I think the main problem here is one of spin. What’s hard to get around is the truth behind the statement. He didn’t call them blimps, cows, pigs, or any other nasty, derogatory word. He called them fat, and they are. Try it with any other class descriptor. “He wrote black girls on our ticket!!” Are you black? “He wrote poor girls on our ticket!!” Did you order water, split a meal, and pay with coupons and change? “He called us twins!!” Do you look alike?
Is the umbrage over the word fat justified? Why is fat such a special class that it deserves more consideration than race, economic class, or any other honest physical descriptor? Why is weight the sacred cow, when other characteristics are out of one’s control?
The strawman is all yours. The waiter wasn’t making a social statement or opening a social dialogue. He made a note to himself. His mistake was in failing to remove the note, not in noting to himself that the table he was serving contained fat girls. You can’t tell us which descriptors are appropriate without imparting your own judgement on us. At least four people in this thread have said “I’m fat, short, or black” and they wouldn’t run screaming to the media with a descriptive receipt. You think the word fat is a dirty word, but you can’t force everyone to demote it to an -ism.
It’s complicated because you’ve moved the goalposts from “don’t refer to overweight people as fat” to “don’t refer to people as anything other than shirt color”. On a note a waiter made to keep track of orders, that he foolishly failed to edit.
Assuming it was merely a forgotten note-to-self by the employee it reminds of one of my favorite cautionary tales from my QA testing days.
A programmer, working on a mailout to well heeled clients, used a string literal as a place holder for the client’s name. When the letter eventually went out, those clients with incorrect names received a flier addressed to : Dear Rich Bastard
There is a nice discussion at Snopes with an equally good effort from Wells Fargo.
Stating a general principle and then stating that certain specific instances are worse is not moving the goalposts" (do you even know what that means?). Look at post 20. My position from the beginning has been that it is inappropriate to call attention to people’s physical characteristics in a workplace situation.
Fat is not just a descriptor word. If he had written “overweight women” or even “overweight girls,” it might be different. But the word fat carries a value judgement with it, usually (almost always?) negative.
It would have offended them the same, see Ascenray’s posts. It is never okay to call attention to any descriptive aspect of someone’s appearance. (Except when seeking a shitstorm of attention from the media).
Now imagine for a moment the diner was Ambvalid, and the waiter noted his wheelchair.
Yikes! You’d be facing a lawsuit and a tv camera within an hour! And he’d be right, too. The waiter screwed up some, the manager screwed up large and now this eatery has pissed off tons of people who love to eat! Good luck with that!
Evidently fat people – particularly fat girls - do not like being reminded that they are fat. Which I totally understand, but the irony is that denial and self-deception surely play a role in obesity.
According to the receipt, these girls ordered tri-tip sandwiches with soda and french fries. I did a google image search and here is one of the images I found
Wow, that looks f*cking delicious. Probably if you are eating it, you it will ruin your enjoyment if you think about how fattening it is.
Sadly, it’s one of the great tragedies of modern life. For the wages from an hour’s worth of labor, you can regularly a meal tastier than just about anything our caveman ancestors would have eaten in their entire lives. And yet 80% of the population has to avoid meals like that and/or feels guilty for eating meals like that.
The manager of our local On the Border restaurant comped a meal for us once because it took forever to get the food to our table. We hadn’t even made a complaint. The last time I was at Denny’s (8+ years ago) there was an older couple who had a problem with their bill. The manager showed up, looked at the long line of people waiting to pay the cashier and go and said “I can see your time is valuable, sir. The meal is on us.” Another time I was at On the Border (I used to go there a lot) and after we were seated it took a long time for anyone to take our drink orders. Apparently nobody remembered we were there and the waitress apologized and we got some free queso out of it. Again, not something I asked for but something that was offered.
Pissing off your customers is just bad business. Good managers know this and make sure that their employees treat their customers well. i.e Good service, polite, expedient, etc., etc. A good way to placate customers when something goes wrong is to give them something free or to comp their meal entirely. In the case of the Denny’s manager he avoided pissing off the older couple along with all of us who were in line to pay for our meals and go.
What the hell? Taking potshots at someone not participating in this thread? No, if the ticket had read “Wheels” I doubt Ambivalid would have flinched. His concern is accessibility and enforcement of such, and has yet to pretend he isn’t in a chair or that others shouldn’t mention the chair or identify him as disabled. There’s kind of a big difference between a legally protected class of people and three attention-seeking women who eat a lot.
No, he wouldn’t. Unless they refused to serve him or otherwise mistreated him, I can’t see justification for a lawsuit (“He said ‘Wheelchair’! Gimme money!”) and still wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about it happening on the other side of the country.
These are the sorts of stories that your co-worker tells you and you get bored halfway through listening to them, not things that need national attention.
You say “fat” is a class descriptive. Since when were fat people a class of their own?
You think calling someone poor is ok
No one in this thread has ever said “fat [is a] special class that it deserves more consideration than race, economic class, or any other honest physical descriptor”
