Societal Collapse (previously Societal Breakdown)

Reader SkippyMom recently took small issue with some of my statements in the post, The Double.

. . . I have to disagree with the “tag” you placed on this.

Your opinion about Halloween seems based on one diner’s observation and adults costumed who showed up at Carney’s – but you labelled it “societal breakdown” because kids no longer trick or treat – either you don’t have children or you don’t live in the right neighborhood {one which has a lot of kids}.  My oldest is 22 and my youngest is 11 – and they have all done the traditional trick or treating and this year will be our last year {for the 11 year old}, although we will still give out candy – Yay!

I know this is a weird post to pick to comment on, but not everything is as cut and dried as you sometimes present it and I don’t think because you didn’t have trick or treaters or your customer related to you that all the kids go to church or school related functions dictates a label of societal breakdown.  Just seemed a little harsh.

Still, just my opinion and I do like you blog

First of all, I want to thank SkippyMom for reading and writing. That’s the most important thing. I get some self-indulgent kicks out of writing this blog, but it’s really out there so others can read, learn, chime-in, disagree, etc.

Next, I kind of apologize for being too ‘cut and dried’ and/or ‘harsh.’ In truth, I am a very ‘gray area’ type of person. However, that doesn’t make good reading. I’m not saying I’m trumping up issues just to be controversial or raise peoples’ ire. I’m saying that because I’m writing publicly, I’ve decided to go ahead and make bold statements about which I feel strongly. And sometimes I’ll make statements that I haven’t necessarily thought through, but just appeal to me emotionally. At the same time, anyone reading this blog for long will trust that I’m not just some jackass shouting the most inflammatory, attention-grabbing things I can conjure.

Regarding Halloween specifically, I probably only grazed the target on that one. I’ve lived in five different neighborhoods since the ’80s. I’ve seen a continuous decline in the number of trick-or-treaters in each location (not just location to location, but year to year). And I’ll include my parents’ old neighborhood in the ’90s, which was teeming with trick-or-treaters but they were all ‘carpetbaggers,’ dropped off literally in busses from other neighborhoods – so that, to me, counts too.

This observation stirred my feelings about the traditions of society and how many seemed to be falling away. Collapsing, if you will. As a waiter, I’ve long held a private theory that the rise in demand for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Thanksgiving Day restaurant dining is actually a sign of a breakdown in society. Wherein important communal, familial rituals were being discarded in favor of merely ‘consuming’ a holiday meal.

Not that I invented the phrase ’societal breakdown,’ but I did come up with it in my own vacuum. After SkippyMom’s response, I realized I’d better find out what the hell it actually meant. Google didn’t have it. The closest match was Societal Collapse, which turns out to be the same thing I was talking about. If you’re interested, please read the first few paragraphs from Wikipedia about Societal Collapse.

I was prepared to apologize in general for speaking a little too loosely about the disintegration of certain societal customs, but reading the Wikipedia entry, it turns out I might have been right. Like a blind squirrel finding a nut. Heh.

It really is a subject close to the waiter’s heart, as it applies to holidays – traditionally spent at the hearths and homes of family and friend – that are now occurring at restaurants. I don’t mean to say this is happening unilaterally across the nation. But in my lifetime (the last 30 years of which have been in California, admittedly) I have seen this trend accelerate.

What waiters don’t like about it is that we have lives and families too. We understand, first, that we’ll make more money because of the ‘new’ business coming in on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Thanksgiving, even Halloween. We understand that as it is, anyway, we are the ones working all those other weekend nights when most people are communing with family and friends. We understand also even on these ’special’ days our guests are having certain family and friends moments.

But we don’t care. We have family and friends too, and we would like to have these times with those people on just those few days of the year.

Rather than show up at home when everyone’s already asleep and the fire has died and there’s nothing but empty, sticky glasses on the tables. Rather than wake up Christmas day on 5 hours sleep when everyone else is eager and sharp for Christmas. Rather than eat a cold plate of turkey and stuffing taken from the refrigerator at 11 p.m, the rest of the family gone back to their homes.

Waiters: Happy Thanksgiving!

I don’t bemoan change. Society is always evolving, and indeed this is an evolution. Though nostalgia definitely plays a part in my feelings, I don’t complain just because it’s ‘not the way it used to be.’

I simply think the old way was better for me, for people, for society. There is a bonding that happens on those few special days (which is itself an evolution from when perhaps that kind of familial, communal bonding happened day-to-day, week-to-week, season-to-season). People are together as groups and they fairly celebrate that. I lived with my parents till I was 21, then off and on till I was 26, but the moments I remember best – some of the moments that cemented me to the family – were the gatherings at Thanksgiving and during the Christmas holidays.

I can hear the objections now. But I don’t think anyone would be the worse off if virtually everything closed at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve and didn’t reopen till Dec. 26. We’d lose some convenience expected in our everything-now modern world, but we’d be fine. What’s wrong with spending an entire day with the family? What’s wrong with making your own modest meal Christmas Eve, having some eggnog, and putting the presents under the tree – and having to suffer because you can’t buy a pack of smokes anywhere?

Is it that much of a hassle to cook your own food and do your own dishes?

Think of the meaning of the word ’society.’ Social. Being with, interacting with, people. This brings me to the final aspect of Societal Breakdown (Collapse).

Obviously, people going to restaurants with their friends and family on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day is still communal. They are having their gathering, it merely doesn’t happen to be in their homes. But I maintain it’s just not the same.

Before restaurants existed, the gathering over a meal was an important, even sacred, undertaking. But why?

Because any caveman could shake a berry bush and grub-down on the spot. He could catch a squirrel, and with a little fire, eat it in short order.

Merely eating isn’t the thing.

It’s the whole process of coming home with the food. Preparing the food. Preparing the table. Gathering the family. The participation. The anticipation. And finally, the consummation. A real day to remember.

Showing up at a restaurant at 7 p.m., knocking back a couple glasses of wine, eating some prime rib, having some conversation, paying a check, and driving away at 8:45 p.m. is not the same thing. You didn’t have Christmas Eve. You just had dinner.

And you deprived a whole crew of restaurant workers of the chance of even that small pleasure.

Waiter Nightmare: Type 2 – Real Life (cont’d)

Yesterday I ruminated on the second type of Waiter Nightmare: Real Life. I was having trouble recalling my worst ever.

Sure enough, as I lay in bed, relaxation set my mind free and I recalled a fateful night some fifteen years ago.

It was Christmas Eve at the Fish House in Southern California. The Fish House was a large, high-volume restaurant in a populous, well-to-do city. This was also at the early stages of what I call “the breakdown of society”, where in lieu of traditional values like family time together gathering around the kitchen and participating in (creating together) the ritual of preparing the meal, people opt to meet in a restaurant, have others make it for them, and go home drunk to pass out.

No one wants to work Christmas Eve. Do you? Well, that Christmas Eve, everyone from servers to cooks to bussers to bartenders to managers, all the people with seniority (or just a screw-you-attitude), had finagled to get the night off, a Friday. At the Fish House we had a skeleton crew, and I’m not talking a human skeleton. I’m talking like a trout skeleton.

Add in that the managers, trying to squeeze profit knowing we would be closed the next day, had trimmed their food orders from the purveyors severely. They wanted as little as possible sitting in the restaurant to spoil. Also factor in that the intervening week would be slow until New Year’s Eve, the blockbuster of the year. Their idea was to save all deliveries until Dec. 30.

As I said, this was the burgeoning of the “breakdown of society” era in the ’80s. Ten years earlier, on Christmas Eve restaurants might be closed, or else have light business. But business had improved year after year. So we were open.

Well the people came early without reservations. And they came on time for their prime reservations. And they came late. And they kept coming even later, in groups of six and eight and ten, as the families gathered their kin from the airports. Us waiters were used to five-table stations. We were running seven, and if someone felt like he could maybe handle more, the manager would give him another.

Of course first we ran out of prime rib. You’re used to that. ‘Sorry, folks. It takes hours to cook a prime rib and it’s all sold. There’s lots of halibut, though. And of course we always have our New York steak!’

But as they kept coming and coming, we ran out of everything. We ran out of salad! A restaurant that boasted 20 different fresh fish had just trout and red snapper! The ol’ NY steaks were gone by 8 p.m. The appetizers? They were the worst nightmare, as a lot of them also were made upstairs in the bar at the ‘Oyster Bar.’ So you take the order, rush back to see if we have it in the customary downstairs pantry . . . No! So you rush upstairs to see if they have an order to sell . . . No! (or Yes!, it didn’t matter – it was a nightmare).

The service bartender downstairs (dining room) was a hell of a gal. She would help out however she could, running food, making a salad for you. But it also turned into a nightmare because she’d be gone running food when you needed drinks.

Then she would run out of a liquor – like Jack Daniels. You know there’s enough Daniels in the restaurant to serve David Lee Roth for a year, but there’s no manager around to get in the liquor room. So you don’t eat it and tell the table we’re out. You run to the bar upstairs again and have them pour you one. For one F’n’ drink!

Here's Some Jack Daniel's

Well all that would have been fun (seriously – it’s cool when you weather a major storm and come out alive), but then the kitchen – remember? they’re understaffed just like everybody else? – went down.

I might just be an asshole waiter, but it’s always been hard for me to understand how the kitchen can ‘go down.’ The Fish House is where I formulated this opinion.

I mean, the ticket comes up, say “Bass – Broiled; Mahi – Blackened.” So you put a Seabass on the grill, and dredge a Mahi-Mahi in cajun spice and put it on the flat-iron. Do it now, because it just came up.

At this point you could do nothing for ten mintues but smoke a cigarette, drain your lizard, and stare at the ceiling. And guess what? You’d come back and those fish would be cooked. Why are you telling me the fish I ordered 30 minutes ago won’t be ready for another 15 minutes? There’s open space on your grill! Put some F’n’ fish on it!

Broiler Chef While Bass Is Cooking

So I was a lot more hot-headed in my younger days.

But that was what happened.

I had a six-top walk out because it took 1.5 hours for their dinners. We comp’ed other tables, who stayed, for the same reason.

It could have been worse, but this was a corporate place. Corporations encourage/require servers to refer complaints to the managers. Believe me, I followed the letter of the law. I, personally, dodged a lot of the flak. Of course, the kitchen breaking down is rarely the waiter’s fault (it can be), but if there’s no manager/owner there, the guest will blame whoever is handy.

I recall I still made $200 or so that night, which was exceptional for that restaurant and for that time.

But when I was finished, even though I wanted nothing more than to go upstairs and have a couple of Root Beer Long Island Teas (I wasn’t a manly-man martini-drinker back then), I jumped in my ‘79 Honda and headed home.

My family was waiting.