Serving Cunt

How is it possible to feel like such an alien in an English speaking country? The jetlag probably doesn’t help, but everything is unsettling me in Toronto. Everyone I have interacted with so far has been a service industry professional, which means it’s all been conducted with glassy North American falseness, and the look of an animal caught in a trap, though I might just be projecting. I really do feel like I can detect a hunted look, a constant panic that I might see through the veneer of cheerfulness and good service. I want to take them gently by the arms and tell them that I promise I will be tipping. Please feel free to have a bad day anyway.

A bartender manages to apologise to me several times to no purpose whatsoever, and then looks heartbroken when I need to go and get cash out, certain that I am not coming back. I don’t know whether I have a particularly dry, humourless bearing, but everyone seems to be reacting to me like a dangerous psychopath who needs to be appeased for long enough for the authorities to arrive. 

A server in a coffee shop evidently feels that she has not been sufficiently cheerful with me because as I go to wait for my drink, she calls desperately after me that she likes my tattoos. Am I reacting in the wrong way? I think I’m being open and friendly and warm. I usually am. I would regard myself as amiable to an above average degree. I fear that I am somehow giving off a stink cloud of “won’t tip”. 

Trying to get to the bottom of this feeling, I do some research, and end up reading about a concept which I was familiar with but has been completely replaced by a kind of millennial therapy-speak version, ‘emotional labour’, which is what you experience when your friend is sad and you are forced to listen to them - what an absolute shit! Emotional labour as originally conceived was about customer service work, however. It’s from The Managed Heart by Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist.

Maybe they’re just scarred by Europeans coming for the World Cup. Whatever you have to say about Brexit, we have so much more in common with Europe than I realised. It perhaps doesn’t help that I travelled from Germany, about as much of a service industry whiplash as you could ask for. I couldn’t do it myself, I am too desperate to be liked to be German, but I always greatly respect encountering a Northern European who visibly holds me in contempt or feels the need to itemise my deficiencies. 

I'm tempted to blame this all on the service industry - I often have the unshakeable feeling when meeting Americans abroad that they’re looking for a tip or trying to sell me something, even in friendly social interactions - but an American friend disputes this. They really might just be like this all the time. What reads to me as falseness is more like basic etiquette. I don’t know. It just feels to me like being lied to. There is a certain amount of social lubrication which goes on in all interactions and it isn’t a North American invention, but it does feel like the tipping culture applies nitro to the flame. I don’t achieve honesty in all of my social interactions, but I do try and shoot for it.

I suppose the most surprising thing is that I’ve experienced this in Canada, which by all accounts is less psychotic about these things than the cursed yanks. I’d adapt quickly I’m sure, but I won’t have time to, so I've been left with no choice but to form deeply entrenched views on a vast and diverse culture off the back of approximately 72 hours. And you can’t stop me!

I think what bothers me about it all - and this is my own idiosyncrasy, there’s no doubt that the English are obnoxious in their own, distinct ways - is that I don’t ever know when anyone is really being friendly. It is uncanny. It makes me feel like I am always being instrumentalised. I am a means to an end. Our friendly interaction is judged to ensure that I do my social duty. I don’t like there to be a financial incentive to my chats. I want people who ask about my day to, mostly, if at all possible, have a sincere interest. 

Is that mad? Am I going mad? Do I have a sickness? It feels like I have a sickness. But it's possible I’m also jetlagged and yesterday (inasmuch as I understand what “yesterday” means across several timezones) I took three different aeroplanes. I feel like I’ve smoked weed and forgotten how anything works or what my relationship to it is, which is why I don’t smoke weed. 

For what it’s worth I’m not someone who is actually aggrieved at having to pay service staff. I generally find out whatever the local tipping culture is and then stick to a flat percentage forever. I don’t want to think about it and I don’t want to be the shithead that everyone hates. It’s not their fault. I just don’t think they should be forced to do it. Being forced to plaster on a false smile for a full working day is cruel and unusual punishment. Emotional labour indeed. 

Give me a Parisian waiter who is paid a fair wage and looks at me like I’ve just asked if I can buy his mother’s dirty underwear.

Otherwise Canada was great. More to follow, probably. Or probably not. Bye!