A tip for restaurant servers
If you're serving people in their fifties and older, and you really want to piss them off, then by all means refer to them as "young lady" and "young man." This works particularly well when you're ten to thirty years younger than they are, so that your very presence helps make the point that even as you're faking sincerity the whole comment is patently fake.
Really, there's nothing older people want more than for you to remind them that they're old.
Okay, maybe somewhere someone enjoys this sort of fake compliment, but the people I've eaten with most certainly do not.
Doing it to me is a surefire way to start the tip meter on a fast track downward--and I am in general a very good tipper.
Yes, this happened to a group of us recently, and, no, none of us enjoyed it.
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4 comments:
Thank you for the post. I have started experiencing this and it is infuriating. My other pet peeve when it comes to the "younger" generation is the use of the phrase "no problem" as a substitute for "you're welcome", or some other appropriate and polite answer.
For reasons I do not understand, the phrase "you're welcome" seems to have nearly vanished from daily conversation. I find I am often guilty of not using it when I should. I am puzzled by this language shift, but I believe it is real.
The next time you watch a person being interviewed by a reporter, notice that the reporter will thank the person at the end, and the person will in turn say "thank you" back. Isn't this odd? Wouldn't "you're welcome" be more appropriate? I own a retail business and noticed a year or so ago that I was also doing this when a customer, as they exited my business, would turn to say "thank you" to me. Assuming they were just browsing, and an additional thanks for a purchase therefore unnecessary, I have started saying "you're very welcome". I am not sure how it's being interpreted, but it seems correct to me. But I suppose I am a dinosaur.
I think "you're welcome" is correct, but many do not use the phrase any longer.
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