The segue into this topic is often, "What did you go to school for," or, "Where did you grow up?" As service professionals we are often judged as canines by our pedigree, appearance, and sometimes performance. I'm not exactly sure why people are so interested. You never read a Zagat review stating that the food was great but all the servers were from broken homes in second rate towns. No, this is something more pretentious and psychological. Just as handlers must assert their dominance over a prized pooch, the people who dine out in restaurants like to assert their dominance over you in subtler ways.
Servers joke that working in a restaurant should be mandatory the way that military service is mandatory in some countries. But, really, it's not a bad idea. I mean when you look at people like our republican candidate Mitt Romney, you just know he's never had to carry dirty plates or scoop fries into a cardboard container. This is someone who's never worked at the bottom tier a day in his life--and I guarantee you he's also the guy asking servers in restaurants where they grew up and what they went to school for.
So it came as no surprise that my (old) ladies who lunch wanted to know EVERYTHING about me. It may be a class thing or it could have been an age thing. Old people tend to want to know everything about you tot. This I like to assume is merely early onset Alzheimer's and they have simply mistaken me for one of their grandchildren. But these bubbies seemed determined to learn everything that was to know about the man pouring their wine. And then the inevitable question came, the medicine ball lobbed at my head with curious gravity,
"So, what do you really want to do for a living?"
And as rude as it was, it did make me think. Not about what I really wanted to do, but about the question and its reflective power over people. Since it was apparently okay to ask this information of me then surely I could use this information against others. Sure enough, after a night of being bubbied alive I was armed with my secret weapon of the day. And, after a grueling argument with the dry cleaner in my building about (A) whether or not my shirt was clean (answer: no), and (B) whether or not it was their job to get the shirt clean (answer: um, what the hell else am I paying you for? to staple pieces of blue paper into my buttonholes), I stopped and went silent. The dry cleaner looked alarmed as he was clearly expecting this argument to escalate to fisticuffs. Then I looked right in his eyes and said,
"So, what do you really want to do for a living?" A look of confusion crossed his face and was immediately shaken off.
"Just gimmie the shirt I'll see what I can do," he said, grabbing the shirt from my hands. I was impressed. I would have to test this out on others. Think, if I had only been armed with this simple and elegant response to any argument in the past. How different might my life look now? I was surprised by how often I was presented with an opportunity to use the line.
I went to my usual cheap haircut emporium, which is basically a haircut factory. I walked in, asked for my usual girl Moniqua, and was disappointed to learn she was no longer working there. I instead got a 300-pound man named Maurice who had no idea who Nick Wooster is and even less of idea of why I'd want my hair to look like his. You should all know that he looks like this:
I then gave a very precise account of how Moniqua used to cut my hair, buzzing the side with the size one clippers and then fading slightly to my far left part, square back, leave most of the length and keep the front longer than the back. Then, as he was shaving off the hair in the back his phone rang, and not only did he pick up but he kept cutting my hair with his head tilted talking on the phone propped against his shoulder.
It is at this point I pressed the emergency button located on the underside of every salon chair and a flashing red light and alarm went off, sprinklers came on, people went running every direction and Tabitha Coffey burst through the door calling for backup on a walkie talkie. Maurice was tackled to the ground by a group of four lesbian football players wearing all black and carried by forklift off to some bad barber prison in Utah where he will be forced to perform Flowbee bowl cuts for mormons for the rest of his days.
And what really happened is after hanging up the phone and finishing the back I swiveled around in my chair and said,
"Maurice I'm going to stop you right there. I'd like someone else to finish my haircut."
"Excuse me?" Then I swiveled back around very theatrically and said to him in the mirror,
"Tell me, what do you really want to do for a living?" The manager of the salon was cutting my hair in two minutes flat. You can't put a price on good service, but for bad service the price is $15; the haircut came out so-so, but the knowledge that with one sentence I could deliver a crushing blow to anybody doing any job anywhere was priceless.
Then, my school (The Art Institute of Chicago) called asking for me to renew my membership to the museum so that I wouldn't miss all of the great new exhibits coming up. I asked if the man on the other end of the line knew that I was an alum and had already invested $120,000 into The Art Institute. And in the middle of telling him I wasn't interested in paying one more dime for something that should be offered for free to graduates I stopped and went silent. I knew what had to be said.
"Sir? Are you still there? Sir?," he said.
"So tell me," I started.
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