The regular who keeps score

A man has eaten at the same seafront restaurant in Kuwait City every week for years. The staff know his order. For a long time they also kept his table by the window.

One evening a larger family has it, and he is shown to a table near the kitchen.

What happens next is easy to recognise, because most of us have done a version of it. He does not just mind the table. He starts collecting. The bread came late. The waiter greeted someone else first. The prices went up in the spring and nobody mentioned it. The fish is smaller than it used to be, probably. By dessert he has a full case, and each new item makes the case feel more true.

This is how being spoiled turns into being bitter. Good treatment, repeated often enough, starts to feel like a right. When the right is not honoured it hurts more than an ordinary disappointment, and the hurt goes looking for proof. Bitterness is greedy. It wants more reasons, and it crowds every other feeling out of the room to make space for them.

Meanwhile he is not tasting the fish. He is not talking to his family. He has not noticed that the table near the kitchen has a fine view of the cooks at work, or that the young man who seated him looks exhausted.

The way out is not to win the argument. It is to stop gathering evidence and do something that makes the evening better: start a conversation, try the dish he never orders, thank someone.

Bitterness only grows when it is fed, and he is the one holding the spoon.