When is it OK to chastise the table next to you?

When questions of dining etiquette arise, it’s rare that everybody in a restaurant handles it wrong. But when it comes to screaming children, I guess anybody can lose his mind.

A couple told me the story of their recent Friday night out, during which one table held a restaurant hostage at the dinner hour. The players: a woman and her shrieking baby at the table in question, an irate woman at an adjacent table, and a passive restaurant manager. You can probably guess how the story unfolded.