the owners are too cheap to buy what's known as a crash kit. it's a back-up for situations like this so you can process credit cards old-school style, so we had only a few manual slips and 200 + people with no intention to pay cash. a scramble among local businesses to get something. a reasonable facsimile is found. not a single waiter or bartender had the slightest clue what to do. i've mentioned not having the sharpest knives in my employ. whether they were merely too lazy to think through what might be needed, or truly too dumb to figure it out doesn't really matter, i guess. the card number, the expiration date, the amount. the same exact info they manually enter if the magnetic stripe is dead on a card. gah. so i had to hand-write every slip, and assume the local affluence assured nobody's card was over the limit. it was painstaking, tedious and thoroughly irritating how dickish many of the regulars were because it took 12 extra seconds to process their bills.
collecting checks and payments from the servers at the end, none of them seemed to realize the check and credit card slip should be attached to each other so i could close them properly. in modern processing, it's now one and the same, yet again my optimism superceded the abilities or inclinations of others. more time to sort through the messy piles bunched in their fists. "can i cash out?" "uh, no. please sort that." "what do you mean?" gah. again. mind you, i'm calm as a cuke through all this and everybody remarked on me being unflappable. i'm ok with my apathy being mistaken for imperturbability.
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again at work, different store, different crowd, i mentioned seeing a show just the other night and how long it had been since i'd done so. what great fun it was and how i wished i indulged more often. i saw michelle shocked. never a major star, not videogenic, but at one point a true indie darling. a wall of non-recognition stared back. "who?" i repeated her name as the chef was walking by, and he laughed at me *dating* myself. hell, i guess so. but where is that line of ceasing to know what came before? would they know the god who is elvis costello? the jam? bonnie raitt? black flag? i knew my parents' music but i know timbaland and 50 cent too. ( i love you like a fat kid loves cake.)
are they so barraged with the now, they don't have the bandwidth to go back even a few steps? do they just not care? i've always enjoyed exploring the luxury of context. in school, i remember reading a near throw-away about the triangle factory fire of 1911 and then independently seeking out more info. just cuz, ya know? (waaaaaaay too long a route to explain why that's in here, lol.)
when i'm faced with those who lack curiosity, i'm always disappointed. a particular someone will say i'm holding others to my own judgement. again, lol, i know that. it simply makes me know there will be little *further* with that person.
it's not wrong to enjoy active minds and prefer them in my conversations and my circle. and i don't blame tv or the internet. my childhood included many hours of "match game" and "happy days," and my adulthood allows plenty of perez hilton and mr. wiggles. but i've always liked the open-armed approach to learning and knowing.
a recent "frontline" dealt with this "1st internet generation," with a profile of a very wealthy community near my hometown. these kids all had pcs in their rooms and at some point had a disastrous encounter with parents whom belatedly discovered inappropriate hijinks. they all admitted caging school notes from a net-version of cliff's notes. because they didn't have time to read books. "i know i should have read hamlet, but whatever. the important stuff is all right here anyway."
what will happen in a world where everybody is satisfied with a sound-byte?
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