I have lost count of the number of times that an item or two on a restuarant bill have been 10 or 20 baht more than the menu price. Funnily enough I haven't lost count of the times a price was too low. Once, in over four years. So it is difficult to believe that every time this happens it is an honest (typically dumb local who can't add up more than 2+2 without using a calculator) mistake. Oddly shifty is a better description. Another fairly regular case is when an item you didn't order is on the bill. Yet I've never had an item missed off.
These are tiny amounts of money and financially insignificant, but that doesn't stop it from always being unpleasant.
And so it happened yet again today, in a Bangkok restaurant. In Thailand restaurants, unlike in the UK, I have learned to trust nobody and always check each item on the bill, and this time one of the four ordered items was labelled in the menu as pork/chicken/seafood fried rice 69/89 baht. As with most places, there was a premium for seafood. When the bill came the chicken fried rice was charged at 89 Baht. My bs tolerence is minimal these days (I sure am in the wrong country for that to happen) and I decided that I was going to get to the root of this, as so many times in the past I haven't bothered or simply sent the waitress away to sort it. I took the bill up to the cashier who was stood with a couple of waiters, and showed her the item in the menu. She scowled at me and told me only pork was 69 baht and the other two items, chicken and seafood, were 89 baht. She obviously thought the naive foreigner would fall for her typical crock of thai bs, and as with most thais with a problem to solve, the easiest laziest way to fix it is to lie. I told her that I had the same dish a couple of times there before and it was 69 baht. She flipped out at being caught out and shouted "ok ok 69 baht". I handed over a 500 baht note and she literally tossed my correct change onto the counter. A Thai who has lost face in front of her pals is a very ugly sight. Anyway, a couple of the coins rolled onto the floor. I told her to pick them up. She just stared at me and did nothing. I picked them up myself and said "why does this place have a crazy person working here" to which she said "farang cannot speak to a thai person like that". I was disgusted at her arrogance, called her a buffalo, and began walking away, at which time she shouted "fuck you" to me in English. That moment was one of the few times in my life that I have felt like slapping a girl. I didn't, for obvious reasons.
The two Thais I was with told me that it was very dangerous of me to argue with this thai girl and call her crazy and a buffalo as she might have stabbed me with some cuttlery. Unbelievable.