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I went out to eat tonight with a guy who stunned the wait-staff by demanding — not asking, but demanding — “a shit-ton of ketchup.”  Three servers were delivering our burgers and fries and they stopped, as if paralyzed by phasers on stun.  A bottle of ketchup, about 3/4 full, was already on the table.  Our server, Jerry Lewis, quickly grabbed a half-full bottle of tomato-ey goodness from an empty table, and set it down.

“There!” he said, assuming that he had pleased his guest.  For crying out loud, he ordered a burger and fries, so how much ketchup could he possibly need?

“That’s not enough.  I need a shit-ton!”

The young lady behind me, who seemed to be a manager of sorts, repeated, “A shit-ton!  I don’t know if we even have a shit-ton.  Let me see what we can do.”  To a third server, she said, “Go see if you can find a shit-ton of ketchup.”

“How much is a shit-ton?” the server asked.

“I don’t know.  We usually order it by the case.”

The waiter retreated to the kitchen, one of those open ones where you can kind of see them prepare the food, but not really.  From the pass-through window, everyone in the restaurant could hear the cook’s loud, bellowing reply in richly colorful language, sprinkled with a repetition of the term “shit-ton” and punctuated with the crashing of kitchen utensils.

The waiter returned sheepishly to the table bearing three more partial bottles of ketchup.  I detected a contusion on his forehead above his right eye.  The five partially filled bottles seemed to  satisfy my friend.  We were a little put off that the wait-staff was unaware of the universal standard of weights and measures known as a shit-ton.  The Urban Dictionary defines it thusly:

Shit-ton:  Defined literally as 20 hundredshits, where one hundredshit equals 112 shits in the Imperial System (long or gross hundredshit) and 100 shits in the U.S. System (short or net hundredshit). Furthermore, a shit-ton-force refers to 2,000 shit forces, which is a hell of a lot (i.e. a shit-ton) of Newtons. Example:  “We just received a shit-ton of corned beef from Europe.” Buy stock in Heinz? Absolutely!