The liberation I felt at my colleague’s I’ll-pour boldness was intoxicating. That’s right, I thought, we need to take our lives back. Drinking at your own pace is the best revenge. It’s humiliating to pay through the nose and suffer at affronts to good taste. Wine should glide, not glug, from a tilted, not tipped, bottle. The time that goes into the making of it should be reflected in the time it takes to drink.
That’s so obvious that I got to wondering why wine glasses, even at fine New York tables, get filled almost to the brim, and refilled to that unseemly level, every time you’re distracted from Second Amendment-authorized armed guard of your receptacle.
As with many things, there’s a generous view and a mean one.
The kind interpretation would be that, through a gross misunderstanding of the nature of pleasure, servers and the restaurant managers behind them are convinced that solicitude is measured by the regularity with which a glass is topped up.
The uncharitable view would be that, guided by an acute understanding of the nature of commerce, servers are told by restaurant managers to hustle clients through a meal and as many bottles of wine as possible.
There are two main ways in which a restaurant can inflict bad service on a customer. The first is to keep you hanging about and make it hard to catch the eye of the staff. The second way is to be too intrusive, with overlong recitations of the “specials” and too many oversolicitous inquiries. A cartoon in The New Yorker once showed a couple getting ready for bed, with the husband taking a call and keeping his hand over the receiver. “It’s the maitre d’ from the place we had dinner. He wants to know if everything is still all right.”
The vile practice of butting in and pouring wine without being asked is the very height of the second kind of bad manners. Not only is it a breathtaking act of rudeness in itself, but it conveys a none-too-subtle and mercenary message: Hurry up and order another bottle.
To return to the question of why we endure this: I think it must have something to do with the snobbery and insecurity that frequently accompany the wine business. A wine waiter is or can be a bit of a grandee, putting on considerable airs that may intimidate those who know little of the subject. And then there is simple force of custom and habit—people somehow grant restaurants the right to push their customers around in this outrageous way.
Next time anyone offers to interrupt your conversation and assist in the digestion of your meal and the inflation of your check, be very polite but very firm and say that you would really rather not.
Love it. Simple, nautical, kinda funky; and you can’t even see the patent leather patch on the left arm!
Choosing one job or a career doesn’t mean you will never get to do anything else. But that sort of thinking cripples thousands, even millions of job seekers, college students and individuals, particularly in the Millennial generation. Too afraid they will be missing out on – everything else – if they pick just one thing, the miss out on opportunities that come only with choice and action.
By defining what you are about in your career, your life, your relationships, you are actually giving yourself permission to do more, because you are choosing action over the inaction unlimited choice produces.
When I ran in circles of venture capitalists, there was a common phrase, “It’s not jet money.” Which was a way of saying, it was a good deal, but it won’t earn enough money to pay for a private jet. No matter what size the pile of money is, there’s always a way to see it as small.
After winning the first Grand Slam of the year, in Australia, Maria Sharapova told the Rod Laver Arena crowd that prior to the match she’d received a text message from tennis great Billie Jean King telling her that “Champions take chances and pressure is a privilege.”
A body of water surrounded on three sides by money.
believe in humanity, believe in the success of your undertakings. Fear nothing and no one. Love your work. Work, hope, trust. Keep in touch with today. Teach yourself to be practical and up-to-date and sensible. You cannot fail.
