Lumping it

Last of the summer whine

by Chris Wright

"This is unacceptable." These words, uttered in tones befitting a Victorian barrister, were the culmination of a recent meal at a franchise of the Pally's* food chain. Needless to say, it was not a good experience. In fact, I was this close to storming out, contacting my congressman, or writing a poem: "Ode to an Odious Meal."

"What could possibly raise this kind of bile?" you ask. What, for God's sake, constitutes "unacceptable" at a Pally's? It's not like you enter one of these places with any expectations. But judge not, reader, lest ye be served by a waitress like Tammy.

Here's a brief timeline of our first, foodless hour:

0.01 seconds: Tammy: "Hi, I'm Tammy. Can I get you anything?" [Takes our order, goes home to watch Dawson's Creek]

45 minutes: [Tammy returns] Me: "Excuse me . . . ?"

46 minutes: Tammy: "We're out of baked potatoes." Me: "Okay, mash."

60 minutes: Me [in kitchen, angry]: "We've been waiting an hour!" Cook [cryptically]: "I didn't know where you were."

When our plates finally clattered onto the table, the food was cold, congealed, and came with French fries instead of mashed potatoes. Tammy was vaguely apologetic, and then nowhere to be seen. The trainee manager -- who came to our table unbidden -- was defensive, dismissive, and officious.

"We're busy," he sniffed.

"No, you're not!" I replied, my piping, Monty Python-esque soprano bouncing around the barren restaurant.

"Well, we were," he said, eyes heavenward. Even his pimples seemed to sneer.

I leapt from my seat. "This," I huffed, "is unacceptable." Like I say, I was this close to storming out.

Did I overreact? After all, we're not talking Maison Robert here. But surely even a place like Pally's must observe a basic standard, a bottom line. As far as I was concerned, Tammy and the TM had lowered the bar to the point where even a starving dog would have walked away from the table.

---

I've been having a lot of consumer squabbles lately. There was the brouhaha at Helio's, whose trendier-than-thou sales staff sniffed derisively at my attempts to return a pair of boots with soles that seemed to have been affixed with flour and water. There was the fuss at Judicial Fish, where the waiter displayed a perfect balance of snooty superiority and spectacular incompetence -- and stood by and glared as I complained about him to the manager. There was the pitched (high-pitched) battle with the folks at FKU Cable, who apparently learned about customer relations from reading Kafka. Then there was -- well, you get the picture.

You could chalk this up to the decline of standards in the service industry. Many companies, I know, are laying the finger of blame on a booming economy, lamenting the fact that it's becoming harder and harder to hire sufficiently capable (or desperate) workers.

You could call it a sign that our nation's work ethic as a whole is in decline, that courtesy and competence have gone the way of the soda fountain.

Or you could simply posit that I'm turning into a crotchety old fart.

As I grow older, I am definitely a lot more apt to complain. Time was, a parade of buses arriving after a harrowing wait would leave me seething, but seething in silence. Recently, though, I boarded one of three tardy number 57s and heard myself shrilly declaring: "This is ridiculous, ridiculous." The bus driver just looked at me with the eyes of someone who'd been sitting in traffic for an hour. "Ridiculous," I repeated.

There's no doubt that my own personal standard of acceptability has shifted. And that's not necessarily a bad thing; at least I don't fall victim to the hordes of tyrannous telemarketers, snide shopkeepers, and diabolical drive-thru attendants out there. At least I have standards.

But there's a part of me that fears I'm turning into the guy who made an entire store cringe the other day when he snapped at a busy sales clerk: "I'd appreciate it if you'd stay put." I tell myself that I'm appalled by our culture of entitlement, sickened by the pampered, bickering, litigious classes, the mass of men and women who lead lives of noisy exasperation. But it seems that I can now count myself among them.

---

To make matters worse, there's also a class issue. After many years in the service industry, I've finally landed what might be termed a Good Job. No longer do I feel the shadow of personal bankruptcy looming every time I say, "Supersize it." No longer am I faced with the prospect of fending off snitty customers in order to scrape by. In terms of earnings, I'm still a long way behind Warren Buffett, but I'll bet I'm way ahead of Tammy and the TM. The downside of all this is that, without even noticing, I've gone from being the browbeaten burger boy to the petulant customer. I'm giving people the same shit I used to get -- and I'm getting good at it. Whatever happened to solidarity, to class loyalty?

Whatever happened to me?

For one thing, in recent years I've been given a taste of the good life. I've certainly grown accustomed to decent dining. When I was young and broke, a chicken dinner would have been a treat, no matter how long the wait or how chewy the meat. But a lot of oil has flowed through the Fry-O-Lator since then. These days I tend to go for pan-seared rather than deep-fried. Maybe I've grown soft, gotten spoiled, had things a little too easy.

Sitting there at Pally's, table-thumpingly mad, I may have been "starving," but I wasn't truly hungry. I began to realize that what really bugged me was the sense that I deserved better. At this point my eyes were drawn to the booth next to ours: a middle-aged employee was wiping down the table, pretending not to listen to our spat. He had ketchup stains on the front of his shirt.

Suddenly I was overcome by the urge to sit down and shut up. I don't know why -- the meal before me was still a grim prospect, the TM still a peevish dink -- but the pustule of my anger had been pricked. So, without a word, I sat down and chewed my rubbery chicken. In response, the staff treated us to free desserts. And when Tammy told me that I couldn't have the Belgian waffle sundae ("Machine's unplugged"), I simply -- and quietly -- ordered something else.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.