Do you guys ever have an affinity for awful people with whom you happen to share a name? I've never actually read any of her stupid books.
You'd think if anyone would admire "borrowing" money and then running off with it knowing that there wouldn't be legal consequences because they're related to you it would be Ayn Rand.
Ayn has nothing on our local money columnist.
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Hey ogged, can you drop me an e-mail?
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my ogged address is kaput, apparently. let me find another to send from.
I'm kind of disappointed in Ayn. She didn't charge interest?
5- that is the spammiest website I've ever tried to read on a phone. There's no such thing as a free webpage apparently.
The question is: who do you want to be like? If the answer is Jason Statham (and why wouldn't it be?), then you'll throw him into the passenger seat (or out of the cab) and drive it yourself. If you want to be a thin-lipped Republican, you'll stew the whole way, leave no tip, and maybe give him a lecture as you exit, either about good service, or God. A hapless liberal would, of course, tip him as usual, poor guy.
Just tip, dude, especially since it's not coming out of your wallet. The cabbie needs to money. And if you feel truly aggrieved, mention to him that a GPS is a good thing to have in his line of work.
Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, would tip him lavishly, then go to the office and have all cab drivers fired.
13 without seeing 12.
Haplessly yours,
Limpy
VW is, of course, the very model of a modern hapless liberal.
11: Cab drivers need to know how to get to the airport. It's basic cabbie knowledge. Ditto hospitals and major hotels.
Take his medallion and give it to a homeless guy.
Tip 10%. He needs the money as part of basic income, but that is a pretty low level of service that should be reflected in some way.
In the United States, viewing the tip as a discretionary measure, to be dangled over the head of slavish subordinates until they have performed to your satisfaction, is the mark of the asshole. You just have to pay the tip, it's part of the agreed-upon compensation -- though a part that has unfortunately been left to custom and practice. You can provide an unusually high "tip" (this is a true "tip," or bonus) for good service, but the only situation in which you wouldn't tip at all or substantially reduce the tip below the normal level is when the service simply hasn't been rendered, so you would be justified in refusing compensation at all. Here, that's not the case, the guy is still taking you to the airport, just badly. Perfectly fine to point out the mistake (best done after the tip is paid, though, to avoid being too much of a jerk) and suggest that he either get a GPS or a phone with the Waze App.
And he almost sideswiped another car.
Oh good, the question is moot since knecht will soon be dead. I wonder if the dude even has a driver's license. He's probably filling in for his cousin when his cousin is sick or something.
On tipping in general, Halford is correct in 21.
20 does point out one complication peculiar to cab drivers -- if he really unnecessarily took you out of the way, thus ridiculously jacking up the fare, I think it would be OK to not give the tip on the portion of the fare that was jacked up, after having a conversation about how the driver was jacking up the fare. But that's not the case here, the guy's trying to be conscientious about the fare, just doing a shitty job of driving. Don't be the guy who uses the tipping regime to try to micromanage your personal service experience.
21 is right. That said you could probably go ahead and say something mean to him about his cabbie skills. It's easy to underestimate the extent to which something like "You're really a shitty cab driver, you know? Maybe you should find a job you don't suck at." delivered in a calm/cheerful tone of voice can really hurt someone's feelings. That's a decent trade off for the frustration of dealing with him, right?
One more wrong turn and you can steal his turban. There's a hadith about it.
if he really unnecessarily took you out of the way, thus ridiculously jacking up the fare, I think it would be OK to not give the tip on the portion of the fare that was jacked up
Here I think it's perfectly legitimate to not tip at all, assuming it was a significant, intentional detour.
And I was having such a good tag closing streak.
When I was in Seattle I had this somewhat annoying conversation about tips after a meal. I told the waiter I had just flown in to the country, and I wanted to pay the customary tip but I had no idea what it was. He said I should tip whatever I wanted, which of course is bullshit because there societal expectations on tips and I simply wanted to act like a local would. Luckily another local suggested 20%, or I would have gone with the UK standard of 10% and he'd have felt stiffed.
This is a roundabout way of saying I have no idea what you should tip, Knecht.
It was an innocent, if incompetent, mistake.
And yet you didn't leave a tip?! That's a bit Randian of you.
I agree with Halford in 21. And also with that hapless liberal farther upthread.
30 seems like the right call to me, assuming that I'm understanding it correctly. You paid him $32, which was roughly, or slightly more than, the standard cost of going to the airport including not just the base fare but the tip. You didn't pay him more than that, because any charge (whether base fare or tip) on top of the $ 32 came about solely as a result of clear and pretty obviously unreasonable mistakes on his part, which extended the trip completely unnecessarily. That seems fine.
30: Wrong decision. You should have given him a 10% tip and then immediately killed him.
Speaking of churlish misers, advise me, Mineshaft, on the etiquette of this situation.
The etiquette is: no hijacking threads in the first forty comments.
If a cab driver tries to screw you by taking an unnecessary detour that's grounds to not pay for the ride full stop.
35 to 24 - and when I say detour, I mean actively consciously taking you the scenic route, not just stuffing up and making mistakes.
Hitting up an aunt you've practically never met for $25 (which would be, what, $200 today?) is pretty ballsy. I'd probably skip all the dramatic "what kind of person do you want to be?" hectoring and just throw the letter in the garbage.
34: My ruling is that knecht's question is peripherally related to the topic of the OP and is therefore not an outright hijacking. knecht is not banned.
34: He was, to the best of his knowledge at the time, mid-kidnap. A kidnap deserves a hijack. Even Ayn Rand would see the wisdom of that.
39: That would not have been a valid excuse. There were other threads available.
Thread selection control from a phone in an emergency situation might be weak. And much as there's sense in temporarily suspending the one rule of civilization--all debts must be paid in a timely fashion--in the case of illness, we must do the same in the case of incompetent cabbies who probably don't even know how to base thinkpieces on.
I see a market for employing a fleet of cab drivers who act like poor clueless souls and rack up fares higher than cabbies who drive you directly to your destination, and prey on liberal guilt to still get tips. At least 10% more profitable than a traditional cab company.
we must do the same in the case of incompetent cabbies who probably don't even know how to base thinkpieces on.
That is prose worthy of Thomas Friedman himself!
Heebie, I'm trying to reclaim your thread. Help me out here.
Should be "don't even know how to deliver one-liners to base thinkpieces on" and I mis-edited. Guess I'll start working on my mustache.
44: I thought Ortberg's "30% very good advice, 50% unnecessary yelling, and 20% nonsense" quip was good. There is a core of sense in there, amazingly.
(Also, woah, copy/pasting from The Toast is terrible.)
I tried but I could no more finish that letter than I could finish Atlas Shrugged.
Instead I read Ortberg mocking the woman who fucks her (not Ortberg's but her own) dad
What I learned from Ayn Rand: there's no simplistic argument that can't be made overlong.
The preceding is missing a period because she wants to have a baby.
Heebie, I'm trying to reclaim your thread. Help me out here.
Ayn Rand has no sympathy for failures!
The posts following 34 reveal that 34 itself is in violation of the rule it mentions. Recursion!
52 is good. I can't remember where I read it but I liked the characterization of it as a philosophy which was only suited for hailing a cab in Manhattan.
To rethreadjack: are there any pointers for smokescreening? For when you don't want to answer a question and don't want to lie. I need to up my skills.
"That depends. What do you mean by 'sex' and 'Mutombo?'"
It cracks me up that the rule is now 40 comments. Back in my day, it was the rare thread that got 40 comments. Insofar as we had a threadjack rule, I think it was "not before the third comment" or something.
Tip question: if a waiter at an expensive place that you splurged on is really crappy, is 15% or ever so little below, assholeish?
if a waiter at an expensive place that you splurged on is really crappy
This is unusual. What happened?
55: For less formal situations, you could answer a tangentially related question (or the one you wish they'd asked). Works best with cheerful, airy delivery with no indication you might be misunderstanding. Then, pivot to a new topic that will pull focus in a serious, slightly urgent tone. They ask about TPS reports, you say, "Oh, I'm just about done with my audit. Say, do you have availability on Tuesday to discuss cattle husbandry?"
55: also, depending on context. Ask advice of the questioner on a related topic.
It was prix fixe tea. In a friendly way, I told the manager whom I know. She started, sort of, to clear and set the table like she was trying to get rid of us. She ignored us, because we weren't getting alcohol.
But the main thing was, the other servers were giving many more scones and sandwiches to the people they were serving. We were expecting more food until we realized what was going on and left starving.
She wasn't being rude.
I probably should have asked for more sandwiches but Tim did not want to make a fuss.
61: Tips (should) get shared out between all the waitstaff (i.e., including table runners, busboys [what's the gender-neutral term for this?], etc.), so stiffing your waiter for bad service screws them too.
You should definitely complain to the manager, though.
67 before seeing 66. In that case, I'd tip 20% and never go back.
I should probably avoid giving any more details on the exact situation.
70: We did 15% which was the old standard. I like the restaurant a lot and have been meaning to tell the person who manages it with the chef and whom I've known for 20 years.
71: Boo. Polite deferral per KR works for other situations, too.
52, this changes my whole view of GFW if true. So I will presume it not true, like your other "IIRC" quotes about uncunting and whatever else.
74: Will used to imagine himself a Christian high-church conservative, like Muggeridge MacIntyre or Buckley, back when you could tell the difference.
It seems weird to think that back then Republicans were also the party of business, but that did not mean they were united in utter opposition to all forms of morals and ethics. What changed?
Goldwater/John Birch style robber baron capitalism + the effectiveness of the Southern strategy did most of the heavy lifting early on, and then the rise/consolidation of the evangelical right washed away the last vestiges of basic decency/sanity.
70: We did 15% which was the old standard.
Did you pay in 1970s dollars too?
76: I just finished reading Perlstein's Before the Storm (a decade late, I know), which is pretty much the answer to this question. Mid-century "consensus" Replubicanism ala Eisenhower/Rockerfeller held that a strong social safety net and not rocking the boat too hard was good for business. Then civil rights happened.
78: This is nonsensical. How can percentages be subject to inflation? Will the standard tip be 50% when we're in our dotage?
I know, I just thought using the "old standard" is ridonk, on the assumption that the old standard corresponded also to higher wages for waitstaff.
It's still the standard in the boring parts of the country.
I don't know, I'm kind of leaning to zero. If the server brings you 80% of the expensive food you ordered and charges you 100%, well, I guess I don't care how badly they need the money, they should do their fucking job if they want to get paid. And yes, I'm sorry that the bus and dish washing staff got shorted too, but that's on the server, who unilaterally and without justification decided not to serve all the food. They should be talking to the server.
Manager had a chance to make it right, and basically said 'fuck you, we got your money, we don't have to give you the food you ordered.'
Wait, what comment is 84 referring to? Is this by analogy to the cabbie getting lost?
84: No, that wasn't clear. I told the manager that it felt like she was clearing the table on us as we were leaving. The waitress just wasn't communicating or talking. She asked us which tea we wanted and then just brought plates of food without saying what they were.
I said nothing about the sandwiches or scones. That was my bad. She basically gave us (and a mother/daughter pair) a serving for one. There were two types of tiny scones (a cheese, and a raisin--a quarter of the size of a normal traditional scone, and we only got one of each, i.e. we had to split them. I got 3 sandwiches (bread on one side only) which amounted to about 2/3 of a slice.
There were plenty of little dessert tarts, and the piece of buche de noel we split was so rich that it was plenty.
We were both kind of confused, so we didn't speak up.
And the manager is generally great. She's sent out dessert for free on my birthday. I think she would have given me a free drink once except that it's not legal.
I'm not generally cheap. I mean, I tip my hair stylist a lot, because I never buy product. I was tipping him like 35%, but he just raised his price, and I think I kept my tip flat percentage wise (still over 20%).
You and Tim together paid for a serving for one, and left hungry? My outrage is dissipating.
Got it.
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NMM to legendary LA musician, record producer and Runaways band manager Kim Fowley.
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82: Is it, or are you just trying to make the swankier folks feel bad? I tip 20% unless I'm with Selah, at which point it goes way up in connection with her level of (age-appropriate, granted!) messiness.
I've started leaving extra cash on the table (or handing it to the waiter) when I eat out and my father pays. I'm trying to decide whether their area counts for 82. Probably, but it still seems low.
In rural areas, it seems to be 15%, but I wouldn't expect suburban Covington to count as rural.
I've been trying to train my parents to tip 20% instead of 15%. I think they're grudgingly coming around.
83.1: One of my goals in life is to track down that quote. I wonder if the tip of the tongue* sub-reddit give it a go.
*Something like that.
94: Why is ydnew's father buying you dinner?
89: An interesting player back in the day. His "Animal Man" (assume the visuals are unrelated, but could be a young him). Album art.
88: No, we paid for a serving for 2 and got an amount that would be a serving for one. Less than half of what the tables the other servers were getting.
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It amazes me the casual contempt that American newspapers display towards Europe. For example, this article refers to "the cosseted boulevards and suburbs of major European centers." Cosseted? Fuck you, New York Times.
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Maybe the cossets are why they have less obesity than we do.