Beheaded trout

Three times last month I witnessed the abuse that restaurant staff routinely must endure from customers. Some offenders are inspired by social media, which has graduated from its former viral instigations of subway surfing and choking competitions for kids.

Waiters are especially easy targets, because the concept that the "customer is always right" lends indignity to subservience. Not even Marine Corps recruits are so subjected to the demands and tribulations of temper control.

Being non-unionized aggravates their vulnerability.

The first incident was at a diner on Long Island's South shore. A group of ten had licked their platters clean and were smiling and hugging each other as they got up to leave. Their leader, however, stayed behind.

She irately confronted the non-defensive manager, who showed restraint and skills at de-escalation that should be the envy of the first responder units that talk emotionally disturbed people out of jumping off bridges. Afterwards, I went to the manager to stick up for the waitress, who, I knew from experience was invariably attentive and cordial.

The manager then told what the customer's grievance was. It was bizarrely grievous.

Something like the trout she had ordered had not been beheaded and was smirking at her. After the entire party had finished their three-course dinners, they stiffed the restaurant of their $300 tab.

Perhaps it's an exaggeration to say that this was a life-changing experience for me, but the brazenness of this scammer was borderline transformational. No meme could do her justice. She owned the electric field that surrounded her, which emitted ions of entitlement.

It's too bad that the manager didn't call the police. I had offered to take down the license plate number of the thief's high-end BMW, but the manager wanted peace at literally any cost. Her diner is a community landmark, and she didn't want awkward publicity and gossip.

Absconding from restaurants after pigging out, is more predictable in Rockville Centre than Red Hook, but as a suburban sport, it's still not as popular as lacrosse. This occurrence is a microcosm of the decline of civility that is bedeviling our society. 

I happened to notice that the grifter was wearing a necklace with a religious symbol. That didn't stop her from conning. She'd decided to hedge her bets with the creator; no need to do so with the maître d.

A few days after this event, at a different restaurant housed within a gated community that caters to affluent elderly folks, I overheard a customer complain to the manager that she was given regular coffee instead of the decaf she had ordered.

She waited several days before bringing it to their attention, because she had been too busy at the facility's card tables and enjoying its other amenities. The manager summoned the waiter as though to a high school dean's office. 

The waiter said that he filled the customer's order as instructed. It was impossible, and unnecessary to prove otherwise, and the customer had not alleged to have suffered any ill-effects, anyway.   

That didn't matter. It served some internal need to be indulged, and she took the path of least resistance. The coffee affair was a bitter brew-haha.

Dealing with the public is becoming increasingly onerous for small businesses.

The third event, between two full moons, was a bellyaching bombshell.  It sounds fictional, but it really happened.

A customer's beef was that her steak was not prepared according to her specifications. She wanted it done "rare" but hers was "overcooked." Management apologized and without argument offered to broil her a new one.

She refused, insisting that the original steak be made rare again.

There was no way to explain to this customer, possibly a recent product of ivy-league education, that the steak could not be rarified and rehabilitated to its former state of chew-worthiness. That would be a "bridge too far "like trying to trace a particular strand of hair that a senior citizen left on the barbershop floor whilst in kindergarten.

Is it my imagination, wishful thinking, flawed analysis, or selective memory that not too many decades ago, common courtesy was far more the rule than the exception? Most people were capable of embarrassment or even shame and would fear being alienated by the compliant majority. 

These were cross-community values that generally held us all together. Observing them conferred upon us what has been loosely defined as "class," a concept that has undergone catastrophic revision.

Perhaps it's just a question of changing tastes or revolutionary consciousness. Compare mass entertainment and weep. Go to YouTube and catch a sampling of comedy, variety, Western, game and quiz, and late-night talk shows from the 1950s and 60s. 

"What's My Line," which aired for 17 years until 1968, had a panel that included Bennett Cerf, the founder of Random House and crusader against literary censorship, and moderator John Charles Daly, whose brilliant mastery of the English language would be provocative to today's audiences, if not lost on them entirely. 

Neither of these guys would get to first base in the industry these days, much less hit it big. 

"You Bet Your Life", starring Groucho Marx, and "To Tell the Truth" could also never be replicated. Neither used gimmicks to substitute for creativity, nor insulted or even debilitated our intelligence.

Even Westerns, with their simple plots and shallow characterizations, didn't do that.  The messages of morality woven into the narratives, such as the triumph of virtue over vice, were not heavy handed, and were quite digestible, with grains of salt.

Variety shows on television were a staple of the golden age of American democracy.

On The Ed Sullivan Show, the Rolling Stones could be followed by a ventriloquist, a talking mouse, an opera star, a magician, a circus act, and an iconic comedian. Other shows, like Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, Dean Martin, and Carol Burnett, united the country far more convincingly than keynote speeches from the conventions of the major political parties. 

People didn't nod off; they stayed tuned.

The comparative quality of late-night talk shows is a reliable barometer of our nation's maturity. We've gone from wits like Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Dick Cavett, to goons like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.

None of the above adds up to an indictment of society, though it may point to a slippage in the general level of cultural sophistication and allegiance to anachronistic social norms of civility.  It seems there used to be greater respect for the ground rules for discourse, and there was benign, pervasive pressure to adhere to them.

And we could go about our business without dirty looks from troublemakers and trout.