Overheard at a Santa Fe restaurant:

Customer: So what's the altitude here?

Waiter: Oh, about 7,000 feet or so.

Customer: Huh.... is that year-round?

Waiters are an immensely underappreciated lot*. In an ideal world, everyone would be required to work customer service before gaining the right to receive any. In this world, everyone should at least have to read a few months' entries on Waiter Rant in order to be admitted to a restaurant. It's truly appalling how wretchedly restaurant patrons can treat their servers. It's not rare either, a lot of people do it. People speak and act to waiters in ways they would never dare to strangers on the street. If the Christian ethic/categorical imperative/golden rule/common human decency are insufficient motivation for you to treat your server politely, consider the ample opportunities they have for vengeance (and how!). It behooves you to be at least a teeny bit nice to the person carrying your food.

Also, tip! Waiters make their money through tips and nowhere else. An inadequate tip is stealing, just as much as if you take your spare key and drive your car away from the mechanic without paying for your new transmission. Guidelines: 10% is nasty, insulting, only for palpably bad service. 15% is adequate, but hardly generous. 20% and up says, "Thank you." And if you have special requests, difficult children, &c., tip more! Remember, poor people are very often the most generous tippers. If you can afford to eat out, you can afford to tip.

Keep in mind, waiters take it from all sides: from customers, who want their hearts' desire, and seldom appreciate any good thing they didn't think of beforehand; from cooks, who somehow resent being asked for enchiladas without cheese or tortillas; and from management, who are the reason the last customer's placemat gets turned upside down for you (sometimes twice) instead of being replaced with a new one. Do you want, on your romantic evening out, to venture into a steamy kitchen full of sweaty, surly, Spanish monoglot chefs bearing prison tattoos and knives and tell them that your steak is just a hair underdone? Or would you rather complain to the coked-up dilletant and his trophy wife, who secretly want the restaurant to fail to escape the shadow of a famous restaurantuere mother, not to mention tax purposes? I thought not. That's what your waiter does: keep it in mind. And remember just how spoiled and incredibly lucky you are to live in the only age in history where you can receive such service and food without being born of noble blood. Noblesse oblige.

*Full disclosure: I have never worked as a waiter. I'm not that good. If I were a waiter, I wouldn't be complaining to you, the customer, because waiters don't do that. They're that good! But I am married to one, and count many among my friends. And I have worked several customer service jobs, I have worked for tips. When I was a river guide, I saved people's lives without getting tipped for it.

Also, I can't think of a time when I've ever had a bad experience in a non-fast-food restaurant. (As far as fast food goes, I'll only point out that the world's worst geographic location for acute gastrointestinal distress is the salt flat east of Wendover, Nevada.) When I go out, I'm willing to be surprised with food that a professional chef thinks is good. I'm not in a hurry. I'll trust the judgement of the people who deal with the food every day. I want to place an uncomplicated order and receive a tasty meal with a minimum of trouble. If I want my special favourite idée fixée, done just so, I cook it myself.

But you, as a reader of this blog, are surely nice to your servers, a generous tipper, gentlemanly in all things. What then can you do? Educate! Tell your family, friends and anyone who will listen how to be decent customers. And secondly, ridicule! If you're at a restaurant and the next table over is berating their waitress for forgetting their request that the house salad look like the flag of Ireland, speak up! Tell them what ludicrous swine they are. Invite them to speak that way to someone who doesn't depend on their putative generosity for a living. Offer them lurid visions of what will happen if the cooks catch them outside the restaurant doors. Let's make these people too ashamed and afraid to show their faces in polite society!