WEST COLUMBIA, S.C. — A Midlands man went to an area Waffle House very early in Thursday morning and found no customers in the restaurant, and the skeleton crew sleeping.

“Couldn’t sleep so I went to waffle house….guess what…everyone on shift was asleep,” Alex Bowen wrote on Facebook shortly after 2 a.m.

Did he leave?

Did he wake them up?

Nope. The Pelion native made his own meal, snapping selfies all the way to document the caper, then took his “double Texas bacon cheese steak melt and rolled.”

Nobody would likely be the wiser, save for the fact Alex Bowen posted about his late-night adventure on Facebook.

The former medical sergeant with the U.S. Army is a pretty popular guy, with 909 Facebook friends, so word and shares of his Waffle House visit spread rapidly.

“I waited at the register for about 10 mins….no one came..so I made it happen,” Bowen rationalized in a reply to a comment on his Facebook post.

That post included pictures of the sleeping staff member, a selfie of him frying bacon on the grill, a couple of selfies of him behind the counter and finally one more of him putting the sandwich together.

Bowen wrote he “even scraped the grill when I was done.”

By 7 p.m., his original post had been shared more than 500 times and garnered more than 300 likes or reactions as well as hundreds of comments.

It helped that a Facebook friend encouraged him to make the post public, which Bowen did, then telling anyone who liked to “share away.”

When asked if he paid, Bowen said no, and explained why he chose not to leave any money.

“I ain’t paying if I’m cooking my own (stuff) lol…waffle house gonna have to take the L on that one.”

Later in the feed of his Facebook post, Bowen was asked if he “stole.” Unashamed, but honorable, Bowen commented on the second part of his adventure.

“No I went back and paid for it.” He even included a day-after selfie with a unenthusiastic employee pictured at the register.

According to the rest of Bowen’s Facebook bio, he went to Pelion High School and was an Army Combat medic for 12 years. “Now I’m a computer nerd.”

He studies computer science at Midlands Technical College, and does flooring for ProSource Irmo.

If any of that falls through, he could have a job waiting for him as a short-order cook working the grill on the overnight shift.