The holidays are officially over, I thought as I surveyed the calmer, much smaller crowd that greeted me when I stepped behind the bar. It was really a huge sigh of relief. The bar was easily about a third as busy as it was just a week ago. For many of us in the restaurant business, the end of the holiday season doesn't come soon enough. Every week it ratchets up just one more notch — in both stress and volume — finally culminating in the amateur-free-for-all that is New Year's Eve.

I took a deep breath and welcomed the end of the craziness.

Looking up I noticed a twosome approaching me. Matching Uggs, similar $300 True Religion jeans, each in pastel Abercrombie long sleeves. Nothing makes 40-plus-something look more desperate than mimicking a 15-year-old's attire.

It took them several minutes to decide on two perfect spaces at the bar, settling on the only two dirty ones that they could find.

“Could you do something about …” the purpled one said while holding up two hands as if preparing for surgery.

I wiped up the offending bread crumbs.

“We just want to let you know, we are going to be high-maintenance,” said the pink one with a giggle.

I don't know when, or how, or why that the idea of announcing that you are going to be a pain to deal with is synonymous with being cute. A neurotic compulsive desire to be the center of attention by any means necessary is not really cute, it is, well,

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pathological.

Immediately, the fun began.

“We'll have two hot teas, with honey, and sugar, and orange slices …”

“Turbinado sugar …”

“And brown sugar …”

“And clover honey …”

“Or lavender.”

I was pretty sure we had honey, somewhere.

After spending five minutes in back gathering the supplies, I returned, not with Turbinado sugar or lavender honey but with the best substitutions that we had. Regular sugar and regular honey. We are a bar after all, not a tea house.

Immediately upon my return, Pinkster pointed at the water glass sitting on the bar.

“We need water without ice.”

After assembling the tea service and removing the ice from the water, I was about to move on to other customers when Purple piped up.

“Is this honey organic?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Can you check?”

Another trip to the back yielded the answer. Interestingly, the “no” answer didn't stop them from using it. But sometimes it is not about the answer, it is about putting someone through the trouble of finding out.

A split salad with dressing on the side, and a plate of bread and olive oil and balsamic — not mixed but separate — all gathered on separate trips to the back kitchen kept me running for the next 15 minutes or so.

For the next 20 minutes after, it was a split salmon entree — half medium rare, half medium well, no butter — with substituted steamed spinach, which kept me constantly heading into the back kitchen.

These two weren't kidding when they said they were going to be high-maintenance. It reminded me of a saying a veteran waiter once coined. He called it the high-maintenance-low-yield effect. Essentially, the more difficult a customer (especially frivolous difficulties) the lower the potential return. He surmised that the greater their perception of self, the lower their ability to value anyone else's time or effort. A losing proposition when a gratuity is involved.

When it came time for the check, I had to adjust it two times, including a re-splitting of the amounts and re-running of the credit cards twice, after it was decided that one of them should pay $2.50 more than the other for her extra half-glass of wine.

All part of the game, I thought.

When they finally got up to leave. I looked at them, and they looked at me.

“Have a good night gentlemen,” I said.

“Oh we'll see you next week,” said Pinkster.

“If our wives let us out of the house,” added the man in Purple.

As I watched them shuffle toward the door, I realized:

— High maintenance-neurotic behavior knows no gender.

— Some wives might be more apt to let some husbands out of the house more often than others.

— Someone once told me that the difference between a neurotic and a psychotic is that a neurotic believes that there might something wrong with himself whereas a psychotic is sure there isn't.

— Being a pain to deal with is not cute. It is exactly the opposite.

— Perhaps “the craziness” is not confined to the holidays after all.

Jeff Burkhart is an award-winning bartender at a Marin bar/restaurant and an author. His columns appear weekly in Here. Contact him at jeffb@thebarflyonline.com.