Recession, Nothing Like Recess

My father said that one of his dream jobs, if he'd had his youth to play with again, was to be a "hired squat." While it sounds like a dubious honor (the word squat, depending on your generation makes you think of a fun word for 'nothing' or makes you think of what happened right before you got poison ivy for the first time), when I finally learned what it is that a hired squat does, I too was envious.
A hired squat, as referenced only in one local newspaper article a long time ago, is a bullpen catcher. When the Colorado Rockies became a major league team in 1995 or 1996, they did profiles on everyone from the batboy to the retired senior citizens pointing people to their seats and there he was, the hired squat. His job is to work in the bullpen before and during the game, warming up the pitching staff, playing catch with the professional ball players, traveling with the team, and sometimes – oh what a pain -- shagging pop-flies during batting practice.
My father had also wanted to be a garbage man because he could ride on the back of the truck and wave to the neighbors, happy to be helpful, happy to have the wind (however disgusting and garbagey) in his hair.
For those of you who know me well, you'll know where I'm headed when I say that when I was a little kid, my aspiration was to be cheese. This was not a romantic understanding of what cheese was, hoping that I was reincarnated as some seriously delicious bit of cheese eaten slowly by a princess in a castle or something - - no no, I wanted to be everyday ordinary cheese. Why? "Because somebody has to do it."
And while this first section has been poignant and a little heartwarming, I will not offer proper transition into what follows. I never became cheese, as is evidenced by my recent MRI or by the fact that on a hot day in Arizona I don’t melt into a pool of dairy products. I am, however, an employee in the food service industry and I am also a freelance writer and blog-haver.
At the restaurant, people have started doing a few funny things. They’ve adopted the corner-cutting policy of "Recession Tipping" as I like to call it. They have enough money to order three courses and to request special attention and modify the menu as they see fit, they have enough money to stay long past the closing of the restaurant but they stop there at the tipping water’s edge - - it’s a recession, you know, we can’t just be GIVING money away.
This is a long argument and if you’re going to engage in it with someone in the restaurant industry, you’d better have your wits about you. The general populace doesn’t understand that a restaurant doesn’t pay its employees very much. They pay us $3.90 an hour, all of which is gobbled into taxes - leaving cute little $0.00 checks twice monthly. You wouldn’t question the "Labor" charge at your local mechanic, would you? You wouldn’t question a delivery charge from your pizza man, would you? You wouldn’t question the property taxes you pay even after you own your house outright, would you? So why then, when someone is working for YOU for two hours of their lives, making sure you are ENTERTAINED (because dining out is not just for sustenance, otherwise we’d all be eating energy and protein pills instead of ordering medium-rare steaks garnished with tiger prawns), making sure that the only thing you have to do while you sit there is to enjoy yourself and your dining company. Why is it so hard to understand that you should pay for that?
The other little ditty I’m going to point out is for a more select few people. May the Lord help you if you fall into this category and if you know someone who is also in this category, urge them to see the light. This is not a life or death situation, this is a pet peeve at its very utmost. I’ll set the stage.
The table has just left, the check presenter is sitting idly in the middle of a newly cleaned table, the glasses are polished and the hostess is seating a new group to your section. You whirl past the table, taking with you the check presenter and out flies one of two AWFUL things. The first is coinage. The second is minuscule shreds of credit card receipt. What. Are. You. Doing?
Don’t leave coins. Don’t ruffle through your handbag for those extra four quarters or for that eleven cents that is remaining on a $200.11 bill. I’ll take care of the .11, okay? The last thing I want to hear or have happen is to have your errant and stupid pennies drop onto the hardwood floor and roll around so many spilt washers. They make noise, I look stupid trying to find them, and even when I do find them, I have only gained .11. Leave it alone. Leave a nice tip and I’ll understand why you didn’t use exact change.
For all you confetti makers out there: Stop it. Don’t rip up your credit card receipts. If it is simply something you can’t stop yourself from doing, empty the little paper shards into your purse and you deal with them later. Or even better, take the receipt HOME LIKE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO and either file it away or turn it into papier mache - - I don’t care. Don’t rip it up, don’t put it in your water glass, don’t tuck all the pieces into the flap of the check presenter so that it flies out and into someone else’s soup, hair, cleavage. Don’t do it.
Are you that concerned that I will be able to take that piece of paper home and guess the first twelve digits from this number: XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-5439. What am I going to do with 5439? And let’s face it, if I was the type of person to steal your credit card number and use it for my own benefit, what huge mistake did you make earlier in the evening?
YOU HANDED IT RIGHT TO ME.
And you know what I did? I left the table and entered it into a computer. Can’t rip up a computer can you? I’m not stealing your credit card number, people. I’m not going to tape it back together CSI-Style just to see what clues I can glean from your personal life. I’m not doing any of that, and if you’re paranoid enough to rip it up - you should be paranoid enough to take the pieces with you.
No one is perfect. My father was a consultant, a lobbyist, chief of staff to the mayor, a good dad, a good husband and a good man. He never got paid to play catch with major league pitchers (something I have done, but we’ll save that for another time) and he was never, thankfully, a garbage man - - though I think he got to ride around on the back of one during a summer in Cheyenne.
I’m telling you people, and I’m telling you straight. The economy will be okay eventually. If you have money, keep right on spending it. If you don’t have money, find a way to stay happy and don't drink too much. And if you’re spending money at a restaurant, remember that it’s recession time for the people (yes, we’re people) bringing you all that extra bread and butter.

By the way, if anyone needs new stereo equipment for their house, charge it to Harold Butterfield - Visa - 7310-8736-4609-XXXX. . . he hates it when you do that.

Point of Order

I do have an answer to the sad gentleman from 90210. I will post it in a few days to allow the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to do their thing first. Thank you.

Town Hall, Different Than 1692

This is a blog, it does not reflect the opinion of anyone, nor should anyone with anyone’s opinion be offended by the opinion of the blog, which is the opinion of no one in particular, by which I don’t mean me, and I also don’t mean the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And while I don’t mean to implicate them in this blog, written by no one, for no one, about no one, forever and ever, Amen, I do wish to say that they sing very nice and might sing a lot better if they were rewarded with ice cold delicious Coca-Cola after a performance. It might send them to hell, but hell could use a few songbirds.
I don’t know if it is just a theme among some of the more public discourses in the country, but no one is honest about what they want to know, what they want to say, and what they want to hear. If you’re an avid subscriber to this little ditty, you’ll remember my take on weddings, and how honesty could play a much larger role in making the world a better place – it might even reduce the divorce rate because it would eliminate the following conversation:
Wife: You’ve been drinking mega-ritas with those 23 year-old whores from your office, haven’t you?
Husband: You never said I couldn’t, what’s the big deal.
Wife: Actually, if you’d like to pop in our wedding DVD, I clearly state that during our vows.
Husband: I do remember, and I do apologize. Would you care to engage in sexual intercourse?
Wife: No.
Husband: Ahh. I’m so glad we can be honest. I’ll go buy you something we can’t afford.
Wife: You know me so well.

Last night on public television, hosted and moderated by Tom Brokaw, was the second presidential debate. The debate was meant to be held “Town Hall” style which means that both candidates will answer questions posed to them by random individuals who have attended the meeting in hopes to air their grievances and to hear what their leaders are going to do about it. The debate last night was more theater-in-the-round than any kind of “Town Hall” meeting. If the precedent for town hall meetings was a list of specific questions from the internet and the executive producer of CNN, edited and re-written by a staff of professional television workers and then lobbed up like grapefruits for the two candidates to smash out of or into the park at their will all the while aiming their responses to the “folks” who were a carefully collected group of non-offensive, non-old, non-young, non-racial, non-biased, non-political friendly faces. . . if that was the 17th century precedent of a “Town Hall” then Salem would have been a lot friendlier place to live in the 1690s. As I understand it, a Town Hall Meeting should be the place where the crazy assholes in society are finally allowed to ask the questions they want to ask and it is the teeth-grinding duty of the elected official to ANSWER them despite their lunacy, accuracy or embarrassing insinuation. Let’s take a look:

Moderator: Senator McCain, you are an old man, are you not?
McCain: Yes, I am. I am quite old.
Moderator: And you are also a gambling man, often in the casinos until the early hours of the morning.
McCain: Yes, I am. I love the dice.
Moderator: The janitor here at the town hall has scribbled a question on some toilet paper, I’ll read it aloud. “The country is worried that you are old and crazy and have spent so long wanting to be president that you have forgotten what the office means and stands for. The country is worried that you are, campaign-wise, staying too long at the Presidential Craps table, trying to win the presidency by any means necessary and that adding Sarah Palin, let’s face it, a glitzy twit, might be your first public act of senility.”
McCain: And I have to answer this?
Moderator: Yes, that is the format that is chosen for the debate. Answer the janitor’s question.
McCain: It’s true, I am a maverick, my friends. My running mate is more glamorous than most women in politics and yes, she believes that the bible is written by God’s own court reporter, that the world was created in seven days and that dinosaurs lived among man in the garden of Eden where they listened to the snakes talk. But I put this to you, my friends, my little fellow Americans – is it not true that Harry Potter also talks to snakes? Are we to believe that a talking snake is impossible when one of our own pop-culture icons speaks freely with them? My tax plan for the…
Moderator: I’ll stop you right there, Senator. We don’t want to hear about your tax plan. We’re moving on. Senator Obama, you are in fact not an old white man, though you are applying for the job of one.
Obama: The rich history of the office of President of the United States has been largely Caucasian and largely older men, yes. And I am running for that office, yes.
Moderator: While Senator McCain brought on Governor Palin to serve as an idealistic opposite and a pretty party-puppet, it would seem that you brought on Joe Biden to be your “old-white-man”, is this true?
Obama: He is white, and from Delaware, and he is older, that much is true. But it is also true that he has been in the senate for over thirty years. He was first elected to the Senate when Sarah Palin was 8 years old, and he’s been on the Foreign Relations Committee since 2001, which is almost four times longer than Ms. Palin has been in the Governor’s Mansion in Alaska. Sure it says 2006, but we forget that it was December of 2006 when she was elected. To have her in the passenger seat of the office of President of the United States with only 22 months of Gubernatorial experience is reckless and political and, pardon me for saying, insane.
Moderator: Are you worried that the American people will “do it wrong” and elect a filthy rich, dice-throwing war hero who wants to bomb everyone and his pretty little friend whose foreign policy might involve a map and a set of colored darts?
Obama: Terrified.
Moderator: Us too. That concludes this Town Hall Meeting, let’s everyone go have some pie at Mabel’s Diner down the road. Best pie you’ve ever tasted.
McCain: My tax plan includes pie, my friends, it includes pie for everyone. Everyone gets a piece of the pie.
Moderator: We’ve turned your microphone off, please stop growling and jumping up and down, a man your age could break a hip. Senator Obama, would you please help Senator McCain across the street to Mabel’s Diner for some pie. He looks like he may stroke.