A different server (female) waited on the table next to us. She spent almost half the time we were there conversing with the one customer (female) at that table.
I was thinking, and almost said out loud, “Why don’t you just join her for lunch?”
If the waitress.... sorry, “server” needs a friend that bad, she should get a dog. Déjà vu all over again. (Yogi Berra)
My favorite Yogism is “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” I ALWAYS follow that advice.
That’s the other extreme, when waitresses forget their professional boundaries. Most likely, that chatty customer was being polite, hoping each new sentence the waitress uttered would be a wrap up to the dialog, allowing her some privacy. A watchful manager knows that it’s not good for waitstaff to bestow so much individual attention on one customer it makes other customers feel ignored by comparison.