Are you uncomfortable when someone waits on you?
It's something most people don't seem to understand: my discomfort with eating at restaurants, going to hotels. Getting a haircut. Having work done on my house or car. Having a maid, who is busy and exhausted and working harder than I am, call me "sir."
I'm talking mostly of dealing with service staff, here. People doing things we could do ourselves, but want to skip out on, either to save time or money or as an occasional "treat."
Or even when the service is just forced on you.
Like, the other day I had to make a delivery to a wealthy customer at a high end hotel in the city. So I was in service-mode myself. When I found the hotel, which was quite an impressive edifice on Boylston St., an African American in a smart costume with a little hat rushed over. He said, "Let me get that for you, sir," and opened the door for me.
It felt absolutely ridiculous. I suppose I may have looked more like a customer of the hotel than a delivery boy, but that just added imposter syndrome to my discomfort. Once I made my delivery and left a minute later, I was sure he'd see me for a fraud and refuse to let me out, but he opened the door again and wished me a good day. I wondered if I was supposed to give him a dollar, but somehow that felt even more ridiclous.
I told my wife about it, and she said, "What's the big deal? The guy's a doorman. He was just doing his job."
"That's just it," I said. "It's the fact that that is someone's job." The idea that a place exists where someone opens the door for you struck me as nauseating, decadent, somehow morally wrong--though I'd be hard pressed to tell you why. It's not like the role of delivery boy comes with any moral authority.
It also made me realize that I'm 49 years old and have never stayed in a real hotel. I'd say it's time to do some travelling but I don't know if I could handle the panic.
A couple years ago, our friends went on a double date with us to a Mexican restaurant. Our friend June shares my discomfort with service. In fact, I think she's the only one I've met who feels it more intensely than I do. If she thought she could go into the kitchen and wash her own dishes after a nice meal, she'd enjoy it more.
Her partner, though, had no such compulsions. Straight away, she ordered the extra-special guacamole. It said right on the menu it would be prepared at the table. I thought June was going to have a heart attack. This guy wheels out a little cart, spreads out some implements and avocados, and gets to work, inches away from us.
"I'm so uncomfortable," June whispered. Her skin was pale grey and she looked like she wanted to slide under the table.
Her partner said, "Why? It's not because he's Hispanic, is it? You're not racist, are you?"
"Of course not," she said. "It's just, it feels so unnecessary!"
"It's not like we're not paying for it. Would it make you feel better if he did it in the kitchen where we couldn't see? That's where they're making the rest of our food, you know."
"Yeah, I know. That's weird too. But when it's in there, I don't have to think about it."
During the pandemic, I learned to cut my own hair. I can do a pretty decent job of it, with some electric clippers and a collection of those plastic teeth things.
What a relief it's been! Even though a haircut was only $16.95 (plus a five dollar tip), the cost in energy and anxiety would wipe out half a day. I'd spend the whole time with my jaw clenched, hearing the voices of my ancestors screaming in my head: "Hey asshole, you're just going to sit there and do nothing? Get up and help out! Who the hell do you think you are?"
"So," says the hair-dresser, who just finished telling me about her two kids and three jobs, "What do you do for work?"
My boss pays for a massage once a week. I don't begrudge him that. He works hard enough--and a relaxed boss is a happy boss.
But, to imagine it! He literally pays a man to stand over him and rub him up and down for an hour or so. His role is to lie there and make appreciative noises.
I would die. My heart would stop. For me, paying for a massage would be purchasing an assisted suicide.
And if there's something it's best to handle by yourself, it's suicide.
That's enough examples of this particular hang-up, I think.
I'm curious to know how many other people feel it.
I was thinking about it the other morning, as I drove past a Dunkin Donuts with twelve giant SUVs idling at the drive through, waiting for high school girls to hand them coffee they could have made at home for a fraction of the cost. And I started to sense why the idea of this service is so distasteful to some of us.
Here's the premise:
None of us chose to be here.
On this planet, I mean.
In existence.
Yeah, yeah, I know it's a juvenile thought. What toddler (or teen) hasn't screamed at their parents in a moment of angry passion, "I never chose to be born!"
It's true, though. The moment of birth is perhaps the greatest violation of the concept of "consent" that a date-raping creator could throw in the face of a college ethics board. It's a cosmic joke. It murders the idea of free will more quickly than a first-trimester abortion and more brutally than a third-trimester one.
We are born. We are pulled into a world with absolutely nothing to say about it.
And, immediately, we have needs.
We have demands. Clean us clothe us give us something to eat clean up our shit.
And a bedtime story would be nice.
At this point, it doesn't matter how we feel about accepting the service of others. We're dead without it.
And the way we're born, the way we're programmed, death doesn't feel right.
So we scream.
We spend the first years of our lives in a state of constant bewilderment, panic, and pain.
What we are incurring at this stage--again, without our knowledge or, ha hah, our consent--are debts. Debts of gratitude, debts of obligation, debts of guilt and resentment.
"Do you have any idea how hard your father works to feed this family?"
"Do you know what your mother went through when you were a baby?"
I know there are parents out there who willingly give of themselves out of love and generosity and some kind of purity of spirit that makes them happy to see their families grow, whatever the cost. I've met, maybe, two of them.
Far more often I hear the line, "I love my kids, but if I could go through life again I wouldn't have them." I've heard, "I love my kids, but I don't like them very much." Or just outright, "Don't have kids. It's not worth it."
The poor kids. They'll never pay back what they've cost.
Later on, we can say "no thanks" to some debts.
No thanks to student loans, no thanks to credit card offers, auto loans, mortgages.
Ah, but already we're getting into grey zones. Zones where that pesky idea of "consent" isn't so clear cut. Because the demands never go away. We need food and shelter. So we need work. So we need transportation to get to work. Maybe we think we'd be satisfied by more meaningful work. That means education. So, student loans it is...
For as long as our hearts beat, our existence is inseparable from the unremitting demand for payment. Life means debt.
(Maybe that's why central reserve banking has been the most successful monetary policy in human history. But that's a topic for another post.)
Someone shows me their baby like it's sweet and adorable. I see a mouth that's going to devour 200,000 pounds of food over 80 years and leave behind a mountain of feces and one broken old body. It's like a tube, a funnel with teeth, a wind-tunnel of consumption that'll tear through the coming century. A tornado which, left unchecked, will spin off other storms to cut their own swaths of destruction through the world, bewildered and dizzy and spinning up debt as they go.
None of which, anyone ever bloody asked for.
Now, it's not really so grim as all that.
There is room for kindness, and drama, and beauty. We can do our best to make it not so bad.
I love Mister Rogers. I love his line about whenever something terrible happens, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." I think that's the best we can ask for in this life: to understand that nobody asked to be here and help others get through it without too much pain.
So why, then, is it so disturbing when someone is paid to perform an unnecessary service? Isn't that helping?
Can't it just be a form of kindness, with a little money exchanged?
I know how miserable it is to be trapped at a job where you don't want to be.
I've spent thousands of hours straining my face into a fake smile, so many hours that my face has deep laugh-lines reflecting emotions I've never felt. I smile and my mouth runs off small talk and suggests products while my mind contemplates how to end itself with a minimum of violence and collateral damage. I've spent years at it because I'd rather not starve, or die in the cold, or be a burden to the people around me.
And I bloody well know that many--not all, but not few--of the poor suckers working service jobs are doing them for the same reason.
That's why I'm so uncomfortable with a guy prepping guacamole at my table.
I know he might very well--for this moment at least--rather be dead. For sure, he'd rather be doing anything other than mashing an avocado for a table of strangers. He might even, in a rage born of desperation, enjoy seeing all of us expire.
Let's be honest, we all have customers we'd be happy to never see again. So how do we know, when we are the customer, that we're not that one?
And, yeah, maybe the alternative is worse. Maybe the fact that all of us idiots have someone willing to pay us some wage for a significant portion of our existence (so that those debts we never consented to don't get too out of hand) is something we should appreciate.
It's jobs! Jobs for the economy!
It's the enjoyment of the situation that feels so detestable.
It's the fact that, as customers, we demand a level of cheerfulness and interaction from service help. It's the way people go out shopping for fun, and then chat with the sales clerks as if they're fast friends, when in fact they're trapped in a situation they can't escape.
Flirting with wait-staff, bantering with baristas.
It's social rape. It's telling a whore she should be grateful for the opportunity to do something that destroys her soul. It's walking up to a slave on a plantation and saying "Hey man, how's your day going so far?" and expecting a cheerful answer.
And then getting it--because he'll be whipped if he gives you any lip.
It's telling livestock to celebrate it's slaughter because, hey, if it weren't for people eating meat, they'd never have been born into their filthy sty.
"Nobody wants to work, these days!"
No shit, asshole. You don't, either. If you did, you wouldn't be trying to get someone else to do this shit for you!
Until labor is completely voluntary, we should use it sparingly and treat it with solemn respect--as something we all need to do on our trek from our bewildering birth to the death that's our only true inheritance.
I mean, sure, we can perform our duties with good nature and camaraderie and do our best to brighten the day of the people we interact with.
But, a man opening a door for you, or prepping guacamole at your table? Asking someone who is paid by the hour and contractually obligated to be nice to you how is your day going, so far?
These things turn the tragedy of life into a farce at which no one laughs.
Or maybe it's just time for me to find a new job.
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Camera divider and signature illustration by @atopy.
