Please Tip Your Servers

Wait staff aren't really anybody, are they? Within their jobs, they exist only to ferry desires from customer to kitchen and fulfillment from kitchen to customers. Same holds true for other serving staff: we tend to ignore them.

I was thinking about this as I walked home from a caf&eactue; this evening: the language we use when seeking service in retail and service environments is really telling. We rarely ask about the server him or herself, and when we do, it's often a surprise to the person behind the counter.

But even so, when asking for things, we typically say "I'd like" or "May I have" or "One [x]", and even if we're polite (please, thank you, etc.), there's a fundamental deprivation of subjectivity that happens in our language in these situations. "I'd like" is a simple statement of our personal desire. It ignores any agency on the part of the person who might help us obtain our desire. "May I have" adds some personhood to the server by symbolically asking the server for something--but it's largely rhetorical now, and it isn't much. And simply stating the object(s) of desire is like pushing a button on a vending machine: we don't give even the courtesy of complete sentences and the interpersonal interaction hinted at by introducing ourselves as a subject. It's interesting to me that with all the variations available to us, we never ask "Would you give me", which would open up an even interaction, human to human.