The recent story of the waitress that posted her customer’s bad joke on Reddit kind of hit me right in the nose. You of course know what I am referring, the infamous ” I give God 10%, why do you get 18?’ scandal.

When I moved from the frozen wastes of Northern Minnesota to the Twin Cities I found that I needed to work in order to make money, keep my apartment and not have to move back beyond the wall. After a couple weeks of digging around, I bagged a shitty job as a waiter in a 24 hour slop shop in Uptown. Typical 24/7 joint, it served low price, poor quality, high calorie food to lunatics, cross dressers and inner city thugs at night and in the mornings, poor women with their spawn in tow, high tension business people on their way to a pacemaker, shoppers and, on Sunday mornings, church people. In the year and a half I worked at that greasy spoon I had knives and guns pulled on me, had to stop man orgies in the bathroom, chased a dine and dash out the door and was subsequently shot at for it. One wonderful night I was even followed out of the place by a guy that claimed he was going to rape me, one chunk of fence in the face taught him a valuable lesson about following young men into dark alleys. The thing about that place was, for all the horrors that were cast upon me, the only shift I truly hated was the Sunday church crowd.

If you work in a 24 hour joint, you rarely see a good tip. It is more an issue of quantity over quality, serve three hundred people on your shift and you may get to go home with enough money to pay the rent, get drunk and buy a bag of weed. Sadly, Sunday church people are a whole different breed of restaurant patron. They haul in armies of self righteous, coffee swilling, neck bent, babbling zealots that flood through the doors, take up your section for hours drinking java and leave you with a poor to non-existent tip. To add insult to gratuity, every damned table would have, as part of the tip, a book or pamphlet that was meant to bring you to the lord. During this portion of my life I was not yet an Atheist, let’s say I was mostly dressed but hadn’t yet put on the hat. In a way I gotta thank people like this for helping me make the final leap of no faith because those pamphlets and bad tips helped push me away from the possible pursuit of religion. Why even consider religion if it means being that cunty? One of the pamphlets that really stands out to this day was from a table I was serving on a typical post church Sunday morning. A table of thirteen came rolling in, six adults and their demon seed, wanting a to be seated immediately even though there was a wait. “We are with our Pastor”, shouted a corpulent she-beast in a flowery tarp. After the impatient lot had been seated they immediately began to demand more coffee than the pots that were placed at their table. They spurted out orders for foods that they felt should be on the menu and complained about the quality of everything they received. A side note, it always amazes me when people who look like they are gold medalists in a heart disease competition sit and bitch about the quality of food that wasn’t squeezed from a tube. This table was not out of the ordinary for any given Sunday, that is until the Pastor had a heart attack. Old fuck just seized up and fell off his chair, needless to say, everyone at the table and the surrounding area lost their shit. Walking over, the restaurant phone in hand, I rang the local ambulance delivery system, which was on speed dial, it had to be. The paramedics arrived in under three minutes and took the old fart out on a gurney. After the smoke cleared and the rush was over, it was time to bus the table, imagine how amazed I was to see a hundred dollar bill at the table, it was so unexpected, they must have been pretty happy with my fast response to their medical emergency. Now imagine how pissed I was when I picked up the hundred and found on the back the printed phrase “Think you were blessed to find a hundred dollar bill? Think how blessed you are to find the word of god instead? It wasn’t money, it was a fucking pamphlet that was meant to look like money, no real money by the way, zero. There wasn’t even a thank you from the group. The fatty in the moo moo did thank the lord for his actions in saving the dying guy yet she didn’t even thank me for calling the ambulance. A couple weeks later the pastor even came back to the restaurant, he shook my hand and asked me to pray with him to thank the lord for saving him. I said no thanks and told him that I was an Atheist, perhaps hoping it would stress him out and this time I could give someone else the phone to test their ability to react to pressure. The Pastors table was full again, they prayed loudly that day and asked not to be waited on by me. The waitress they did have was a good woman. She went to church, prayed before eating and sleeping, a loving mother to her family, great at her job and never said a bad word about anyone. She served a table of twelve for almost two hours, came out back, asked for a cigarette and said “I want to stomp that fat bitches ugly face right out of her ass”! The table left her a two dollar tip and blamed it on me, being arrogant about my evil ways, not the fact that they were cheap dicks. Our next Sunday was special however, we had finally gotten the owner to agree to a set gratuity for groups of six or more, due to so many people getting horked out of money at the old shithole. You can imagine the ire in the voice of the tub of lard in the dress/fumigation tent when she found out. “Why should we give you eighteen percent? We give God less of a percentage than that and he created everything”! That is why this particular news story got to me. Why should they get eighteen percent when you only give God ten? Maybe when God creates a moderately to low priced steak and eggs breakfast wherein the eggs aren’t scrambled with saliva and the steak hasn’t been dragged, lovingly, twixt the line cook’s balls.

A note to people that feel that they don’t need to tip because of some blah, blah, stupid idea they have built in their tiny little minds. You have eaten ball juice, spit, a pit burger, a slab of ass toast, human hair, possibly feces, don’t be a shithead, if you can’t tip, eat fast food, at least that way you will die a little faster.

-Joe-