Eccentric Flower:200911/Not Fun Things

I am tired even though I seem to have been getting decent sleep. My eyes have been red and sore for two days, which I'm hoping will improve when I start a new pair of contact lenses. You folks are not providing me with enough content or comments to distract me from the stupid thing I have to do for stupid people at work when I really want to go play outside or something. And the internet is irritating me this morning.

I posted a comment at Making Light the other day which, while I admit gave the wrong impression, got slapped down by several people in what I felt was a particularly tactless way. What I like about Making Light: its intelligence level. What I dislike about Making Light: its bluntness level. I realize that being able to say "I think you are wrong" in a graceful and delicate way is a lost art that most people no longer have the time or patience to do, but as you know, Bob, I have an extremely thin skin and a vengeful disposition - a horrible combination - and when I am slapped down my impulse is to slap back, even if the slap is justified. Whereas if you tell me politely, "I'm not 100% with your detective work, Lou," I'll likely say, "Oh, you're right, I goofed, a thousand pardons," and all will be well.

I did not slap. I posted a clarification. It was late enough in the thread that no one will go back to read it, and some people will think things about me that are not true, and that's annoying.

The internet is really not a good place for me sometimes.

Bill's dad died, after a long hospitalization, and we are all very sad here, and Bill's remembrance of his dad is excellent and worth reading, but there's one paragraph which triggered my ire this morning - not at Bill, because I happen to agree with it 100%, but at MIT and the culture he describes and the people who somehow manage to think that culture is a good thing. That's as far as I'm going to take that rant; any further would be really inappropriate given the source, and besides, that's it in the nutshell. Just take my annoyance as read. And don't let it have any effect on the rest of Bill's entry. Just me being nasty over here, nothing to see.

A guy at the New York Times whose uncompromising restaurant is going to fail hard once he realizes the realities of the industry posted fifty rules for waiters, and some are good and some are utterly unrealistic, and the guy at Waiter Rant posted his rejoinders, which are often flip, nasty, and dismissive, but are sometimes accurate, and this is just another pair of salvos in a long-running battle which annoys the everloving snot out of me whenever it flares up again - which is often.

Being a waiter sucks. The basic point of the guy at Waiter Rant is, "You have no idea what it's like, how bad it is here, so don't come in with your expectations when you have absolutely no clue." I agree that being a waiter sucks. I agree that the average customer has no idea how horrible the working conditions for waiters are, especially when they have asshole bosses (who seem to be the norm in the industry, possibly because the restaurant business is so cutthroat) who are stabbing them from the back side on hours and expectations and cutting corners everywhere they can while still expecting their staff to be smiling automatons.

However, I tend to also be of the school that prefers waiters to be smiling automatons, and the Waiter Rant guy loses me every time he says, "Well, how am I expected to have any personality?" or variation thereof. I don't want my waiter to have personality. I want him to be efficient and invisible.

But mostly, I'm really tired of this whole war. Waiters with bad attitudes; customers who are boors; restaurant owners and managers who are grubby, sleazy, mercenary bastards - they all need to be taken out back and shot. Start fresh.

The fact of the matter is - and if I have said this once, I have said it a thousand times - there are very few areas which will continue to provide steady employment in this country going into the next fifty years, and one of the ones which will is the service sector. I tell you again because it is true: Your grandchildren will either be lucky enough to get an increasingly sought-after set of specialist jobs (technology, finance, medicine, law) in an overcrowded field with far more people seeking work than getting it, or they will work in the service sector. Industrial jobs, manufacturing jobs, they are gone. They're already gone and you don't realize it. They're not ever, ever coming back. I will bet you dinner. I will bet each of you dinner. The growth sector is McDonald's and its ilk. Wal-Mart and its ilk. That sort of thing. That's all there is. Push your kids to get a specialist skill of some kind, possibly more than one, because if you do not have specializations, you will be a cashier or a clerk or a line cook. The armed forces will not save your ass. Industry will not save your ass. It's going to be an either/or.

I squeaked by; I got very lucky. I am one of the last people in the last generation who will get to be lucky. When my niece tries to get a job like I have, sometime in the future, it will be long past the point where she can get in on past experience and knowledge alone, because the warm bodies will so exceed the job pool - the market will be so heavily biased against the worker - that she'll have to have a pedigree a mile long just to compete for a place against all the others who have pedigrees a mile long. I don't need a degree to do this job, but I was quite fortunate to get hired despite that - to find an employer who cared more about my actual skills than the paper trail. Those are already an endangered species.

We are already seeing cases where people need to present proof of four-plus years of college education just to be in the running for jobs which, frankly, could be done by any reasonably intelligent high-schooler - just because the market is getting so tight. In the absence of any other means to select between five hundred people for one job, the most ridiculously overqualified person (on paper) will win.

And for everyone else, there's Wal-Mart. It used to be "there's always work at the Post Office," but unless the government lets the Post Office be privatized, it will be dead within fifteen years.

What's this all got to do with waiters? Simple. More and more people are being pushed into this particular battlefield. If we don't make peace now, it is going to get intolerable and/or schizophrenic. It is amazing how many people can be shat upon all day as a grocery store clerk and then go to a restaurant and make the waiter's life hell. That's not a good use of compartmentalization. As the number of people who have to be clerks and waiters goes up dramatically, we have got to clean up our national madness about how we regard service workers, or we are going to get REALLY bitter and nasty. Americans tend to think the person on the other side of the counter is a lesser being and an asshole, no matter which side of the counter they happen to be on. Customers think waiters are beneath the salt, and waiters think the same of the customers. It's ridiculous, and it's stupid.

If we don't abandon this phony war, and get into the mindset that the person on the other side of the counter is a human who is acting according to certain understandable needs and drives, if we don't exercise more tolerance, this is going to get a lot messier.

OK, I'm done ranting all over the place now. I'm still tired and crabby, but at least I haven't had to think about how stupid the useless thing I have to do at work is, or how much I'd like some human conversation, for about fifteen minutes while I typed this. Hooray! Small victories through the power of peevishness! Is it lunchtime yet?