Glass Half Full

I don’t have much time to cook.  I dine out often.  A lot of my activities seem to involve eating before, during or after. 

While the majority of the time meal consumption takes place in a moving vehicle, occasionally it actually occurs at a stationary table located in a stationary structure, and digested like a normal human being. 

I was spared the requisite teenage occupation of working in the food service industry.  I took a much different route when I entered the workforce at 15 while attending school.   I have been a disrespected employee, and I am a seasoned customer, so I am somewhat cognizant of what an unappreciated profession this is.  I am aware of inpatient and impossible to please customers and I have vowed never to be one of these people. 

Instead, I am the complete opposite.  I tolerate situations even the average person wouldn’t.  I don’t complain when I should.  I don’t send food back if it isn’t what I ordered or not cooked to my liking.  As much patience as I demonstrate, as much tolerance as I have, I am frequently tested. 

I am not sure if it is due to lack of training, incompetence, or lack of attention.  Why is it that certain questions are asked but the responses are ignored, forgotten and generally not written down to make everyone’s lives easier?  Questions are asked and answered repeatedly and still result in an unrequested outcome. 

To me, these are minor offenses and there are much bigger problems in the world to lose your cool over.  In the grand scheme of things, it just isn’t worth allowing someone to control my emotions or my night out.  I have much bigger fish to fry. 

However, there is an expectation when you order a multi-course meal that there is a normal procession of courses.  Appetizer precedes soup.  Soup precedes salad.  Salad precedes entrée.  Side dish accompanies entrée.  Coffee comes with dessert.

But this isn’t always the case.

Sometimes the soup or salad arrives with the entree.  Sometimes the appetizer arrives with the entrée.  Sometimes everything comes all at once.  It can be quite a juggling act to consume three courses at one time, on a small circular table that can’t fit more than two dishes and two glasses at one time.  You have to stack multiple dishes on top of each other, avoid knocking glasses over with your elbow, and eat mass quantities at once while everything is hot.  This occurs even when you specifically tell your server to bring the appetizer first before firing the entrée.   

Why does the server not hold off bringing the entree to the table instead of making an insincere apology and dropping it on the table before moving on?  And sometimes if you’re lucky, the entrée comes after sitting on a counter for eight minutes getting cold.   

Some service is impeccable like a perfect waltz, and others are downright exasperating.   

My friends and I were in a Mexican restaurant after a golf tournament recently, and waited 30 minutes to be acknowledged by anyone after we had to seat ourselves, clean our own table off and secure our own menus.  The bus person ended up taking our orders, and brought us our waters.  The bartender happened to be doubling as a waiter and a chef to customers who seemed to take priority over us for reasons unknown to us. 

We never actually saw our waitress until she brought us our bill.  We made a special point to give a tip to the bus person who actually took care of us and got us out in two hours, and not to the waiter who only saw fit to acknowledge us at the time of payment.  It took an hour for me to get a tossed salad and a margarita.  I doubt this place does well in the Yelp world.  I feel bad for the people who live in that rural town who are stuck with this restaurant on a recurring basis.  We won’t ever return. 

A tip is earned “to insure prompt service”.  It is not a given and it certainly isn’t guaranteed.  Owners and managers should train their staff that they must actually do their job in order to receive payment.  I am known to give overly generous tips when the service is impeccable.     

The alternate scenario is the doting server at the ready to oblige the customer’s every whim.  This person asks how the food is before you even pick up your fork, interrupting intimate conversations, speeding up deliberately slower-paced evenings, staring at you uncomfortably waiting for you to drop your fork, require more bread, or give them any reason to do something other than look at their smartphone while on the clock.   The ultimate insult is when they remove the plate from under your chin as you are still eating from it, without asking you if you are through.  What is their hurry, is there some quota they are trying to meet, are they trying to compete with McDonald’s “Billions Served”?

Then there is the glass half full phenomena. 

Some servers come by and constantly refill your water glass whether you want it or not (currently not a problem in California, as water is no longer served as a default due to our severe drought.  Water must be requested).  As you are drowning in water, you do anything to stop the constant disruptions.  You hide your glass under a napkin, turn the glass upside down, or put the glass on the empty table next to you, anything to stop the madness.  But it is to no avail, the glass somehow still gets filled in spite of your efforts.  The glass is turned over or replaced with another.   

And the cycle repeats.

And repeats.

Anti-Disestablishmentarianism

Every once in a great while, somebody says something so completely unexpected and earth-shattering that it completely floors you.  It literally stops you in your tracks, forces you to take a much-needed breath, be present in the moment and refocus attention.  It also causes you to miss a few beats and require recovery time to get back in step. 

It’s a rare occasion that I encounter a person who can affect me this way.  I have taken multi-tasking to a ridiculous level over the last few years, and find it hard not to do several things at a time.  It isn’t something I recommend doing.  For me, it became necessity, because the efforts required of me exceeded the physical amount of hours in a waking day.  In order to meet all obligations simultaneously, I am the person spinning all the dishes on all the poles while juggling.   Being on multiple conference calls or in multiple places in multiple towns simultaneously has become the bane of my existence of late.  While none of it is actually any priority of mine. 

When my brother and I were kids, our Dad used to encourage us to play a word game.  The object of the game was to form the longest word possible, in order to earn the most money.  An average word was worth a nickel.  A good word was worth a dime.  An excellent word was worth a quarter. My father was the judge and jury.  He and he alone determined what constituted an average, good or excellent word.  There was no guidebook for the players to refer to.  We had to play at our own risk and hope that we would win the big prize by dumb luck or chance.

I had always excelled in English grammar classes and in spelling bees, so I liked playing this game. The challenge was to be able to come up with a word off the cuff, at any moment the game was initiated.  It wasn’t like I could go consult a dictionary first.  We had to have a word at the ready on a moment’s notice.  Luckily we didn’t have to be able to define the word or use it in a sentence.  We just had to knock the socks off my Dad.   Of course I always shot for the quarter words, and I usually succeeded.  Even as a child, I was a gambler and motivated by money (nothing has changed in the present day). 

Fast forward to the 2000’s.  Now the grandchildren play this game with my Dad.  Webster’s Dictionary has seen quite some change over the past 40 years since my brother and I were players, and I assume there is a significant generation gap between words the grandchildren come up with, versus words someone of my Dad’s generation (ie, non-digital age) would recognize.  It reminds me of a board game we used to play called Encore.  The object of that game was to be able to sing as many song lyrics as possible that contained the word of that round.  There was a total generation gap between the songs my generation came up with, versus the adults from the 1940s.  There were frequent arguments between young and old trying to defend songs as valid (we also challenged the elders), such as the time I had to defend a lyric I sang from Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun”.   My Dad’s generation wasn’t familiar with alternative music and I can only imagine how this game would go today with the omnipresence of rap and hip-hop.  Which pretty much meant anything that we could say in a sing-songy way we could get away with.  There was no way they could actually dispute it or prove it wasn’t valid.   

While playing the word game with my Dad, my nephew (who was 11 at the time), came up with the word “anti-disestablishmentarianism”.  My jaw dropped to the floor.  I wasn’t familiar with the word myself, and the word was just so ridiculously impressive coming out of the mouth of an 11 year old, and he said it with all confidence and seriousness.  My sister-in-law confirmed that it was indeed a real word.  I think my Dad even gave him a dollar.  It definitely merited one in my book.

In writing this post three years later after this event, I finally actually looked the word up.  Its claim to fame happens to be that it is the longest word in the English language.  I always thought that distinction was reserved for ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, which is longer.  But I guess that is a fictional word and doesn’t really count.  The origin of the word ‘Anti-Disestablishmentarianism’ goes back to 19^th century Britain when there was opposition to removal (disestablishment) of the Anglican church’s status as the state church of England.  In modern day, it refers to the opposition to anyone who opposes the establishment whether a government in whole or part.

I am grateful that my nephew is in a great school system, and more so that I am still capable of learning something from someone younger than me.  It was a necessary reminder that I am not omniscient and that we are all capable of learning from someone else, even an 11 year old.

Magical Mystery-Loo Tour (aka “To-Da-Loo”)

A portion of this post appeared in a travel piece I wrote in 2011.  However, this post places a heavier emphasis on the culture shock we encountered with the Italian public gabinetto.  At the end of this post, I included a link to the original post entitled La Dolce Vita.

After a nine-hour flight out of JFK on Alitalia, it wasn’t long before we experienced our first bit of culture shock courtesy of Milano, Italy.  It was nothing either of us ever expected to encounter.  There was no mention of this in our guidebooks or in our painstaking research before we embarked on a month-long trip that took us from Switzerland to Calabria, and hit all the major Italian cities in between (Venezia, Verona, Milano, Firenze, Bologna, Napoli, Sorrento, Capri, Roma, Pisa, and Calabria). 

 

After admiring Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous fresco The Last Supper on a wall in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie (before its restoration), we had our first encounter with the Italian public gabinetto (toilet). 

 

Upon walking through the door to the bathroom, we realized that the only thing separating man from woman was a sole stall door.  Not only was it a uni-sex bathroom, but both sexes utilized it simultaneously!  Certainly not for the weak of heart.

 

On display within each separate stall was a lone hole in the center of the floor, as if it was a masterpiece to be admired first from afar and then right up close, as one would admire the fresco right outside the door.

 

The hole had an unexpected, interesting porcelain edging around it, perhaps to provide a more aesthetic appeal.  There was no need for a gender-specific toilet or urinal, men stood and aimed with pinpoint precision into the target, while women squatted right over the hole and hoped to shoot straight into the hole beneath.  How economical the Italians are! This was certainly the epitome of a uni-sex toilet if I had ever seen one.

 

As bad as I needed to relieve myself at that moment, I was physically unable to squat that low to the floor without falling over, nor conjure up any inspiration to tinkle with the sound of a strange male voice on the other side of the stall (speaking in German or Japanese no less!).

Little did we know that this would be the first of our many adventures with the Italian “loo”!

 

In our hotel in Venezia (Venice) along the Grand Canal, the hot and cold water knobs weren’t even located inside the shower stall.  In order to adjust the temperature of the water, you had to physically exit the shower, walk over to the knobs on the opposite side of the room, adjust each knob, run back and step back into the shower to test the temperature, and repeat all steps until the perfect temperature was reached.  Never mind freezing your ass off between each trip to and fro the knobs.  I am not sure how non-Italian speaking guests managed, but it certainly helped to be aware that the “C” knob did not denote cold, but rather caldo (hot).  The knob labeled “F” stood for freddo (cold). 

 

Every time I used that shower, I had to rewire my brain from English to Italian first and remember this difference, so I didn’t scald myself.   Sometimes this was hard to do on very little sleep.  We couldn’t figure out for the life of us why the shower knobs weren’t inside the shower, other than perhaps the showers were added as an after-thought at some point in history, and perhaps it was more economical to add the plumbing on that particular side of the room.

 

In our hotel in Firenze (Florence), which decided if and when to turn on the master control for the air conditioning system to the entire hotel (during the hottest month of the year in Italy mind you), our bathtub did not have a curtain.  With one hand occupied with the hand-held showerhead at an angle to clean everything while not spewing water all over the bathroom, it was a bit of a juggling act and a bit of a comedy scene.

In the town of Agropoli, at the house of my boyfriend’s cugino (cousin), there was no separation of the shower from the rest of the bathroom.  The showerhead literally extended out of the ceiling in the middle of the room.  The tile floor slanted towards the center of the room, so that the water would run inward and down the drain in the middle of the floor, allowing the floor to dry itself.  You would literally stand in the middle of the room while the water sprayed everywhere.  Another oddity to me.  What was also interesting in this particular house, was the house wasn’t actually his cousin’s house.  During the month of August, the country literally goes on vacation.  People swap houses and live somewhere else for a month.  I have no idea whose house we were actually in.

In the town of Calabria, we stayed at the house of my boyfriend’s Nonna, which also happened to be the childhood home of his mother and her many siblings.  In this bathroom, the tub stood in the middle of the room, again with no curtain and a hand-held showerhead.  However, this one had an interesting addition that its predecessors didn’t; a window on the bathroom door!  Again, no curtain! The Italian way didn’t cease to amaze me. Luckily, this was the last stop on our magical mystery-loo tour, especially because his Nonna wouldn’t let us sleep in the same bed at least under her roof; I mean we weren’t married and we were Catholic, god forbid.  I drank a lot of Limoncello that visit. 

As old, charming and breathtaking the landscape, architecture and the cities of Italy were, when we landed in New York, I, like Dorothy Gale, felt there was no place like home.  

Non posso aspettare per la mia visita di ricambio al Italia.   :)

 

To read the original version of the travel post entitled La Dolce Vita (from which parts of this post were excerpted), click here.