Waitress left 2 pennies and note by customer

[alcibiades_mystery]

137. I find "the waitstaff was rude" to be more a matter of the customer's issues

I have never found waitstaff to be "rude," but then again, I don't feel insecure about my own status in restaurants, and I don't expect service people to kowtow to me simply because I can pay a restaurant tab. In my experience, the vast majority of "rudeness" charges leveled at service workers come from people who have both those conditions: they're anxious about their own status and feel like they can pay for status.

People who are not insecure about their status and realize that they're only paying for a service rarely perceive rudeness in service workers, precisely because it wouldn't matter.

Ultimately, I have much more power in the relationship with any waitstaff person or other service employee I encounter. As a structural matter, nothing they say should affect me at all, and I certainly shouldn't get in a huff about it. These are all little insecurities of people who feel like perhaps they don't quite belong in the establishment, but at the same time feel like they can pay for status, so they blow up any seeming crack in that facade into rudeness and the like.

It also tends to be a self-fulfilling operation, since the insecure perceive everything as a potential insult, and can therefore come off as nasty, and that provokes the service person, and it escalates from there. Vicious cycle.