing out that the guy who wants to pay attention to the speech can just follow the closed captioning. The waiter weighs his options and decides that turning off the audio is the most prudent move.

Except the first guy goes nuts. He starts ranting about how unamerican it is for the President to be muted, pretty soon he’s talking at a louder volume than even the television had been at, and before long his table is surrounded by employees who are trying to calm him down. No dice. He’s not eating an unamerican establishment and he’s walking out. Except his wife isn’t having it. She’s hungry so she’s not following him out the door. He comes back inside and sits down but insists that they get their food to go. At this point the waiter’s all too happy to be rid of them, so he brings their food out all packed up and they’re heading to the exit.

Like an idiot, I try to casually explain to the guy that I’m in there all the time and the sound is never turned on for the TVs, so it’s not as if they’re doing something out of the ordinary. But the guy isn’t having any of it, as in his mind it’s some kind of blatant attempt on the part of the restaurant to discriminate against either his political beliefs or against this country. So I just go back to sipping my iced tea, resisting the urge to ask him two burning questions:

Since you aren’t content with the closed captioning, am I to assume you’re illiterate?

and

If the State of the Union was that important to you, why did you get up and head out to a restaurant during the middle of it?

After the guy left, all the tension immediately drained out of the dining room, as it always does with a situation that should never have been tense in the first place. One diner shouted out that he wanted the TV turned to the cartoon network with the sound turned up, which sent everyone into laughter, and another diner requested that it be turned to the porn channel and that he too wanted audio. Of the five or six dining parties and three or four waiters that were there (it was late and the place was fairly empty), it was clear that not one of them thought the guy was in his right mind — and statistically speaking, both political parties were likely represented among us. No matter what anyone in that dining room thought of the President, it seemed that everyone could agree that the guy who stormed out was an idiot.

If the President had come on television to address some major emergency that had just happened, I don’t think anyone in the entire restaurant would have had a problem with the sound being turned on. But some pre-scheduled speech in which the President was merely going to repeat everything he’s been saying publicly for the past several months? Don’t we have a right to have our dinner not interrupted?