Wrote this in the blogue on 16th, but putting it here because the previous entry is too long, and it doesn't deserve a standalone.
No tips or no me, simple.
Open a beer. Pour it in a glass. Carry the glass to the table. Pay yourself 3$. Then pay yourself 0.80$ extra.
That is, in case you suffer the restaurantomania, you should. If you are a restaurant, you charge for just serving the drinks at a rate of about four times the cost price (the beer you sell for 4$ or more doesn't cost more than 1$ in the grocery, and you aren't buying there - you're buying cheaper than that). And then, on top of that, you aren't even paying your workers for that. You are expecting guests to pay them.
Which is what got me immune to patronomania... i.e. I am not eating out, not drinking out. Outside maybe, on my porch. If you aren't paying your workers, why should I? You know them, I don't. You know who's deserving, you know how best to split the dough between them and the kitchen (or are you one of those places where kitchen gets nothing?).
Besides, no matter how nice the architecture, how pleasant the enterieur, how convenient the location - when it comes to paying, there is always the disenchantment in the end. It comes from the sense that I got hosed on a hidden cost, and that look in waiter's eyes and in some cases, the almost threatening "was there something wrong?" question if they aren't satisfied. And I've seen my share of scenes when others were paying. Not when I pay, though, I do an honest tip - respecting the custom of the land - but that's exactly the reason I do that less than once a year. If they posted the exact cost up front, well, maybe. Maybe I'd still walk out because I didn't like the price - which would be some progress, compared to my not even coming close anymore, because I loathe the "you'll have to pay more in the end or else we will publicly despise you" attitude.
There's no logic why a drink in a bar should cost four or more times than in the grocery (and even grocery makes some money on it, and has to pay its staff, space etc), and then given that high margin, it makes even less sense why the staff would be underpaid. I'm not against tips as such, but they should be an exception - when there's been a long meeting and the waiters had to work extra hours, or when there were too many small orders, or when the guests were just overwhelmed with the service - I'm against the tip as a system, where you're despised as the worst villain if you don't, where waiters post on the web the names of celebrities who are bad tippers, where I'm expected to give an extra dollar to someone who spent a total of one minute on me - a minute of their regular working hours. 60$/hr, nice when you can get it, and that's on top of the regular salary to which they (the bar and its tender) agreed.
Why don't you tip your postman, your UPS guy, your pilot, your cashier in the grocery, your cop, your stewardess (who may still attend flights in her spare time), your kids' teachers, your mechanic, your lawyer, your CPA..? Why just waiters and cab drivers? It's the system? Well, system sucks, which is why I'm avoiding it.
[Notes taken into Lena's pladžer [pron. as pludger, from y being a dž in juski] that I inherited since she got her nokla (noodle, aka the computer with telephone). For this one, I was reading Dozois's 2005 anthology - though it doesn't say the year on the covers anywhere, must be the calendar is copyrighted]
"A wall runs the length of the garden". Nice to see a wall run.
Funny how "country" means different things. Country as in "a country". Country as in "country and western" meaning, well, pleasant music. Country boy or country girl meaning just... peasant. And, ah, cross-country meaning running across the, um... Earth, as is. What else? Just country. Another country. A foreign country boy is what, a foreign peasant?
Sometimes, but only for special moments, when I'm listening to music, something that's really, really good, it gives me... um, isn't there any better word than "goose bumps"? Or, "my skin is crawling"? Crawling over what? Where to? On its knees or what? It's more "when my hairs stand upright"... on my teme... top of my head. There's not a word for that either. Jebeš ti ovaj jezik, ništa ne možeš da kažeš kako treba. Extra points for clarity introduced with the my, to dispell any confusion and remove from listener's mind any possibility that my hair may be standing on top of somebody else's head. It's easy to be confused otherwise.
And the opera singers specially annoy me for not pronouncing their uuu as uuu but as awww... which is maybe OK in opera (it doesn't matter that the words are unintelligible, you get the printed plot with the ticket), but when you're singing old folk music, it becomes quite obvious you are not the folk. You are an impostor, our common uuu is not good enough for you, it doesn't sound right, it is too dark, you need to make it sound bright to make your voice up to the standards of La Scala, eh? Well, shove it, you were just another co-conspirator in the murder of the genuine folk music, which was all alive, well and kicking ass until you came. People aren't capable of singing their own music, you had to come along and show them? Yeah, right. No wonder they discarded that music as sterilized, just like a cat won't touch kittens smelling of humans. Which made the masses all too susceptible to new folk music when it appeared in early sixties. So what you did in 15 years still isn't undone, almost fifty years later. Morons.
p.s. Fifteensome years later I euqally surcunted those who pronounce the j (dge) as anything but, they just smuggle anything instead, a shhh version of d, or dy, or hungarian gy, a smudged ch, anything but dge. I erased from [my] playlist at least ten versions of „Hey, Joe“ for that reason alone (and as much more because it's actually a male chauvinist piece of shit of a text, greetings from count Mizogin, and the performance wasn't anything special), and a bunch of Marmalade, Marko Brecelj (!) and a select few of forgotten heroes. Sing la-la-la if you think language is an obstacle.
28-XII-2008 - 5-VII-2026