Ask a Wage Slave, Volume 1.

Q: I've wound up at [P.F. Chang's] nearby twice in the past two weeks despite that fact that I don't actually like them. I'm just yet to find any other Chinese place in this neighborhood that doesn't suck. As our fabulously gay waiter so patiently explained the special sauce, I began to wonder what percentage of people use the sauce, and what percentage are like me, the type who nods with a feigned interest while listening to the thorough explanation despite the fact that all I really want is just the regular sauce for my potstickers and a dash of soy on my sesame chicken. Am I an evil person for doing so? If so, how do I restore my karma from the excessive number of times I've done that? -- Kirk

A: You make a good choice in not eating the Chang's special sauce. It's not very clean, really. I won't say it's "guaranteed" to hurt you, but I would prefer to ingest food that wasn't handled by at least three different people in the same day. I'm just finicky like that. Your waiter definitely appreciates you not touching it, because it saves him the time of assembling a new tray every time a new table comes in.

Every time you deliver one, you're supposed to make sure the bottles are full to the brim, and it takes about a minute and a half to wait for the hot mustard to slide down the spout of the pitchers before making contact with the air and singeing your nostril hair. So, half your tables are pissed off by the time you show up to bring them the sauce they might not even use because you necessarily fail to appear before them instantly. If your server could somehow carry the same tray of untouched sauce to every table, he could easily conserve a full hour. When I was at the Chang, servers would leave notes on their "Trios" threatening bodily harm to anyone who thought of stealing one of these unused timesucks for their own tables.

Most people can agree that the Trio is a waste of space in a restaurant that already uses three times the required number of dishes, just because. I have found that only a very particular demographic gets upset about the absence of the sauce. And they are not afraid to make a scene. Let's call them the Henry VIIIs.

H8s are really classy, and require a certain kind of patience; they're used to slathering their foods luxuriously with various condiments (i.e. Cool Ranch Doritos + any sort of dip), and loudly demand to be treated with RESPECT because they are AWESOME.

A nice beach scene airbrushed onto a fingernail, a Nine Inch Nails tattoo, and/or a money clip are all good indicators that you are in the presence of 100% class and, possibly, a H8 table -- in which case, a Trio is a required act of deference. I tried to be understanding of the fact that the H8s had places to be and babysitters to pay, so I would do my best to rush those tables along so they could get home to their Mountain Dew and Philly blunts.