Welcome to the Fool’s Gold Advice Column for Smarties. It’s just like “Dear Abby,” only with deeper expletives.
This week, our topic is: TIPPING.
Tipping is the act of giving money to the waitstaff at a restaurant so that their hornswaggling bosses don’t have to. Tipping perplexes many otherwise intelligent diners, possibly because it involves calculating percentages on a full stomach. So how can you know, quickly and reliably, how much to tip your server?
Answer: Generously, unless you’re a complete chumbucket.
Well… that’s that. It turns out that tipping is not as difficult as scurvy bilge rats make it out to be. So let’s go on to talk about something else that annoys me.
Please allow me to start off by saying that I like the United States Postal Service. It is a venerable institution that preserves the endangered tradition of people mailing bonafide handwritten checks for my birthday. I also acknowledge the positive economic impact the USPS has on my community by hiring no fewer than two (2) employees to serve the entire county.
I do not—cannot!—fault either of these fine employees for my hardships at the post office, because I’ve never met them. In fact, I am starting to suspect that, unless I cut in line like a slack-sailed deck swabber, I will never actually reach them to mail my Christmas packages.
Now I’m not some dimwitted laggard who forgot to mail his presents. Rather, I shrewdly and proactively avoided the entire postal service in December, when the local office sometimes hires a third landlubber to give the impression that the line will move more quickly, or at all. But we Smarties—this includes you, since you’re reading this Advice Column for Smarties—know better. During the holiday season, defined by the USPS as “any calendar year with a holiday in it,” the post office has the longest and most restless line I have ever seen. And I once worked as a bookseller for the midnight release of a Harry Potter novel.
So here we are in February, and I still have all these pirate insult dictionaries to ship to my dearest relations, and the sorry sea dogs will have to wait Davy Jones knows how long to enjoy them.
The Postal Service is falling apart, matey. First to dance the hempen jig were the lickable stamps. My future children will never comprehend that strange tacky taste of glue. Now it’s the ability to mail packages without camping outside the PO like I’m buying Grateful Dead tickets. Next thing you know, neither of the postal workers will be driving the classic white breadboxes with the steering wheel on the wrong side.
The peculiar thing is, not everyone gets the shaft like me. SOMEONE is mailing packages, because the USPS saw an 18% boost in holiday packages last year. I’d like to know if any of those were sent by regular Americans, or whether the Large Online Retailers finally conquered all the grandmothers sending presents to their beloved grandsons, the worm-riddled blaggards! (The Large Online Retailers, I mean. Not the grandsons, and certainly not the grandmothers, mostly.)
Meanwhile, the Postal Service thinks it can keep jacking up our rates while extending delivery times. Talk about hoisting us over the yardarm! Doesn’t the Postmaster General realize that for less than fifty cents I can practically deliver a letter to rural Montana my own grog-snarfing self? And since the United States has yet to democratize other solar systems, what do we need universal service for, anyway?
Nothing, that’s what! Yet those of us who suck at tax evasion dump billions of dollars into a government bureaucracy that doesn’t like to work on Saturdays and thinks of us as Current Residents rather than individuals.
Wait a tick—I’ve confused the Postal Service with Congress! No doubt because both mail ladies deliver so many informative political flyers every election season. At first I was flattered at the attention from my prospective representatives, but then I realized the pox-faced freebooters were two-timing me, sending the same notes to all my neighboring Current Residents.
Maybe the Postal Service is not the mutinous pack of salt swillers I thought it was. Perhaps it requires a bit more tender love to stay afloat, just like the other romantic anachronisms that still define our great nation—things like trains, chivalry, national parks, and Hotmail.
These all deserve serious, considerate preservation, except for Hotmail. That’s why Congress should consider tossing a few extra doubloons at the United States Postal Service as a hearty thank-you for decades of schlepping glossy campaign junk mail. I suggest they chip in at least 20%, the hook-handed swabs.
If’n ye scallywags need a helping hand, bottle yer questions and send ’em to the Advice Column for Smarties at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), or tweet ’em @zachhively.
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