Multiple times recently.
Multiple times,
I have been thanked for doing something,
and it bothers me when people thank me for it.
They're not doing anything wrong.
They're certainly not doing anything wrong.
But they're thanking me for it because the number of people who don't do it
is so astronomical that the fact that we, by policy, do in fact do it makes
us the anomaly. And that is not okay at all. I want to be very clear about
this: it is not a flex to not be an asshole to service people. It's not.
It is the way you should behave.
Even if something is going wrong with the service that you are receiving,
the likelihood of it being the fault of the person who has to deliver
that information or receive that information is, like, nonexistent.
They are just there doing that job — a job that by and large probably sucks
because they have to deal with people like us. Like, even if the job itself
is fine, the people who are brought into their job are terrible, or
often terrible, or might be terrible.
And I say this because we've had two experiences lately where we went to
restaurants and something got messed up.
I don't know if anybody else has noticed this, and this might just be the area that
we live in, which is not super inhabited by things that are not, like, chains. And
there's very little new or interesting as far as restaurants in this area.
And, like, let's be honest, I cook about as often as I schedule
things on my own calendar.
Never.
So, like, sometimes it's just easier to go out to dinner.
And, like, sometimes I wanna sit at a table and have food that I don't care about with
an endless supply of fountain Coke, okay?
Sometimes that is what I want for dinner, and I will eat whatever is in front
of me that I paid for. Listen, I am a person who works really hard and who
is pretty good at making good decisions for myself, but I have zero self-control
when it comes to bread and butter.
If you bring me free bread and butter, I'm gonna become an animal.
I'm probably not gonna share it with anybody.
I'm gonna ration the butter so that I make sure I have enough.
I will go to the mediocrist of restaurants and pay for food if they have good bread.
If the bread is good, I don't care about anything else.
That probably explains how we end up in the places where we end up, 'cause
I'm like, "Ooh, they have good Coke and bread." My husband's like, "All the other
food's poisoned." I'm like, "That's fine." So, two instances recently where something
got screwed up with our meal, right?
We went to Chili's not that long ago — you know, the
high-quality eatery that is Chili's.
My husband ordered salmon.
Not sure that's the thing you should be ordering at Chili's, but
anyway, that's what he ordered.
And both times it came out so overcooked that the bottom skin was like a cracker.
Like, you could hit it against something and it wouldn't flex.
I don't know, somebody was having a bad night.
Whatever.
So the first time it came out and he was like, "I'm so sorry,
but I really can't eat this."
The server looked at it and she goes, "That's gross.
Yeah, let me have them fix that for you." And then they brought out another
one and it was exactly the same, and he was like, "I'm good on this." And
so the manager came over and was like, "Can I get you something else?" He
picked something else on the menu.
It wasn't a big deal.
They brought out the other food very quickly.
It was perfect.
He ate it.
He was perfectly happy.
The kids ate their food.
We were getting ready to finish up, and the server comes over and she's like,
"Just thank you for being cool about that." And I was like, "Well, cool
about what?" She was like, "Oh, just, like, a lot of people would've yelled.
You didn't yell, so I really appreciate that."
And we were like, "Did you cook the food?" And she was like, "No, but you
know, the server's usually the one." And I was like, "But did we end up eating?
Are, like, are we full?
We're good?
We got food?
You didn't steal money from us?" She was like, "Yeah." She's like, "A lot
of people don't think like that."
She's like, "I get yelled at a lot." And I was like, "I have so many bigger
things to worry about than whether this particular meal is perfect.
There's another meal tomorrow, maybe even tonight if I'm feeling feisty.
I do not have time or energy to get mad about this. You
brought food and we ate it.
We're good, we're good." And she's like, "I really appreciate that, 'cause I've
just gotten yelled at a lot tonight." And I was like, "I'm sorry about that,
'cause that should not be happening to you." I said, you know,
"Overcooked salmon is not a big deal.
I have bigger things to worry about." And my nine-year-old pipes in and says,
"Yeah, we have bigger fish to fry."
So I was really proud of that.
But also, this poor woman — she was so tired, and she'd had a good attitude the
whole time, and she was present the whole time, and she stayed on top of things the
whole time, and didn't argue, didn't… She just was doing her job.
She did a good job.
Like, are all servers great?
No.
But do I think that most people who are serving at a Chili's want to spend the
rest of their lives serving at a Chili's?
No.
I don't think that's, like, their chosen profession.
I just think that's the job they have.
And I'm not judging you if that is.
If that's what you wanna do, awesome.
If you're happy, awesome.
But do I think people wake up in the morning excited
to get yelled at over queso?
No.
I don't think her goal is to bring me 15 baskets of chips while
I tell her she's bad at everything.
Be nice to service people.
Why is this poor woman shell-shocked?
Because people yell at her all the time.
If the food is always bad, if the service is always bad — first off,
stop going to that restaurant. But second off, that's probably not
that individual person's fault.
There's another problem there.
And it's service people everywhere.
You're gonna call into a place, and somebody is gonna give you the information
that they were told to give you, that's on a script somewhere that is stupid and
doesn't make sense and is bureaucratic nonsense, and you're gonna have to get
around them to get what you want done.
But that is not that person's fault.
They are not empowered to fix that problem in the way you want them to
fix it, and that is not their fault.
Lots of people in this world are working shitty jobs for no money because
that's the job they can find right now, and they do not need that experience
compounded by you being a jackdonkey.
Don't be an asshole to service people.
And we are all service people at some point.
Every single one of us is a service person at some point. That was one of two.
The other one — actually, this one was the person's fault — but the other one we
went to this, like, pizza restaurant by our house. It kind of, like, thinks it's
hip and urban. It's just a pizza place.
Like, it's just a place where you can get, like, moderately expensive pizza.
The pizza's good.
The kids like it.
We get to sit outside.
We get to bring the dogs, whatever.
It's in a nice area.
So we pay a little… we overpay for pizza, basically.
So we went there, and I don't usually order my own pizza, but there's a type
of pizza that I really wanted that I would only get a small one of, and
my kids could have some of it, but they probably weren't gonna like it.
So I ordered a small pizza for myself, and then they really branched out
this time, and they got cheese pizza.
But they got their big pizza.
My kids actually are very adventurous eaters.
Pizza's, like, the only thing that they eat plain, but it makes
me laugh, 'cause every time they look at the menu and they're
like, "What should we get this time?"
And I'm like, "You're gonna get cheese pizza." They're like, "Yeah,
we're gonna get cheese pizza." So the big cheese pizza came out.
The appetizer came out.
They actually, I think, came out right around the same time, which was fine.
And then, like, my pizza didn't come out.
Well, I wasn't actually super hungry, so I really didn't care that much,
but, like, we were just like, "Does anybody know where my pizza is?
Do I get a pizza?
'Cause I ordered one.
'Cause if the answer's no, that's fine.
Just, like, can I get a heads-up on whether I get a…" The server
comes over after a little bit, and she's like, "You haven't gotten your pizza
yet?" And I said, "No." And she goes, "Oh.
All right, let me go check on that."
And then she comes back.
She comes back a couple minutes later and, like, verifies what was ordered, and I
was like, "Oh, she forgot to put it in."
So she went back, and she was like, "Okay, it's just gonna be, like, five more
minutes." And I was like, "You're cute.
You're cute.
I know what happened.
You're cute, but all right." So she brings it out, and she puts it down, and
my husband just, like, very nonchalantly said to her, like, "So what happened?
Did they get backed up or something?" And she looks at me and she goes,
"Nope, I totally forgot to put it in.
I forgot you ordered a second pizza.
I'm so sorry.
This one's totally on me." And he was like, "All right."
And I just said, "No problem.
It's fresh now.
Happy with it.
No problem." She walks away.
And my nine-year-old goes, "Why didn't you, like, tell her that wasn't okay?"
And I was like, "Because it was okay.
Because sometimes people forget things.
Because I don't remember your name half the time.
People forget things sometimes." And so she came back over later, and she
was like, "I'm so sorry about that.
Like, thank you for…" And again, same thing: "Thank you for being
cool about it." You could tell, as she was telling us she forgot it, that
she was, like, bracing for impact.
Like, she was waiting for somebody to be like, "Let me talk to your manager.
This is unacceptable.
This steaming hot pizza took seven extra minutes." She was just, like,
waiting to get yelled at, and she couldn't have been older than, like, 20.
Like, she probably wasn't even that old.
Like, she was so young. And so I just ate my pizza, and I actually, like, boxed
up most of it, 'cause by that point I was like, "I'm not even super hungry
anymore," 'cause we had appetizers.
So I just, like, boxed up most of it. No big deal.
And so she came over and she just, like, made some comment about how she was
waiting for a bad tip, basically.
And so we gave her, like, a really excellent tip.
My nine-year-old is learning, like, percentages and stuff, and so she looked
at it and she was like, "That's more than the other number," 'cause a lot of
bills now break down what the expected tip percentage is, to give you an idea.
Also to remind you that you should be tipping.
Tip your freaking servers.
And I said, "Yeah, that's not a problem." And she goes, "Why?" And I
was like, "If you screw up and you own it, like, you should get recognized
for that." She could've lied.
She could've lied and said it was the kitchen.
She could've lied and said, "Oh, they dropped it."
She could've done any number of things, and instead she came out here and, like,
faced us with her whole face and said, "Yeah, I screwed up." And you know what?
That's a good quality to have in a human, and she deserves to be rewarded for that.
And then my nine-year-old says, "Oh, so you'll give me more allowance if I
tell you when I did something wrong?"
And I was like, "No. That's not how that works. That's a little different."
Like, you should still tell me, but I'm not gonna pay you for it, 'cause you
weren't doing your job when you did it.
But it was just, like, these two humans — these two very nice, very, like, doing
their best humans. You can tell, just every day doing their best and waiting
to get yelled at over something that is going to be insignificant in four hours.
You're hungry now, you eat now, you will be hungry again in four hours.
This whole experience will be irrelevant in four hours, and you're
gonna get yelled at for that?
Stop being assholes to service people.
And if you're not an asshole to service people, thank you for your
service. I guarantee you, nine times out of 10 it's not their fault.
They are the unfortunate messenger in a string of things that has nothing
to do with them, and they take the brunt of your silly nonsense.
My theory about Taylor Swift's wedding is that Donald Trump has made $2
billion since he's been in office this term, and no one seems to care.
Why the fuck would I care about her wedding?
She made that money.
It's not like she stole it or got it through a crypto scam or
sold gold Trump phones to get it.
Whether you like her or not — and I don't, I don't have an opinion on her.
I really don't, I'm not a Swiftie.
I'm not super interested in what she does or her life. Jeff Bezos
got married last summer, and nobody cared, or very few people cared.
People were saying that she only donated $26 million before her wedding,
and that is such a small percentage of her net worth that it's embarrassing.
Before Jeff Bezos' wedding, he donated — quote-unquote "donated" — $3 million
to a couple of different charities in Venice, and it was literally
a bribe so they would leave him alone and let him have his wedding.
He didn't donate a bunch of money because Jeff Bezos is a nice guy.
He did it to get the government off his back so he could marry whoever.
So just, like, nobody cared that Jeff Bezos only gave $3 million.
Nobody cared that he probably handed it to a bunch of organized crime bosses
so they wouldn't mess with his gondolas.
Nobody cared.
But when it's a woman who has a lot of money and who might be a little bit
self-indulgent on her fucking wedding day, when she's allowed to be self-indulgent…
What day are you supposed to be self-indulgent if not
your fucking wedding day?
Sing your own songs at your wedding.
I'm not invited.
Why would I care?
Anyway, Donald Trump still has made $2 billion in the last just over a year.
And also, they have not released the unredacted Epstein files,
which they were supposed to do last Friday and which they did not do.
So I do not give a shit about Taylor Swift's wedding.
Live and let live.
Give $26 million to charities.
I don't care if it's not a lot of money to her.
It is a lot of money to the charities that she gave it to.
Fuck everybody else.
Wait, like, you're gonna call your lawyers on your wedding day and stop
your wedding to call your lawyers and be like, "He's using my song"?
Like, not to mention the fact that she probably has lawyers who
are monitoring this stuff anyway and who just take care of it.
I bet she doesn't even have to intervene when somebody infringes on her copyright.
She just has people who take care of it.
Go yell at a wall.
Did you know that you can leave us love notes?
Okay.
It doesn't have to be love notes.
It can just be whatever you want.
We have a voicemail. People call us and talk about the recent
accomplishments. They brag on themselves.
They ask us small talk questions — some of the small talk questions
come directly from there.
So if you go to differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/voicemail, you
can quote-unquote call us and leave us a message of whatever is on your
brain, including the recent things that you've done that will knock
our socks off, or just questions that you might have that you want
answered about how to handle things, or
why things are the way they are.
Either way:
differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/voicemail.
We have a small talk from Priya in Oregon.
"Dear Small Talk, I've been the planner friend my entire life.
I organize dinners, send a calendar invite, et cetera, and for years
I told myself this was fine, that it was just how I showed love.
But last month, I didn't reach out to anyone for three weeks
just to see what would happen.
Two people texted.
Two out of 11 friends I regularly invest in.
I'm not devastated, more just recalibrating, but I genuinely don't know
how to go from being the person who holds a friend group together to being someone
who lets friendships be a little more mutual without burning everything down.
Has this ever happened to you?
How do you even start that conversation without sounding
like you're keeping score?"
I'm not the friend who reaches out a lot.
I also don't have one friend who is responsible for, like,
organizing all the things.
I tend to be the reason that my friend group gets together, 'cause we'll plan,
like, one big thing every so often.
And I guess I'm technically in charge of that, but only because, like, it
was my idea and I wanna do it and I have friends who come along for it.
I can't help from the perspective that I have experience being,
like, the glue, 'cause I'm…
I'm a good friend when you call me.
If you need something and you call me, I'm there.
I will get my shoveling gloves and show up without asking questions.
Or the question I will ask is, "Where do you need me?"
But I won't ask any other questions. Like, full no-questions-asked friend.
I am that friend, a hundred percent. I do, like, randomly text to check
in on people, but, like, you know.
I was an extra good friend when my mom was in the hospital,
'cause I had a long drive almost every day.
Twice a day.
And so I would think of people as I was driving home, or
driving there, and I would, like, tell the phone to text that person.
And so for, like, two weeks there recently, I looked like a really
good friend, 'cause I was all on top of the checking in on people.
But in general, like, I'm just elsewhere, and I'm very honest about that.
I will go a long time without talking to people I care a lot about, just because
there's not something happening with them that they need that attention immediately.
And so my brain is elsewhere.
And the reason I say that is, it is probably very likely that a lot
of your friends are like that too.
And that doesn't mean they don't love you and prioritize you and
want to actively be in your life.
But, like, there's a lot going on right now, and the general mental
load of existing is just a ton.
And so if you're a person who really only has the bandwidth to look at what's
in front of you and doesn't really have time to conjure up academic things like
dinners with friends — even though they're very important and you should do them —
I can understand how they would go a full month without engaging with you.
I have friends that I go way longer than that with, but when
we do talk, everything's great.
Like, it's like we didn't miss a minute. So I wouldn't consider it too much or too
concerning that after that short period of time, you only heard from two of them.
That sounds right to me.
There are people who reach out to me, and unless they're reaching out to me, I
probably don't talk to them very often.
Not because I don't want to.
I love them, I adore them. They are just not the one with the need
at that point, and I am focusing on the people with the need, and
there's always someone with a need.
That being said, if these are friends who you really want to spend time
with, or you really want to continue that friendship with, and that
friendship is important to you, then you should absolutely talk to them.
You could definitely say, like, "Hey.
I just wanna let you know that I've taken a step back from organizing things,
'cause the mental load of it was a lot.
I still wanna spend time with you.
I'll still do some things when there's events or activities
that are really important to me.
But, like, if we wanna hang out, just know that you might have to initiate,
because I'm not gonna do it, or I'm gonna do it less, and for that reason
I just want it on your brain that…
I'm probably not gonna text you and say, 'Drinks next Thursday.'
If you wanna go for drinks next Thursday, you probably are gonna have to text me."
Most people will be totally fine with that.
Some relationships are gonna peter out because you're not putting in the effort.
That's okay.
That's allowed to happen.
And some of them, once people get a notification that this isn't
something that you have the bandwidth for right now, they will totally
take ownership of it and maybe start doing a whole lot of other stuff.
I remember several years ago we did, like, a friends' weekend thing.
I didn't stay in the house with everybody the first night
because it was where I live.
And there was some other stuff going on, so I didn't stay
in the house with everybody.
But when I got there — or when everybody else got there, 'cause they drove in —
there was a smoke alarm going off, and I had been in planning mode
for this weekend for two months.
Like, it was constant logistics. Picking up people from the airport, figuring out
how people are gonna eat, planning a party, planning an event around the party,
getting family coordinated. Like, it was two solid months of just logistics. And
I had booked the house, and booking the house was, like, a whole thing.
It was, like, the third house we booked, because there was so much…
there was just nonsense with it.
With the booking there was a problem. I booked the house.
I coordinated everybody's travel.
I picked everybody up at the airport.
I found them ways to get to the house if they didn't have the
ability to get to the airport.
I did all of this stuff.
There was so much stuff.
I did all of it.
And then when everybody came in,
there was an issue at the house that they let me know about,
but I wasn't even at the house.
But what I heard was: there's an issue at the house, and I need to fix it.
I was in the middle of doing 10,000 things, and I just forgot
to fix the thing at the house.
I forgot to call the management company.
I just was busy.
It slipped my mind. And so the next morning I got there,
and one of our friends came downstairs and she was like, "Oh, they came by
and fixed the thing this morning."
And I didn't even say anything to her about it.
She was just like, "They came by and fixed the thing this morning."
And I went, "Did they know already? Because I didn't call them."
And she was like, "No.
I called them." And I went, "You called them."
And she was like, "Right.
So, I am a grown adult.
I can fix problems, and I didn't need you to do it.
You're okay.
You have other stuff going on.
I took care of it." And the confusion that I felt — I remember sitting
back and going, "Oh, that's right.
I'm not coordinating a birthday party for a bunch of hapless 10-year-olds.
This is a bunch of grownups who were able to figure out how to, like,
travel across the country to come here. And if there's an alarm beeping,
I can figure it out — they can also figure it out."
The point of that being: your friends are probably smart
people who just need a flag.
And if you give them a flag, they'll take it.
Or if there's an opportunity that they see, that there's something where they
actually can jump in, they probably will.
And if they only want your labor so that they can have fun on the backs of your labor,
then maybe it's time to let them go.
That's fine too.
Just let people do their jobs.
Let people do their jobs.
That's it.
Don't be an asshole.