I work with both men and women. We all travel for work. Sometimes, we meet for breakfast. This is not a “work meeting”, we just have breakfast together or in the same restaurant before going to work.
And we often segregate by gender. Why? Because there are rules about how you behave at breakfast. And thankfully, the rules for the male table are clearly stated. I don’t know what the women’s rules are, but the guy rules are:
You may not talk about anything that you cannot reference to the newspaper section you are reading.
You may only speak two sentences at one time. The subject of these sentences must be,
a. “Read this article”;
b. “Fucking idiot.”
That is sufficient and necessary guy conversation over breakfast.
Whoops, I seem to have been living by the men’s rules.
The girls do seem to find me odd when I’m pointing out articles to them and saying “look at this moron”. I didn’t realize there was an established set of rules!
So do I switch tables and sit with the boys, or do I learn to discuss makeup and Jennifer Aniston’s biological clock?
Well, my breakfast rules are as follows, and I suspect that they are shared by more males than females, but I don’t pretend to represent any group.
Silence is golden. The less noise the better. Put a nipple in that screaming kid’s mouth. And if you throw those dishes and silverware into that plastic bin one more time, I’m gonna come around this counter and smack you, Mr. Latino Denny’s Busboy.
Coffee. More coffee. If you see me tilt my cup to my mouth past 45 degrees, then ideally I want you here with the coffeepot by the time I set the cup back down. I know that this is often a difficult standard to meet… but if you make me wait for more coffee with an empty cup, it’s comin’ outta yer tip.
Don’t engage me in conversation. My mammalian brain comes online slowly, and Broca’s area is one of the last in the boot loader. If I wanted conversation with breakfast, I’d have words in my mouth, not food.
Don’t pester me. Similarly, my reptilian brain is the first to come online, and it’s functioning long before any inhibitory controls. So don’t pester me with questions or commentary unless they’re directly related to food, coffee, or imminent prospects for propogation of my genes. Otherwise I will react aggressively.
Give me space. I don’t want to share your personal space before breakfast, and so you shouldn’t violate mine. Don’t seat me at a table next to a high traffic area. I can’t relax if people are hovering around the periphery of my vision or breezing by my shoulders. And I certainly dont want their asses near either my face or my plate. And if I’m sitting at a counter, at least one of the empty stools next to me counts as my space.
Meat. Animal flesh must be served as part of breakfast, whether it be bacon, sausage, ham, steak, smoked fish, or even chicken or turkey if it’s prepared imaginitively. And no organ meats, damn… whoever thought I wanted to look at a cow’s stomach lining while nursing a hangover should be shot.
That’s all. And really, it’s not that hard to comply with.
Thank you for your patience… both our days will now be much more pleasant.
I waitressed at a lot of hash-slinging diner type places in high school and college. We opened at unholy times just to catch the factory shifts starting, truckers beating rush hour, hunters and fishers (fisherman? fishers…huh, that’s odd) heading out early and assorted other early morning types.
Whistlepig’s rules seem dead on with what I witnessed, and Bug’s rule of coffee is the first thing a successful waitron learns. You just don’t walk out on the floor without a coffeepot in your hand. I’d pour a lot of folks two cups to start with because I knew they’d have the first gone before I could circulate back.
