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.