Monthly Archives: January 2012

We are twenty percent tippers. More, if you’re fabulous or one of our regular bartenders or servers.

We are also tipped employees. One of us has made a long career in food service. Restaurant jobs aren’t just for teenagers and those not smart enough or hard-working enough to get a “real” job. Americans are generally pretty uncomfortable being served–what with that curious bootstrap fetish we’ve got and all–and seem to pretty consistently overlook the fact that waiting tables takes more intelligence and physical effort than your average “real” cubicle job.

There’s a lot to be said (and quite a lot that has already been said) on that topic, and I’m not going to get into it here. Blogs don’t change minds–particularly when the topic has so many emotional hot buttons (money, our conceptions of work and worth)–and the converted don’t need more preaching.

But I will say this: when it comes time to tip your server, you have the opportunity to work a little magic. It’s very simple, and it won’t even hurt the first time. Once you get used to it, it will actually start to feel good. Here’s how:

Get your bill. Do the math. Decide what you believe the tip should be (twenty percent, fifteen percent), to the penny. Then round up, not down.

That’s it. One more dollar than you might otherwise have left. Your wallet probably won’t even notice. (Side note: If your wallet does notice–and there have been times in my life when every single dollar counted–you probably shouldn’t be in a restaurant in the first place.)

Your one dollar buys more than you ever thought a buck could get. Your server who–let’s give the benefit of the doubt–takes pride in his work and was doing his damnedest to make sure your meal was a great one, won’t take the bump from, say, 18 to 22 percent lightly.

Imagine that you received a performance review a dozen times a day, and that your boss adjusted your salary based on not only your job performance but also on the quality of the entire department’s work. That’s what waiting tables is like.

Sure, your buck could go to someone who doesn’t deserve it. Maybe your meal turned out alright because someone else was paying attention when your food was up, or caught the mistake when your order was put in wrong, or tidied up after the kids at the next table so you didn’t slip on the cheerios all over the floor. Maybe your server was hiding in the office texting while all this happened, and shouldn’t get that dollar.

It’s a risk that’s worth taking, because the joy you spread is far more important than “losing” a point in the grand game of Who Gets To Be Judgy-McJudgster and Be More (Self)Right(eous).

I hate that game.

And it’s not overstating the case to bring Joy into it. My fella is the sort who takes an enormous sense of satisfaction from doing a job–any job–well, and receiving appropriate feedback. A smaller tip doesn’t just bum him out; it makes him question everything about his own performance (questions which are usually totally unwarranted). A larger one (and, remember, we’re talking one lousy dollar), is an affirmation that he appreciates more deeply than you might think–and, by extension, makes the next table’s experience just that much better. Your dollar buys a smile, puts lightness into steps, and brings relief in a world where there’s precious little of that to be found.

What a bargain.

I’ve never really believed in New Year’s resolutions, but I suppose that the Jan 1 transition is as good a time as any for a person to take a new direction or follow a dream. Ours has been in earnest motion now for some months, but this day–keeping with tradition, sort of–seems a good one to lay it all out.

As you may have gathered, we’re taking the long walk this year. This is something I’d planned to do solo about seven years ago, but then life did its thing and I found myself with a career in EMS and staying in a city I never expected to like as much as I did. Time passed, various lightning bolts struck, and here I am these years later with the good fortune to have a partner who embraced this dream wholeheartedly. So now we are two–twice the planning, but twice the hands working on putting it all together.

It’s gonna be good. But, more importantly, this is the opening act of a totally new chapter in our lives–bigger than moving across the country, bigger than changing jobs, bigger than anything either of us has ever done before.

2011 was a year of more self-examination than usual. A year in which what I’d always found not quite right turned into downright unsettling. A year in which I did a lot of work explicitly clarifying my values and deciding how to make my life more closely match them.

We spent a great deal of time thinking and talking about what’s necessary and what’s not, in the smallest and largest senses. About how we’d apportion our waking time if half of it weren’t already automatically beholden to an employer. About what satisfies us, in a deep way. And how to make that happen.

What ultimately killed our restaurant plan was the realization of what it would mean to finance the project. Nevermind the enormous commitment of time and effort the place itself would entail (sweet labor though that might be, to folks like us). Owing a bank such a huge amount of money would dictate how we’d be able to live for all the years before we could pay it back. That’s an awful lot of control to willingly surrender.

It began to look like a trigger we weren’t meant to pull.

We still had our finger on it the day I broached the thru-hike subject. We talked about what it would take to make this happen–paying off the last of our debt, saving money, shedding possessions, reconfiguring our budget, making do with less–and then it dawned on us that this was the exact same plan for making our wildest of wild dreams happen: this was the way to hike the AT, yes, but it was also the way to get off the hamster wheel of work/paycheck/stuff for good.

I think angels sounded a high, clear note, and the sun got a little brighter.

This was possible. And we were going to make it happen. And the key wasn’t–as I’d long been taught, as we’ve all long been told–getting a better job and making more money. Our yearning for more has been misplaced–we don’t need more money, more things, more degrees, more titles, more on our resume; we need more time that actually belongs to us. We need more real meaning from our labor. And, unless you’re independently wealthy, getting this kind of more means having less.

If you’re okay with that, the math works in your favor. Me, I’d rather have fewer nice clothes and more time to write. A smaller house and a bigger garden. Fewer nights out on the town and more long days in with a chore list of my own making.

It’s a funny thing, though, shedding all those years of conditioning. Even when you know, down to your core, that this is the right thing to do, you find yourself resisting in unexpected ways. Relinquishing my professional identity and the status that comes with it was an important step, and it’s made some of the other de-attaching go more smoothly. But we still run up against the cool tee shirt problem: when discussing exactly how much of our considerable book collection to offload, I had the realization that I was attached to more than just the books themselves: I liked what stuffed bookshelves said about me. Even though the only people who are likely to see the inside of my home already know that I read, that I’m intelligent, that I have diverse interests, I was still clinging to that physical symbol of these attributes.

The Man Friend has a great expression: these things that we hang onto, that we use like bumperstickers to advertise about ourselves are identity bangles. Like the bracelets, they rattle around saying look at me! Look at how [smart/cultured/fit/well-connected/pious/rebellious/whatever] I am! They’re cultural shorthand, a substitute for the hard work of actually getting to know each other.

I can’t get rid of all the books–I love me some library action, but there’s something to be said for being able to pull a well-loved tome off the shelf any time you like, to re-read in its entirety, or just to sample a few choice passages. I find it extremely comforting. But there are plenty volumes on those shelves that really are just filler–books I’ve read once and won’t read again, books I read and didn’t even like, books that I own because I think–as an English major and a “serious” reader–I should own them. That’s the very definition of superfluous.

So I suppose what we’re really doing is working out our own definition of what is necessary. Time? Yes. Food? Yes. Shelter? Yes. Creative efforts? Yes. Most of our stuff? Not so much. Money? Not as much as we think. And, maybe most destructive and unnecessary is the stress that comes with all that we’re working to purge. For, after all, being invested in a job you aren’t in charge of is simply borrowing someone else’s stress. For people like we two, who are inclined to become invested in any job we have just because we like to see work done well, whatever it is, it’s impossible to work for bad managers and not get upset about it. And a paycheck just isn’t sufficient compensation for that kind of irritation, not anymore. Money may indeed make the world go ’round, but there are other forces that can take its place, once you’re able to wean yourself off that dollar-sign teat.

Our position statements:

• Monetary income is a poor measure of the quality and meaning of one’s work.
• Paychecks are meant to be spent, usually on shit we don’t really need, supporting a global system of consumerism that is, on balance, not a great thing.
• The more toys you have, the more you want–and the more of your time you sacrifice to work for more of that almighty paycheck.
• Have less, want less, buy less = have less reason to work for someone else. This frees up an enormous amount of time to do things that have real value for us–whether concretely, as in growing our own food, or more abstractly, as in more time to create and write and meditate and pay attention to what we can do to help our neighbors.
• We want that.

Kicking all this off with a six-month exercise in living a life stripped to its bare essentials seems right. Even if we don’t finish the trail this time–very few do, though I think we’re more prepared (in all ways) than most–it’s come to be about more than just a simple thru-hike. And there is gold waiting at the end, however short or long the rainbow itself may prove.