If you really want to turn my stomach (and polls have shown that 96% of the earth’s population not only wants to but strives to), all you have to do is situate any of the following near me in a restaurant setting:

• Lipstick marks on the rim of a coffee cup or any other beverage vessel
• Fingerprints on a water glass
• Crusty, dried-up food trapped between fork tines
• Hardened, crusty ketchup/catsup (or other condiment) on the bottle’s neck under the cap
• A napkin doubled up to absorb the spills between a coffee cup and its accompanying saucer
• An ashtray that contains even one atom or molecule of ash
• A scrunched-up napkin (with or without coffee or lipstick stains) discarded in an ashtray
• A table surface where the path of the dirty rag used to wipe it down is visible
• A little dish of individual half-and-half containers in which used ones remain among the unused
• Your child standing up in the booth that faces me or is behind me and, respectively, staring at me with a runny and/or crusty nose, or putting his hands on the back of my seat and thus pulling my hair (especially if he even remotely resembles Mason Reese)
• A corpse, post-autopsy
• Anything floating in my drink other than ice

Note: The usual disclaimer about this list not being a complete one applies. I feel compelled to say this, because people invariably write to tell me I “forgot” something and then remind me of an item or two that they would have included. Those people are included on a special list, the theme of which I need not divulge.