Etiquette, manners, and customs are human constructs. We can create new ones. We can modify or discard old ones. The fact that we rarely do says something about us.
Likes and dislikes are rarely entirely sane and rational. They are also personal. I don't like nickels.
I have worked fairly steadily in the food service industry for a bit over five years. One of my jobs was at a fast food place that I shall call Sandwich Emperor. I was frequently assigned to the task of order-taking and/or collecting money from the customers.
One of the things about this job is that employees were expected to count down their drawer themselves at the end of the shift before handing it over to management to make the count official. I didn't like counting nickels. Quarters make sense: four of them make a dollar. Dimes make sense: two piles of five make a dollar. I'm a very visual counter: I sort things into piles and then count the piles. Pennies make perfect sense: each one is worth one.
Nickels bother me: it takes four piles of five to make a dollar. So, I made it a sort of secret goal of mine to run out of nickels by the time my shift was over. This led me to a new practice. If a customer wasn't one I was especially fond of, I'd make sure their change was as heavy on nickels as possible. An even ten cents change as two nickels instead of one dime, for instance.
People in customer service jobs put up with a lot of crap. We need a way to express our frustration with more subtlety and good taste than serving the customers sneezers. I propose that anyone in a cash-handling customer service position adopt my practice of giving out change that's heavy on nickels as a subtle sign of displeasure.
Showing posts with label food service careers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food service careers. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Monday, November 8, 2010
So, Why Don't Bus Boys Get All The Girls
Bart Simpson (voiced by Nancy Cartwright): If this girl I'm seeing comes here, and she might, I wouldn't mind of you told her I was the kind of boy that does the dishes.
Homer Simpson (voiced by Dan Castellaneta, with a tone of derison and sarcasm here): Yeah, bus boys get all the chicks.
-The Simpsons, episode entitled "The Good, The Sad and The Drugly" written by Marc Wilmore and directed by Rob Oliver
So, as the above quote indicates, telling a girl you're a bus boy is not the best opening line. I am somewhat puzzled about the why of it. Being a bus boy, among other things, by trade myself, I think there's a good case to be made for bus boys.
Males and females are mysteries to each other. At least that's the gist of the vibe I get from books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, He's Just Not That Into You, and Bridget Jones's Diary. Part of it is until humans perfect telepathy, everyone is a mystery to everyone else. While an individual might get lost in thought from time to time, really foreign territory is someone else's brain. This foreignness increases exponentially when crossing gender lines, though.
So because we are alien to each other, males and females, who attempt to make the effort towards some form of heterosexual romantic relationship, have some complaints. Two complaints I have heard females make of males are:
1) He's not very domestically inclined; he's no help around the house; he never cleans up after himself.
and
2) He's got some BS macho attitude about being head of the household, the one in charge, etc. and so on, simply because he's got the Y Chromosome and higher levels of testosterone.
Here's where bus boys might be an improvement:
1) If you are a true bus boy and it has taken root in your soul, you will feel a natural inclination to try and pick up after yourself a bit because dirty dishes left on the table are WRONG in much the same way that a Christian would find a Satanic shrine WRONG.
and
2) Maybe it's different other places, but where I bus tables, most of my bosses are women. While, I think I've always been more or less a feminist, low on macho BS to begin with, following the orders and instructions of so many females has killed what little I had left. I am ready, willing and eager to accept a female as my equal or superior. If other bus boys are similar, then that's a second point in our favor.
So if bus boys might represent a slight improvement over the average male, why aren't they the most sought after mates on the planet? Or at least in the industrialized Western countries where bus boys exist... I have two somewhat inter-related hypotheses:
1) Money
and
2) Social status
Money, I'll try to be concise about. Bus boying alone will never get you rich. In the whole game of dating, mating, and relating, having some disposable income at your disposal is a help.
As for social status, that's almost another essay. A while back I read a book called Where Do Nudists Keep Their Hankies? It's one of those books of random facts that might be interesting. The whole book was sort of themed around sexuality and the whole weird mating dance that humans have built for themselves. I have since sold my actual physical copy of the book, so I am going from memory here, but this was a pretty memorable bit.
The book is presented in a sort of question and answer format. One question was something along the lines of, "why do women go for jerks?". The answer came from emerging scientific research. Among lower types of social mammals, like wolves and chimpanzees, females try to mate with a high status, as close as possible to the pack alpha, male. This ensures good genes for resultant offspring. Then the female will seek a lower status male to actually try to take care of her and her offspring.
There is no reason to believe these instincts and behavior patterns have entirely disappeared in humans. Now among humans, the type of aggressive behavior that allows one to rise to alpha status often comes off as jerky behavior.
Getting back to bus boys, we are almost certainly not the alpha of our local pack. We might not be the omega wolf, pushed to the fringes of the pack and forced to beg for scraps, either. The point remains that we are the guy approaching the alpha and asking if we can take away his salad plate so there will be room on the table for the main course.
Homer Simpson (voiced by Dan Castellaneta, with a tone of derison and sarcasm here): Yeah, bus boys get all the chicks.
-The Simpsons, episode entitled "The Good, The Sad and The Drugly" written by Marc Wilmore and directed by Rob Oliver
So, as the above quote indicates, telling a girl you're a bus boy is not the best opening line. I am somewhat puzzled about the why of it. Being a bus boy, among other things, by trade myself, I think there's a good case to be made for bus boys.
Males and females are mysteries to each other. At least that's the gist of the vibe I get from books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, He's Just Not That Into You, and Bridget Jones's Diary. Part of it is until humans perfect telepathy, everyone is a mystery to everyone else. While an individual might get lost in thought from time to time, really foreign territory is someone else's brain. This foreignness increases exponentially when crossing gender lines, though.
So because we are alien to each other, males and females, who attempt to make the effort towards some form of heterosexual romantic relationship, have some complaints. Two complaints I have heard females make of males are:
1) He's not very domestically inclined; he's no help around the house; he never cleans up after himself.
and
2) He's got some BS macho attitude about being head of the household, the one in charge, etc. and so on, simply because he's got the Y Chromosome and higher levels of testosterone.
Here's where bus boys might be an improvement:
1) If you are a true bus boy and it has taken root in your soul, you will feel a natural inclination to try and pick up after yourself a bit because dirty dishes left on the table are WRONG in much the same way that a Christian would find a Satanic shrine WRONG.
and
2) Maybe it's different other places, but where I bus tables, most of my bosses are women. While, I think I've always been more or less a feminist, low on macho BS to begin with, following the orders and instructions of so many females has killed what little I had left. I am ready, willing and eager to accept a female as my equal or superior. If other bus boys are similar, then that's a second point in our favor.
So if bus boys might represent a slight improvement over the average male, why aren't they the most sought after mates on the planet? Or at least in the industrialized Western countries where bus boys exist... I have two somewhat inter-related hypotheses:
1) Money
and
2) Social status
Money, I'll try to be concise about. Bus boying alone will never get you rich. In the whole game of dating, mating, and relating, having some disposable income at your disposal is a help.
As for social status, that's almost another essay. A while back I read a book called Where Do Nudists Keep Their Hankies? It's one of those books of random facts that might be interesting. The whole book was sort of themed around sexuality and the whole weird mating dance that humans have built for themselves. I have since sold my actual physical copy of the book, so I am going from memory here, but this was a pretty memorable bit.
The book is presented in a sort of question and answer format. One question was something along the lines of, "why do women go for jerks?". The answer came from emerging scientific research. Among lower types of social mammals, like wolves and chimpanzees, females try to mate with a high status, as close as possible to the pack alpha, male. This ensures good genes for resultant offspring. Then the female will seek a lower status male to actually try to take care of her and her offspring.
There is no reason to believe these instincts and behavior patterns have entirely disappeared in humans. Now among humans, the type of aggressive behavior that allows one to rise to alpha status often comes off as jerky behavior.
Getting back to bus boys, we are almost certainly not the alpha of our local pack. We might not be the omega wolf, pushed to the fringes of the pack and forced to beg for scraps, either. The point remains that we are the guy approaching the alpha and asking if we can take away his salad plate so there will be room on the table for the main course.
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