Mere Means

Yesterday AV and I took a car trip. We like car trips, and I'm still convinced that our ability to spend very long periods of time together in a moving vehicle - pleasantly, no less - is part of the reason why we get along so well. Today we were gone 10 hours. We made our way down to Penitente Canyon, which is roughly 20 miles southwest of Saguache (itself about 50 miles south of Buena Vista) nestled at the foothills of the San Juan mountains.* We also saw a tornado on the way. I'm not kidding, and anyone who reads this blog who (a) is married to me or (b) is related to me and lived with me during my childhood knows that I am absolutely, deathly afraid of tornadoes. It was very far away, and we stopped to tape it. So now we have video of a tornado.

Anyway, on our way home, we took highway 24 through Leadville. Leadville was where we concluded one of the scariest, most tense drives of our married life about three years ago**, so once we happened upon Twin Lakes it was har-de-har-har all the way into Leadville. We were starving, and so we pulled into a small little cafe on Leadville's main drag. As we walked into the cafe (which had maybe ten tables in all), we seated ourselves and began to wait. It was almost 10 minutes until our server stopped at our table. She took our order, and we waited another fifteen minutes for root beers that never came. We asked her to cancel our order - something we never do. She then proceeded to get huffy with us, and we left the restaurant.

I was a server in college, incidentally at the highest-grossing Chili's in the region, and until I became a teacher my nightmares almost always were about waitressing. Lost tickets, forgotten drinks, people sitting at tables for long periods of time drinkless - all these things I have done, and all of them I had nightmares about until I started teaching. I can certainly understand busy restaurants and servers "in the weeds" (or, dans la merde in a more sophisticated French setting), a place I found myself many nights in the period I was slinging fajitas - in one case, quite literally - at customers.

Because of my experiences serving (and one Sunday afternoon in which I waited on a very demanding table of eight to no tip), I often appeal to the plight of servers and those working in retail (another college job) to explain the point of Kant's second line of the Categorical Imperative: "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of any other, always at the same time as an end and never simply as means." If a server sweats blood for you (or minimally provides reasonable service and allows you to enjoy your meal), you give her a tip in recognition of her efforts. Kant's requirement is that we respect the goals, projects, and rationality of our fellows, because we have the same expectation for ourselves.

Now, the question I'm left with this afternoon is whether on this principle we were justified in leaving the restaurant as we did. My first thought is that we were justified in leaving, since servers are just as capable of treating customers as mere means, and so we have a Kantian justification for giving good service. But just because we don't get the service we expect, does that justify us in not leaving a tip? Is this overly retributive? Do I need a new example for my students?

Clearly, I've thought too much about this. Did you know that the word "tip" was initially an acronym for "to insure promptness"?

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*Our drive south on Hwy 285, especially through the San Luis Valley (spectacular views of the Sangre de Cristo mountains) is easily among the most beautiful drives I've ever taken in Colorado. Other spectacular drives include: Hwy 285 over Kenosha Pass into Deckers and Jefferson (if you've done it, you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about); Independence Pass in the late summer/early fall at night - scary, but like another planet; Anywhere in Grand County; Hwy 7 south from Long's Peak through Allenspark, especially on a rainy July or August day.

**Some friends were married in Marble, CO at the foot of the Maroon Bells. As we were driving through Aspen, we were low on gas and as we drove by a gas station, we erroneously assumed that there would be another gas station before we got on the pass. Turns out that the gas station we passed was the last one until Leadville. As we made our way up Independence Pass, the gas light came on. We white-knuckled it to the top of the pass and drove as much of the way down in neutral as was possible. As we rolled into Twin Lakes, we discovered the gas station to be closed and so on to Leadville we pushed. We barely made it, and important lessons learned: stop for gas at the gas station you see, because it might be the last one for many miles.