CSotD: Serf-shaming and other follies
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Gonna start today's short-takes with Hagar the Horrible because it sparks the best rant.
To start with, I like the strip because the term "Viking meal" takes me back to my Year of Living on Campus, when someone would occasionally declare a Viking meal at the dininghall, meaning that we were expected to eat without implements and do creative things like sticking our cupped hands under the spout of the milk machine instead of using a glass.
I only recall one or two Viking meals, which is good, because that was probably enough. I do remember, however, pulling an all-nighter during January finals and emerging the next morning to find the snack bar packed.
We quickly learned that, at the dininghall the previous evening, dinner had featured tainted beef and half the campus, rather than studying for finals, had been in the bathrooms, violently ill.
That evening's dinner was not a Viking meal but rather a full-fledged food riot. And, if food poisoning during finals week was unintentional bad timing, serving baseball-sized cream puffs for dessert the next evening was just poor judgment.
I sat through it with my study-buddy, eating calmly amid the howling and shouting, while food and dishes sailed over our heads and smashed against the walls and windows.
I guess I would title that memory "Dinner at the Hieronymus Bosch Cafe"
Anyway, today's cartoon also fits in with a particularly distressing and annoying Facebook thing, which is this latest example of morally bankrupt entrepeneurship that is actually being promoted by its potential victims as a good idea.
No. No, it is not. It is a very bad idea, yet another bogus move to disguise the refusal of business owners to deal the cards face up.
I've been in a band, and we occasionally got tips. More often, we got drinks sent up to us, which was fine with us because — wait for it — we had negotiated with the bar owner for a fair payment in the first place.
I know, right? Who'd have thought of such a thing?
We based our novel approach on the theory that more people came in when we were playing, so they spent more money, so the owner had enough money to pay for the band that had increased his profits.
So if you paid X-amount for dinner, the price was set at a level which reflected not only his rent and utilities, but payment for the band. Which is good, because, if we didn't know we were going to be paid a fair amount in the first place, we would not have bothered tuning up our instruments.
We were used to hearing sob-stories from bar owners who would tell us how they lost money by pouring beer, which explained why they couldn't pay us more but didn't explain the pinky ring, Cadillac and cottage on the lake. We did not, ourselves, burst into sympathetic tears over these heart-wrenching explanations.
In fact, our whistle player told of a time when he was living in Perth and the Dublinners were in town. After the gig, the pub owner said he hadn't made enough to pay them, so Luke Kelly aided his focus by holding him up against the wall by his shirt front, the better for him to calculate the comparative costs of paying the band versus paying to have his pub completely rebuilt.
That was Perth in the Rare Old Times.
In my mind, paying your waitstaff sub-minimum peasant wages and forcing them to rely upon the kindness of strangers so you can keep the prices on your menu artificially low is bad enough, thank you. You don't also get to screw the band.
But, then, I'm an old guy. Maybe I'm just serf-shaming young musicians who enjoy the freedom we never had to choose to be cheated and exploited.
That's it: I'm jealous of their freedom.
In other business news
Alex has returned from his week at the detox/weightloss spa. It's been a very funny arc, because he went there simply to find potential clients among the sort of wealthy people who go to such places.
This is actually how networking works. In fact, my main client today is someone I first hung out with on the back deck of a conference center in San Diego during a national business convention back in, I think, 1998. We knew each other from a professional listserv, but this was our first face-to-face meeting.
I didn't even smoke anymore back then, but she still did, and it was a chance to chat without all the fripperies, frou-frou and interruptions of being in the more organized networking venue. We could cuss and make improper jokes and everything.
She has long since quit smoking, but we still crack each other up and strive successfully to avoid formal settings and near occasions of health.
"Listserv"? Say what?
For those puzzling over the archaic term I just used, the current story arc in Zack Hill offers a trip to the Jan Hill History Museum. The arc starts here and is worth visiting.
I got rid of my last encyclopedia just in time. They're getting to be like tires, where you have to pay to have them hauled off. I think the library used book sales would rather have your collection of National Geographics PLUS your Reader's Digest anthologies than your old encyclopedia.
Speaking of things I had kind of forgotten
Deflocked breaks yet another barrier. Jeff Corriveau is originally from maple country. I have no idea how much he knows about nursing mothers, but he obviously knows something.
I never quite grasped the etiquette of being with your wife in public when a small baby who is not your own small baby cries, but I guess giggling was okay, because she stuck with me for nearly a decade after that.
Applause
Rob Rogers pulls off the impossible: A Malaysian airliner gag that doesn't suck. In fact, it's quite good.
And finally tonight:
Be careful out there, folks.
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