A bottle of white, a bottle of red. Perhaps a bottle of rose instead?

Why is it that when you go out with a large group of people for dinner, someone inevitably says, let’s just take the bill and divide it by X number of people we have? In theory, this is a reasonable idea; however, because I am the person who usually does not drink all the wine, or have the $9 appetizer, I wind up being screwed. It’s even worse when we go out for someone’s birthday because that person doesn’t pay, so there is one less to divide by. Over the weekend, twelve of us went out for a friend’s birthday and our share of the bill turned out to be $50 each. I had a $9.95 burger and $1.95 Dr. Pepper. Even including my share of the birthday boy’s meal and a couple of bucks for the cake we bought, how does that equate to $50? I had none of the seven $18 bottles of wine; I didn’t eat any of the five different $9.95 appetizers that were ordered. I was royally screwed and I didn’t even enjoy it. My burger was undercooked and greasier that it should’ve been. The fries were lukewarm. I don’t plan on going back to that restaurant either, but that’s for another day. One of these days I’m going to bring a notepad and a calculator, see who eats and drinks what and calculate the bill that way. We’ll see how they like it when the person who drank two bottles of wine, had an appetizer, the $17 entrée and the cup of coffee for dessert is stuck with the biggest tab while I wind up paying hardly anything. I don’t disagree with the theory, it’s just not a practical matter when you have people like me in your group and I’m beginning to take offense to having to pay more than my share when I can’t afford it.