WWJT?

Listening to: Sterling's wonderful holiday mix

This Tuesday night group is beginning to organically bond. A strange phenomena, how groups evolve and begin to mesh, find common ground with each other and a comfort level that allows them to share what tingles beneath the surface. With this group, I’m beginning to see true cohesion emerging, empathy expressed, eight souls beginning to grasp that there’s something bigger than themselves and sharing that realization, with glee.

This group had an intense start and took awhile to find its soul, to recognize the reasons to come back every week and talk about what really matters, to grasp the hands of others and feel the vibration that moves us and binds us. However, within the last month, the clients began to place themselves on the line, take risks, gripe and moan and disclose their innermost thoughts, feelings, and pain.

An intense beginning to an awfully insouciant topic that follows - mea culpa. Foregrounding this, though, seemed essential to dealing with something that needs to be addressed "outside of group".

One of the clients of the group is working his way through college as a server/bartender, much the way I did, with the same gripes I had when I busted my ass smooching the great brown asterisk for a few extra shekels. Seems he’d had a big top (sixteen or so) of church-going Christians and they tipped him a piece of paper asking him if he’d been saved.

A $90 tab, whiny kids and demanding shits and for his trouble he got a piece of paper, a piece of paper, essentially, because who the fuck is going to see your point of view when instead of honest remuneration (about $18) you give a worthless flap of scold?

WTF? WWJT? At the last supper (Hey, one has to figure it was at restaurant or at least catered), after all the plates were cleared and Christ announced someone would betray him and the whole movement, he at least left something besides a pose. It’s difficult to imagine that the server who finished and cleaned up didn’t walk away whistling that hey, that was an awesome party, a little depressing but it paid well.

Church folk seem to imagine that scripture states “And the Lord stiffed the staff and Lo, the waiters walked from the table with much mumbling because they had not spit in the salads.” Christ, I don’t pretend to be someone who spews chapter and verse but I’m pretty sure “Screw thy server” isn’t anywhere in the Good Book.

So, for you witless hillbillies, let me give you a clue. A (as in, “A, B, C, D, etc., the alphabet, you know), servers make TWO FUCKING DOLLARS AN HOUR which is shit, of course, and they really make their money off tips – TIPS, you dipshits, the money you don’t leave. Got it? The money you don’t leave is pretty much what hat server needs to pay rent and such. B (Made the connection yet? Yeah? Ain’t you clever?), the server brought you food and managed not to put the tray on your flat head. C (See the pattern here? No? You illiterate shit, no wonder you can’t work out percentages.), people bringing you food are the last people you want to piss off because, let me tell you, those aren’t really sausages on your plate.

In the 21st Century, as opposed to the 15th Century or whatever it is where you born-again Taliban live, 1% is insufficient, 20% is the norm and no one wants to see your idiotic pamphlet. 10% if the service really sucks but you have to wonder that if the service is less than adequate it might be due to the blinding effect of your double-knit suits (and polyester children).

If you’re interested in winning converts to your starched out cult, being cheap cheese dicks is probably a bad start. Ponying up with decent tips is probably a much better strategy; a 25% tip (and a lack of laughable haircuts) might have made me give a second thought to the merits of your blood cult. However, even the born-again zombies who worked with me when I was waiting tabled acknowledged that Christians were shitty for tips and were loathe to wait on those assholes. “Yeah, I tell everyone at my church,” they’d apologize, “but they don’t seem to get it.” And in the spirit of good Christian charity, they’d attempt to palm a table of holier-than-thous off on any sucker around.

If there’s any Christian types reading this, A) why?, B) Are you really getting the sense of this whole alphabet thing? And C) why are you so goddamn CHEAP?!?!

Tonight’s group has been grilled on the dangers of seeing The World As It Is though a “filter”, how our filters are deleterious in operating objectively. Yet, it’s impossible for me to gainsay the “Church-going Christians are cheap” preconception because, hey, they’re their own stereotype, a consistent thread throughout the universe.

Servers of the world would love to prove me wrong but it’s not up to them. It’s up to those folks who would ask, “WWJT?"