My Shameful Past

Wow, I haven't used this blog in six and a half years!
Look, I've done a lot of things in my life that I'm not proud of. The older you get, the more you look back at the things you did in your youth and cringe. I've done a lot of very stupid, often dangerous, things that could have gone incredibly poorly for me, and others involved. This is not one of those things.
I lived in Key West, Florida for about 14 months. For thirteen of those months, I worked in the Food & Beverage department of a hotel and resort. It was my first experience working in the food industry, so I started near the bottom and quickly worked my way up to mediocrity. I started out bussing tables, I restocked minibars, I hosted meals (seating diners), I served breakfast, I delivered room service, I did occasional banquet service, and ended up serving food and drinks to customers at the pool, hot tub, and on our private beach.
Let me tell you something about Key West, that you may not have known. There are a LOT of foreigners working there, and they come from all over the world.Many of them were young people participating in work/study programs; taking classes at the incredibly prestigious Florida Keys Community College, and working at one of any number of hotels or restaurants in the tourist district of Key West.
Off the top of my head, I worked with Russians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Romanians, Germans, Greeks, Spaniards, Croatians, Serbians, Latvians, Koreans, and Caribbean islanders. I also had coworkers from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Japan. Anyone in the work/study program spoke excellent English; in fact, I'd say that many of them spoke better English than the Americans who worked there. But not everyone was in that program.
I remember one guy that I had to train to bus tables. I don't know why I had to train him. Sure, he was replacing me, but I don't recall being trained when I started. There's not a lot to it; you clear tables, you bring the dirty dishes back to the dish pit, and then you set the tables you cleared for the next customers. Anyway, this guy didn't speak much English, and I may have messed with him a bit.
I hosted at breakfast and lunch while he worked as the busboy, and he was a nice enough guy. He was very polite, but didn't know a lot of words, so he was pretty repetitive. Any time I opened a door for him (because his hands were full, usually), he would say, "Thank you, Jack!" Now for me (and this is absolutely true), part of working in the service industry means never saying "You're welcome." I work at a restaurant now, and I never say "You're welcome" when customers say "Thank you." I try to deflect it, and thank them for their business. How is this relevant? The first week or so that I worked with him, I responded to his thank you's differently every time. "No problem!" "My pleasure!" "Don't worry about it!" "I've got you!" "No big deal!" "Anytime!" "I'm happy to help!" etc. It wasn't intentional; it's just part of my nature.
Well, it wasn't intentional for the first week. Once I realized what I was doing, I became determined to keep it up for as long as humanly possible. I made a list of different ways to say "you're welcome." I asked friends for their suggestions. I googled "different ways to say you're welcome." I even started saying "you're welcome" in different languages, like "De nada!" I was absolutely obsessed with never saying the same thing twice to him.
I don't really remember how it ended (this was over 10 years ago), but I do remember how much his English improved. I choose to believe that all the different words I said to him in the exact same situation helped him absorb the language better. Yes, I did that man a service by refusing to say "you're welcome" like a normal human being. I'm not a horrible, cruel, monster. I'm a hero.
That wasn't my only instance messing with that poor guy, though. Fairly early on in his tenure, I ran into him in the men's locker room. The bathroom in there had the only employee wash area that used a motion controlled paper towel dispenser. He couldn't get it to work. I guess he couldn't read English, either. He showed me his wet hands, and gestured towards the paper towel dispenser. I, being an asshole, decided that this was a great opportunity to use powers for evil.
I walked up to the paper towel dispenser, bent down so that my face was right in front of the motion sensor, and yelled "TOWELS!" Sure enough, a towel slowly poked out of the mechanism. A great big smile appeared on his face, and he thanked me profusely. I'm pretty certain that I didn't say "You're welcome." Every few weeks or so, I would walk past the locker room door, and hear him yell "TOWELS!" It really never stopped being funny.
Another position I worked at that hotel was hosting dinner in our "fine dining" restaurant. I put fine dining in quotes because customers didn't dress up for it. I remember seating a hairy, overweight man wearing ratty shorts and a completely open Hawaiian shirt. When politely asked by the manager, he refused to button it up. The waitstaff, however, dressed in long-sleeved black shirts, black pants, and black shoes. They thought they were the best waiters in the world because they made better tips than the rest of us. That was mainly because the entrees cost roughly ten times more than the breakfast items that most of us got our tips from. Add a bottle of wine or two onto the tab, and you're making $50 in tips off a single table.
All of the waiters who worked there (with one exception) were from areas formerly under Soviet control. None of them liked me, so naturally they would all congregate around the host station in their copious amounts of free time (because their jobs were ridiculously easy), and converse in Russian. They did it constantly. And you know what? It bugged me, and the fact that it bugged me drove me crazy, because they were only doing it to bother me.
Now, I know what you're thinking: Shouldn't this have taught me some humility? It wasn't that long ago that I was messing with that guy who didn't speak English. Shouldn't this have shown me what it was like to not speak the same language as everyone else around me? You know what, wise reader? You have a point. But it's a really stupid point, because I still lived and worked in a place where everybody spoke English. If only there was a way for me to communicate with other English speakers in a manner that the waiters couldn't understand. That's when it hit me: Pig Latin.
I called my manager over and said, right in front of all the servers, "O-day ou-yay eak-spay ig-Pay -atin-Lay?" She laughed and said, "Es-yay, I-ay o-day eak-spay ig-Pay atin-Lay!"
The waiters lost their shit. One of them protested "They are not actually speaking to each other! They are speaking gibberish to try to make us think they are communicating. They are so immature!"
So I turned to him and said, "Let's go into the kitchen. You're going to pick something for me to tell her, and when I come back out, I'll tell it to her, and she'll tell all of you what it was. And if she gets it right, then you have to stop gathering around me just to speak Russian."
We went into the kitchen (where I found two other people who spoke Pig Latin, btw), and he thought long and hard about what he wanted me to say to her. Finally, he decided that he wanted to hear her say the word piano. I think he might have had an idea that we were just changing our words around, and he wanted to figure out what the trick was. Obviously, if I said "iano-pay" he probably would have heard the similarity between the words, and called us out on it. So I couldn't say it like that.
Now, like I said, this was a fine dining restaurant. Naturally, we had a lounge, and in that lounge we had a piano player named Larry. So when we walked back out to the host stand, I looked at my manager and said, "At-whay is-ay e-th ame-nay of-ay e-thay ing-thay arry-Lay is-ay aying-play?"
She looked at him and said "The piano."
And that's how I solved that problem.
I wish there was some wort of moral to this story, like "No matter what language we speak, deep down inside, we're all just people." Alas, no. If this story has a moral it would have to be "Don't learn from your mistakes. Be a dick to everybody before they can be dicks to you. Because deep down inside, we're all just dicks."