Bright gal.
Daphne Crawford is a high school senior in Bogart, Georgia, renamed from Osceola in 1892 in proleptic honor, I've no doubt, of my bromanced Hollywood-noir icon. She's taking four advanced-placement classes, is enrolled at a nearby university, is busy with college applications and shiny résumé-boosting extracurriculars and, because she also waits tables, has published a Washington Post op-ed — "This one goes out to every whiny brat restaurant customer" — something I've never accomplished, and I've a few years on her.
As Daphne pointedly notes in said op-ed:
"From customers berating me and my co-workers because we’re out of ranch dressing for their takeout order (we all know you have some at home) to being yelled at for things I can’t control (I didn’t overcook your steak; I’ve never cooked a steak, period), to closing up after a double shift at 11 p.m. and getting less in tips than you’d see in a street player’s guitar case on a Tuesday afternoon, I’m quickly running out of patience and the willingness to work."
I hear ya, Daph. Decades ago, facing poverty and thus impending starvation in the Missouri Ozarks, I too took a job waiting tables. In the span of what seemed about 15 minutes, my patience ran out, along with my willingness to work the wretched job of seeing to the "needs" of unappreciative dining deadbeats who had just paid an exorbitant price for some awful country-western show in Branson. In about 16 minutes — and here I scarcely exaggerate — I quit. Starvation seemed more attractive.
What has stayed with me over the years was the dreadful, nightly phenomenon of waiting on, say, a party of six, clinically obese, late-middle-aged rustics whose ear for music equaled their excessively tasteless way of dealing with an underpaid waiter. There I was, attentive to a t, doing this or that for them. Two hours of this and that and mercifully they would leave — after leaving a $2 tip.
Ever since, I've left a 20% or 25% or perhaps a 30% tip for a dinner tab or, barring eats, $5 for so much as one drink or a mere cup of coffee (which is rare, since I'm mostly a hermit). The waiter must still wait, must drop by now and then to ask if I'd like anything else, must still be on his or her feet — and above all, the waiter too must eat, and pay the rent.
In no way do I divulge my tipping habit as a self-celebratory, look-at-me invitation for applause. Generous, or rather, appropriate, tipping is just the right thing to do — unless of course you have a surly bartender or otherwise dinner attendant who deserves instead a more appropriate lesson in manners.
Ms. Crawford writes that she still waits tables. My advice to her in the gun-happy South: the above's reverse. No one would fault her for it. Be all you can be, Daphne.