The things we do for money
During a busy Friday night, one of our customers came up to his server and said, "It's my wife's birthday. I want to get her a dessert and have you sing her happy birthday. I'll take care of you if you do." So said server ran around the restaurant looking for candles and tore my hostess stand apart hoping we had some.
In the end she got a book of matches and held up a single lit match while the party sang to the birthday girl. The first match went out, so she frantically lit another one. This time, she cradled the match with her other hand to keep it from the wind outside...that was the hand holding the entire match book. The whole thing went up in a fire ball. She screamed and threw it up in the air. Their server could be seen stomping out the last of the incendiary just as the last notes of "to yoooouuuu!" floated through the air. Needless to say that was awkward.
As if that weren't bad enough. Their server had received a table during this fiasco to which she went next. She apologized for not getting to them sooner. Their reply was, "It's okay. I was going to flag you down but I saw you were having trouble not starting a fire over there."