Never the wealthy customers, who are long gone.

Always the server, the hourly worker, the one whose whole month is balanced on a knife’s edge, told that it was their table and therefore their fault and therefore their bill.

I had seen good coworkers cry in the walk-in cooler over exactly this.

I had comforted them, and been quietly grateful it was not me, and told myself that someday, somehow, someone would do something about a system so casually cruel.

I did not yet know that the someone was going to be me.