Hi Everyone - greetings semi-rural Georgia.

Thanks for all your input -both good and bad. I appreciate that some of you may have handled things differently, but I'm not the type of person to write letters to management when I get lousy service - I usually (and quietly) give a few choice words to whomever is giving me trouble, and get on with my life. I also am not a really belligerent person, but when confronted with such obvious asshattery, I chose to convey a warning to the jerks in question as well as my fellow diners. If I prevented another customer from being scammed, I think my actions were warranted. I would like to mention that my remarks about escalating my physicality were made (mostly) in jest.

As I said before, I fell for the scam... shame on me. I knew the score before I went back there and that my odds of evening it were slim.

Now that I am a little more lucid with my previous illness now in retreat, let me fill in some details that may change some (but not all) minds.

Like I said, I returned to the restaurant immediately after I made the discovery of the fraud. There is no doubt as to where the bogus bills came from.

However, given the way they ring up bills at El Establo, I recognized that the waiter may not have been complicit in the scam. He may have been palmed off by the cashier, or someone else who made the change.

Let me preface this with some background: I dined alone that night, as my girlfriend had returned to Toronto two days prior and I was set to retun the next day. As I was at the table next to the staircase and the serving station where this guy was based, we had opportunity to talk on several occasions in fluent English (thank God, since my Spanish stinks). You name it, we joked about it. Sports, weather, politics and traffic on the nines. When I say fluent, I mean this guy could conjugate like the Queen herself. No problem communicating, except when my coughing fits interrupted us. I hadn't spoken to anyone all day, and I enjoyed the company. Ironically, I was a little standoffish with him at first, looking for his angle, but he won me over. He was very smooth.

About my state of mind: I got a wicked head cold starting on Sunday (anyone else?) and was pretty light-headed by the time I arrived at El Establo. I was laid up all day in my hotel room and had been taking lots of Benadryl. I wasn't loopy or anything, but my reaction time was definitely delayed and it would have been evident to anyone around me, what with my heavy blinking and such. I brought a paperback with me to dinner and I was reading every sentence three times over.

So having established a casual rapport with this guy, I felt comfortable getting right to he point with him - as in, "what the f*** is this s***?"

I figure he'll either own up, feign embarassment, or stonewall - you know what he did.

My previously verbose pal suddenly has lost his touch for English, and also appears to be at a loss to understand why this gringo is waving fake money in his face. All he was missing was his altar boy's uniform.

So as we are already in the little nook in the dining room next to the cashier, I lay the bills on the till and ask that guy, who is not decked out like Fred Astaire and I assume to be a manager of some sort, if they came from him (in English).

No dice; he might not understand English, but he sees what's going on - he simply shrugs his shoulders and smiles, then just shakes his head. He makes a point of not touching the bills, as if contacting them would implicate him.

At this point, I'm 100% sure the waiter is crooked, and I'm pretty sure that the cashier, if he is not in on the scam, doesn't particularly care if the waiters are taking a little side action. I can tell the two of them have this act down to a science.

Bottom line, I don't think these asshats give a damn about a potential stern letter to the Buenos Aires Better Business Bureau. They know tomorrow I'll be back in Peoria or Knoxville or Calgary and the next turista mark will come through the door.

Seeing this obvious stonewall for what it was, I decided not to beat my head against the proverbial wall any further, so I made a loud exit. I still fail to see the problem with that. I didn't hit the guy (although I wanted to) and I didn't violate the liberty or well-being of anyone present. I don't care what the staff there think of me, and if nothing else, if the customers think I'm a "raving lunatic" at least I'm a lunatic with a backbone. In retrospact, my tirade lasted mayble 15 seconds - hardly enough to ruin anyone's evening, but enough to send a message.

Like Alex said, this for me is about principle. I realize some may think my action was undignified - hell, it was undignified - but slinking away licking my wounds while this jerk was having an after-work drink on me would be more undignified. Whether that gels with your personal calculus is up to you...

Again, this is not how I conduct my business day-to-day. I'm Canadian for chrissakes, I've got "non-confrontation" built into my DNA. But this was way beyond the pale.

I stand by my actions.