Monday, August 18, 2008

Society: Soul sucked out Part II.

I know ... I'm always pointing out the negative examples. I'll start this off by saying that I've seen plenty of positive examples of good social behavior from Singaporeans and I'll admit that I'm biased in the sense that I take the latter for granted.

However, I'd like to take the stand that we, as a people, should be working towards the good. Bad examples should be highlighted and eliminated ... hence the focus.

Anyway, this is from personal experience (yesterday, in fact): I was at the Chinese restaurant in campustown. There was a middle-aged man with his family eating there ... and I assume one of them was his daughter studying here. Turns out, there's a good chance they were from Singapore because the waitress asked them when they were returning to Singapore. Anyway, they seemed on good personal terms with the waitress.

Then, horrors of horrors ... after eating, they left without clearing the dishes as was expected at the restaurant and on campus in general! I was sure they were not in a rush ... the waitress reminded them they had a small dessert they had not been served yet and they stayed over 10 minutes to finish it and continued to chat with the waitress.

Why had they done that? The only reason I could think of is that the waitress had insisted they not clear the dishes. From what I know of this waitress, she would not go out of her way to insist on that before they start on their food (at least, she does not do that for me, and I'm a regular too). He left a tip, but surely that's not a license to not clear the table? The thing that shocked me most was the fact that he knew them well ... then why not clear the table to help them out?

I can understand if we do not clear the table because the serving staff would be blamed for not doing their jobs (a friend and I recently got frowns for clearing our own table at another restaurant outside campustown). This was clearly not the case ... I really consider that guy's behavior to be a case of bad social graces.

No comments: