Server Rant!

"Why did SHE get chips and salsa and not ME?"

You're probably thinking these words were uttered by a small child who hasn't developed an understanding of social norms, a child who is still in the ego-centric sociopathic stage known as ages 2-5. You would be wrong. These words were uttered by a grown ass woman at a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

As most struggling actors in NYC, I waited tables to pay the bills and worked at a little southwestern style restaurant, Cilantro, on the Upper East Side. I hung my hat at a few restaurants in different parts of the city and I have to say that the customers at Cilantro had the distinction of being the 2nd worst of any of the restaurants where I worked (David Burke @ Bloomingdales had hands down the worst customers. ever.).

And when I say awful, I mean throwing chunks of ice at busboys because they dared to send them water that had ice in it awful. Most of my co-workers were from Mexico and, while they each had their own unique style, they all looked the same to the customers and so they never bothered to make the distinction between their server or a bus boy or the bartender. Instead they would just hand their check to any brown person that walked by (it got SUPER awkward when they handed it to another customer).

At Cilantro, chips and salsa were complimentary and were cranked out to new tables with assembly line precision. Granted, when it was really busy customers sometimes had to ask for the chips and salsa, but they would get them eventually--even assembly lines malfunction. And while it was understood that one table generally received one serving, we were more than happy to supply refills upon request.

On this particular day, there must have been a glitch in the matrix because it was a slow lunch and one of the servers had failed to deliver the sacred chips and salsa to an older lady sitting by herself. She flagged down her server after sitting at her table for maybe three minutes and, rather than asking for the coveted, complementary item she exclaimed, "Excuse me! Why does SHE get chips and salsa and not ME?" as she pointed at another lone diner who was chomping down on some chips, oblivious to the controversy.

Her server responded with, "Oh I'm sorry ma'am, would you like chips and salsa?" To which the woman replied,"I want to know why SHE got chips and salsa and not ME?"

At this point the manager noticed something had gone awry and went in to diffuse the situation. The woman was convinced that something conspiratorial had transpired. She was legitimately angry and, despite the fact that chips and salsa were quickly brought to her table, she believed that the mistake was intentional. This woman was upset because a complimentary item was not given to her the second she wanted it and someone else got it first.

I guess the reason this still stays in my mind is because this woman (who came in often and was usually pleasant) reduced herself to a petulant child over chips and salsa. I'm not going to offer platitudes like, there are starving children in Africa...but...why is that bitterness and anger and sense of being treated unfairly present in a wealthy white woman. And it's not like she's an isolated case. This sense of entitlement persists within the wealthy class.

On a broad level, the customers often mistreated the servers and staff so it was particularly frustrating when entitled customers acted as though they'd been wronged. I remember an older man who had ordered a cobb salad and was mistakenly sent a chopped salad. He flagged me down and demanded to know where the egg and avocado were. It was like he didn't understand that sometimes mistakes happen. He threw a fit and demanded this be sent back immediately. I obliged and asked him if it was in fact a cobb salad that he wanted (to avoid any further miscommunication). He looked at me incredulously and replied with, "Do you want to get paid?" This pissed me off to no end but I remained calm and explained that I wasn't his server to which he replied, "Oh right, so does he understand English?" You insult me, fine. You insult my paisano? No bueno. I explained to him that yes, his server does in fact speak English, but that even Americans often get cobb and chopped confused, especially in a noisy restaurant. THAT'S being wronged and mistreated.

These two examples of awful customer behavior weren't the norm, but there were a lot of terrible, terrible people who came into that restaurant. And while I'm not going to turn this into a 1% issue, it should serve as a reminder to treat people with respect and kindness, even if you think they've wronged you. You never know where someone is coming from or what they've experienced. I'm sure that the angry chips and salsa lady was experiencing fear of the inevitable prospect of dying alone or something and while, she was awful, mi paisanos and I were graceful and respectful. Plus, when you meet anger with kindness, the culprit can't help but feel like an asshole. It's such a satisfying feeling. So don't do it to be a better person, do it to make them feel like a worse person:)

Best Practices and the NYPD

New York City and its Ray Kelly headed police force is regarded as a particularly successful model for crime control. The zero tolerance and quality of life policies that have been implemented, when coupled with the harsh sentencing practices of the Rockefellar Drug Laws have contributed to an exponential increase in the incarceration rate in New York State.

Contrary to the repetative discourse that bemoans ineffective government bureaucracies, local governments can be active when need be. City governments also frequently communicate and share best practices with each other. Agencies such as the publically funded MTA, for example, talk to cities that have similar transit systems like London and Paris. The head of the MTA will share what has proven effective, what is supported by the public, and how best to implement improvement projects. When discussing transportation initiatives, this all seems fairly innocuous, but when the subject matter is crime control and policing, this takes on an entirely different shade. What if the subject matter is less about adding more subway lines and more about effective ways to stifle protests?  And what if the supposed leader of innovation, the NYPD, is actually promoting an archaic, expensive, unjust and ineffective method of policing?

There is an insistent and oft repeated correlation between broken window policies and the decrease in crime that began to occur in the early 90s but the validity of this relationship has little empirical merit: crime rates dropped dramatically all over the United States and other industrialized nations. Not all of the cities that experienced this decrease in crime practiced the broken window theory and yet the public perception continues to accept that harsh sentencing and tough-on-crime policies were the reason—to the detriment of low level offenders of color. So if we have a model of policing that is nationally and globally celebrated as a success and is adopted by other municipalites, despite contradictory evidence, then we have a problem, and it’s a problem that has civil rights implications.

Very briefly, let’s look at Paris and the riots of 2005. The direct cause of the riots was linked to the deaths of two boys who were hiding from the police in a power substation and were electrocuted. That’s the basic premise, although I’m greatly shortening it for simplicity’s sake.

Nicolas Sarkozy was the Interior Minister at the time and he showed little empathy and insisted that the youths were possible suspects fleeing a crime scene rather than kids playing soccer. In the world that he lives in, there was no way that they were fleeing from what they perceived to be yet another frequent and unnecessary police interrogation where they would be forced to show their identity papers. The New York Times reported that many in the poor communities in Paris blamed Mr. Sarkozy for alienating young people with the way he has pressed a zero-tolerance anticrime campaign, which features frequent police checks of French Arabs in poor neighborhoods”

The Sarkozy administration did not acknowledged that youth in blighted and segregated regions of the city do not see themselves fully reflected in the promises of the republic of France. He has not acknowledged that the public visibility of youth of North African origin beyond the boundaries of the projects provokes discomfort, rejection, and relentless identity checks [by police] and fuels a powder keg of frustration.

It’s no accident that the constant identity checks bear an eery resemblance to some of the NYPDs tactics. These are “best practices” that have been shared and implemented with corporate precision. What is interesting is that the subjects of the abusive police practices whether they are French Arabs of North African descent or Black and Latinos in New York City, while they have varied and unique cultural experiences, they have one distinct commonality: those that suffer from these abusive policies are minorities who have historically experienced institutional discrimination in the forms of slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and other government mandated forms of human rights violations.  

The reason for sharing this background and scope and bringing up Jim Crow, slavery and colonialism is to highlight that the current punitive policies didn’t hatch themselves. Rather, they are part of a long-standing and substantial institutional lineage. Now is the time to break away from this inheritance. Now is the time to bring the issue of equitable justice to the public forefront.