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I'm against religious violence as much as you are, boys and girls, but these people who leave their waiters tracts instead of tips really ought to be taken out back and shot.
When Bishop Cyprian of Carthage was sentenced to death he gave his executioner 25 gold pieces. Now there's a man who could teach the Sunday lunch crowd a thing or two!
In Paradise Lost, Satan famously said, "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven." But not if you get to wait on Cyprian.
I made some good tips the other night. A $9 tip on an $18 bill, and a $40 tip on a $150 bill (nice! Thank you Russian-immigrant-sounding family!) But the server in the next-door section went home with just $25. Stiffed twice. And on a Saturday night!
It's a maddening aspect of the hospitality industry. Bad service will earn you a bad tip every time, but good service won't necessarily earn you a good tip.
I've blogged about tipping before, and Kyle's comment made real sense to me:
A "Christian sense of social justice" has spurred a whole lot of people to shell out a few more dollars for clothing that's not manufactured in sweat shops, or coffee that came from a farmer who was paid a fair price for his crop. Where's the justice for waiters and waitresses? In most states, we only make $2.13 per hour. If you're only tipping 10%, you're stealing the server's labor. We need a Fair Service movement to match the Fair Trade movement.
I can imagine service so wretched that a small tip is justified. There are some sketchy people in the hospitality industry, and on rare occasions, you might draw the seriously hung over waiter or the racist waitress whose service deserves a mere $2.13. Just remember that a lot of things can go wrong in a restaurant, and many of them might not be the server's fault. Stiffing the server often punishes an innocent party.
In the meantime, Mr. and Mrs. Casual Dining Customer, let me be so bold as to encourage you to be better guests by not committing the following gaffes (all of which either I or my co-workers have had to deal with):
For extra credit: you parents of small children, resist the urge to feed them saltine crackers you've collected from the salad bar. The crumbs go everywhere, and when they mix with the condensation from the glasses, the stuff sets up like concrete. It's a mess to clean up. But props to you for being one of the better tipping demographics.
I remember a Candid Camera segment in which this guy pops into a fast food restaurant to order a burger. Only it's a fake burger joint. As soon as he places his order, one of the staff leads a cow through the room into the back. Then the sound of a saw starts up, followed by copious amounts of bovine bellowing. Then silence, and shortly thereafter out comes the burger! Now that's what I'm callin' fast food! Naturally the guy was beside himself.
I had a similar experience at Thurston's Lobster Pound in Bernard Maine. You walk in and place your order at the window. In the window are three sinks, one filled with small lobsters, one with medium, and one with large. Say you order four small lobster dinners. Well, the girl yanks four lobsters out of the far right sink, throws them into a big tupperware container, and then the heavily-tattooed woman takes them away to boil outside the restaurant door. And in five minutes, Viola! Your lobster is served.
My younger son found the whole experience appalling. He's a budding vegetarian--of a sort. He does eat burgers, but he always asks if our sausage is the soy stuff and not from the little piggy that went to market. I'm not sure if he understands that burgers are meat too, or if he's just inconsistent. I haven't accused him of inconsistency, which, after all, is a feature of most adult's moral reasoning, so why should I expect more from a nine-year-old? Anyway, he was quite ornery at dinner, and only straightened up when his mother gave him pen and paper and told him to express his feelings in that medium. So he drew pictures of bombs falling on the lobster pound. My son, the eco-terrorist.
My older son isn't the slightest bit troubled by where his meat comes from. "Look, granddaddy; those are his eyes!" CRACK.
I was wondering to myself, If we did sell burgers the way we sell lobster, would we eat less meat? I think not. When most people farmed, whatever personal relationship between human and animal that arose on the farm didn't deter hog-killing season from rolling around. Today's industrial farming model makes the relationship between humans and livestock much more impersonal, but it also makes meat much cheaper, which I suspect is the determining factor.
There are a million good reasons to be a vegetarian. It's a healthier diet. The animals are subjected to discomfort, even cruelty, in modern confinement operations. It's good stewardship: It takes millions of acres of corn and soybeans to feed the cattle, hogs, chickens and turkeys we eventually eat. Why not raise food to feed humans directly instead of indirectly? Vegetarianism may also be a prophetic sign of the coming kingdom of God, when "the lion and the lamb shall lie down together." Oh, and it's cheaper, modern agribusiness efficiency notwithstanding.
And yet I'm not the strict vegetarian I once was. We do, on rare occasions, buy organic beef, and on long journeys like the one to Maine and back, McDonalds does seem to be rather handy and fast. And in the spirit of "When in Rome..." I ordered lobster last week.
I was of two minds about it. Going from living to dead pink in boiling water before your very eyes, and then setting upon it with the crackers, yanking the meat out of the claws, the legs, and dodging the, Ahem, green stuff exploding out of the body cavity seemed barbaric to me. My hands were sticky and slimy. Flecks of green ooze on my shirt. Plus, lobster meat doesn't have that much taste to me. I think most people actually like the taste of the butter, not the meat.
Then again, I was also reading Linda Greenlaw's The Lobster Chronicles while on vacation, and learning that lobsters are arthropods, underwater spiders basically, and nicknamed "bugs" by lobster fishermen. Their brain-mass to body-mass ratio is among the worst in the animal kingdom. They can walk into a lobster trap, but seem to lack the brainpower to turn around and walk right back out. They are, in short, stupid, revolting little creatures whose very existence seems to justify preying upon them by anything higher than they on the food chain.
And that's all I have to say.
Did I mention how going to work Easter Sunday afternoon sucked every ounce of resurrection joy out of my soul?
It was a good morning. Coolish, but sunny and beautiful. Clear blue sky. Redbuds blooming. I got the boys ready for Church while Mrs. Avdat went ahead for handbell practice. (I am still thoroughly enjoying sleeping in on Sundays and worshiping with my family for the first time since... well, ever).
We sang Jesus Christ Is Risen Today, which brings tears to my eyes. I always react to that hymn the way that I ought to react to The Strife Is O'er, a sense of the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders, from the world's shoulders. Pastor Janet's sermon (with an acknowledged assist from Barbara Brown Taylor) was a slam dunk. "They were looking for the past but stumbled upon the future." Fair words of warning and promise to a budding Church Historian.
We went home, ate lunch, rested, and then I went in to wait tables at That Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before.
Nothing bad happened. No rude customers. No co-worker cattiness.
But the very absence of novelty is what was so spiritually crushing about it. The same musical soundtrack of current pop hits and classic rock standards. The same menu, same smell of french fries. No ham biscuits like there were at every Easter family reunion we attended as children. The dark interior which dilates your pupils and makes it impossible to see outside. Not that there's anything to see outside. A strip mall parking lot. There is a Bradford Pear, the ubiquitous and sterile suburban organic yard decoration that provides the barest hint of nature if you look at it out from under the awning: brown in winter, white in early spring, brown again as its blooms wilt in the face of the inevitable late frost, then green.
Shortly, it wasn't Easter anymore. It wasn't spring anymore. It wasn't anything anymore. By the soundtrack and the landscape you could place my serving gig somewhere in America on either side of the century's turn, but otherwise the venue is as unplottable as Number 12 Grimmauld Place. Suburban wasteland.
I should be tougher. Dietrich Bonhoeffer managed to cultivate a rich spiritual life in a concentration camp, for goodness sake. I ought to be able to find God in a restaurant.
When Jesus returned to his hometown, they took umbrage because they knew the back story on this hot-shot prophet. He was just the carpenter's son; who did he think he was? Mark reports, "He could do no deed of power there because of their unbelief." I'm struck by the word "there," as opposed to say, "for them." It raises a interesting possibility, that there are spiritual dead zones in the topography of creation.
Are they all due to unbelief? Or can inspid art and culture do the same?
The State of Virginia recently enacted a restaurant smoking ban. This is of more than passing interest to me because of my weekend work at That Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before. A few observations:
Articles on the smoking ban legislation at the Times-Dispatch website drew more comments than usual, but quantity does not equal quality. Boil them down and they amounted to either, "You're a Communist!" or, "You stink! (Literally)"
Now the Communist argument is just silly. There is no doubt that second-hand smoke is a health hazard. Requiring restaurant owners to protect citizens from this hazard is no more unjust than requiring those construction companies to dump their debris down a chute instead of just heaving it off the side of the building and leaving it up to the pedestrians to fend for themselves. Besides, everyone in Russia smokes.
But being a waiter has endeared me to our nicotine-addicted brethren. Smokers are so much easier to serve. Because they have something to do with their hands, as well as a means to satisfy their oral cravings apart from the food and drink they're waiting on me to bring them, they're a lot lower maintenance than non-smoking customers. They're more patient, more relaxed, and not surprisingly, they tip better.
It will be better for waiters in so many ways when the ban takes effect December 1. Better for our cardiovascular health. Better for our pulmonary health. And better for our wallets, notwithstanding the observation in the previous paragraph. Most people don't smoke, and most non-smokers hate cigarette smoke. So if you're a waiter in a smoking section, you're often twiddling your thumbs while your co-workers are waiting on a full section of tables. But the improvement in physical health comes at the price of one's mental health: waiting on hungry, irritable people who'd be a lot more patient if only they had a shot of nicotine in them to calm their nerves.
My son asked me the other day if smoking was a sin. Certainly there's a strong current in Christian ethics, notably in the monastic tradition, that sees any non-utilitarian enjoyment of the created order as a sin (non-procreative sex; more food than is necessary for life). In that stream smoking is a sin.
But there's a lot of people who live in big houses, drive gas-guzzling SUVs, eat too much, and sleep around who seem to view smoking as morally and physically dirtier than prostitution. I was the Host the evening that the smoking ban was enacted, and when I dutifully asked, "Smoking or non-smoking?" the non-smoking guests often reacted with the grace of--I don't know--let's say a French labor leader who'd once again brought the government to its knees with a general strike. Fists raised in the air, a crazed look in the eyes, and the words, "You won't have to ask that question anymore, will ya!"
Smokers are people too.
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