Give Us a Break, It's Summer! 08/11/23

Over the years we’ve brought you comics on topics like political correctness, forgetting why you walked into a room, parenthood, grandparenthood, marriage, divorce, bad dates, kids moving out of the house, etc. So this week we decided to take a page out of the Seinfeld playbook and write about…nothing. Yep, an ice cream truck and an inattentive waitress. That’s about as nothing as you can get. Except for the waitress part. We don’t know about you, but we have noticed over the years an increasing amount of inattentiveness and/or lack of eye contact from people who are supposed to serve us. Like cashiers, grocery store shelf stockers, restaurant hosts and hostesses, maitre d’s, you name it. Well, you don’t have to name it. We just did. There are a number of possibilities for this, some more painful than others. One is that young people (like the above-named workers) tend to ignore older people (like a lot of our audience, and us). Many years ago, we did a comic based on an actual incident that happened to a friend of mine who shall go nameless. He tried to chat up the hostess so that she’d seat his foursome, after they had been waiting at the bar for some interminable time. Upon approaching the hostess, she said, “Let me see…” and as she ran her finger down the list of guests, she stopped at the following description, “Bald guy, glasses, 4.” Then she turned to my friend who shall still go nameless and said, “You’re the next party of 4.” This is how she saw him. Ouch. It’s almost as bad as being called “Sir.” “Sir” is just another name for “old guy.” “Right this way, sir” is not what I want to hear when I’m being led to a table by a young woman. How about, “Over here, hot stuff,” or something like that?

So that is one possibility for the lack of eye contact. The other is something I like to refer to as “millennial indifference,” or “MI.” This certainly does not apply to all millennials, but it’s still a generational trait. You approach a cashier and they say, “$49.95,” without ever making eye contact. Or they answer a question by saying “aisle 4,” while pointing to it but not ever once making eye contact with you. Or my favorite, you go the grocery store and the cashier not only doesn't help you pack your recyclable grocery bags, he or she hands over the receipt without once registering where your hand is to receive said receipt. I have a method for dealing with this particular slight. I simply stand there, holding my grocery bag open, without reaching for the receipt, until the cashier is forced to make eye contact. Then I politely say, “Will you put it in the grocery bag please?” This is a technique I like to call “the silent schmuck.” It’s when you say a sentence and leave the word “schmuck” off the end. Example, “Have you seen my glasses?” And the answer, a classic silent schmuck, is “Uhh they’re right on top of your head…” fill in the blank.

Our other effort about nothing this week is about paying too much. In other words, sticker shock. Try going out for sushi in the Hamptons some time. But in this case it’s about a friend you used to know from work, trying his or her hand at something else. It’s one thing that Al has become successful at running his Pizza-on-a-Stick franchise and quite another when his friend charges him almost $50 bucks for a couple ice cream cones. But hey, at least the friend made great eye contact.

Have a great weekend and we will see you (virtually) next week with a brand new 4-part series.

Andy and John