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FYI retail clerks often make commission or profit-based bonuses, which is the traditional reason for not tipping them. Service industry outside of retail sales do not normally get commissions and instead rely on tips.

Yes, it is complicated figuring out which is which sometimes, but the basic rule of thumb is, did they give you something that goes into use on the spot, or did you buy a thing to take home? Gas station pump jockeys = service. Tip them. Pants salesman = retail. Do not tip.

You can tip contractors (like your gardener and your plumber), but traditionally instead of "tipping" you give them gifts... might be $500 at Christmas, or it might be a bottle of wine every couple of service calls.

Tip your garbagemen occasionally... twice a year is fine. An envelope with "thank you" taped to the can and a couple of $20's inside is fine. It'll save you money later when they don't charge you for extra bags.

Any questions?

Actually yeah.

See, all of this is new.  I mentioned hair cutting earlier confused me because once my parents stopped paying for haircuts, I grew my hair out for years.  By the time I actually got it cut someone mentioned something about tipping and I was like "oh...FUCK" because I'd missed a few times.

I've never had to hire a contractor because I've never owned a home.

I specifically avoid full service stations because I don't see the point in bothering someone to do what I can do in just as much time with just as much effort on my own (not a coffee shop frequenter because I brew my own).  When on a road trip through Jersey, where full service is mandatory, I was incredibly uncomfortable having someone do it for me.

Garbage men, now do you pay them for your curbside pickup, because wherever I've lived it's just been a city service.  If it's a city service do you still tip them?

But yeah the dressing room thing was just for the sake of argument, I know not to tip them.

Edit:  Oh, and the using on the spot thing.  If I'm buying a pound of coffee at a coffee shop, which generally takes more time to get together than the cup I would order, is that a tipable service?  I won't be using it just then.  The same would apply to the bagels and cream cheese that I take home to eat throughout the week.

EoC,
doing this shit to death.

I also heard emphasis was on the MOR part?

Balvenie Portwood.


The scotch is aged 21 years in barrels that originally stored port.

'Tis a thing of beauty, I tell you.

Sure, about $140 a bottle, but it's worth it.

The Balvenie Doublewood is my newfound casual drinking scotch.  I'll have to try this one out if I ever have the cash.

This thread needs more poll.

Listen, it's either you're playing Devil's Advocate or you're genuinely confused. The two are mutually exclusive.

WTF is wrong with you, are you stupid? You can't figure out 15% of $1.50? Drop a fucking quarter in and call it good.

Those fuckers at the coffee shop have to be there at 4:30 in the morning, they have to grind and brew the coffee and keep the place clean and be on their feet, MOVE MOVE MOVE, with lines out the door, scalding potential at every turn (and they do get burned, a lot) and oblivious assholes like you who expect to be served in under a minute.

It's the SERVICE FUCKING INDUSTRY. You fucking entitled bourgeois prig.

Seriously, there's a FUCKING TIP JAR there for idiots who can't figure out whether they're supposed to tip. Put a fucking quarter in it.

I like how you seem to think that the only thing they do is pour coffee, like there's a team of magic elves who come in and take care of everything else.

Yikes.

I was always told it was 15% minimum, which I've given on a few occasions of shitty service, but I generally do just over 20%.  I also went a few embarassing years not realizing that I was supposed to be tipping the hair dresser.  Hopefully I haven't been screwing any others out of their pay without knowing it.

The bagel place I go to has a line on the receipt for tips, but isn't it sort've like coffee shops?  Tipping is a nice gesture but they're still paid regular wages on top of it.  I mean they make breakfast sandwiches and stuff here, but if I'm asking for a half dozen bagels and a container of cream cheese I don't usually tip.  It'd be like tipping the butcher or the fishmonger.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yeah, it's exactly like coffee shops. Which means they make minimum wage and work hard, and you should tip.

So if I were to walk into a place and ask for a coffee, regular drip coffee, they turn around, pour it into a cup, and hand it to me, I should pay how much extra for that work?  We're talking 30 seconds of work, or in the case of the bagel place up to two minutes.  Do I pay a dollar tip for a $1.50 cup of coffee?  And what if I'm already paying the higher price to go to support a locally owned business?

I'm not arguing that they're paid great or that their job is easy, but at what point does this start getting out of control?  The people in the dressing rooms at stores get about minimum wage, do I tip them for showing me which one to use?

Don't get me wrong.  I'm all for tipping where it's due.  This is my devil's advocate act because I am genuinely confused.

I was always told it was 15% minimum, which I've given on a few occasions of shitty service, but I generally do just over 20%.  I also went a few embarassing years not realizing that I was supposed to be tipping the hair dresser.  Hopefully I haven't been screwing any others out of their pay without knowing it.

The bagel place I go to has a line on the receipt for tips, but isn't it sort've like coffee shops?  Tipping is a nice gesture but they're still paid regular wages on top of it.  I mean they make breakfast sandwiches and stuff here, but if I'm asking for a half dozen bagels and a container of cream cheese I don't usually tip.  It'd be like tipping the butcher or the fishmonger.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

I like it.  You mentioned giving people a sense of what Discordians do.  There are a lot of ways people on this site do things differently, so participants can write a little scenario about activities they engage in or beliefs they hold that brings the religion into their everyday lives.

This is How I Discordian

Forgive me, Suu, for I have not sinned.

I woke to help my father move heavy shit about his yard and do laundry and cook a fast meal to get to work barely on time so I could type type type for eight hours and come home to do the dishes and fold the laundry and water my plants to make sure they're fed because I'm a good housekeeper even if I'm living alone it's shiny in here to prepare for the guests I won't be having but I can't visit them either because my car is all borked and I don't know why but it's a money sink and I can't afford to replace it but I don't want to keep throwing wads of cash into it because it's got 173,246 miles and the jobs are too expensive for that kind of mileage and none of this is usually a problem because I drown it in coffee but today I decided to withdraw to let my brain suffer from shrinking capillaries which were alleviated only by the medicine of an apple that's out of season now so brief a season so lovely a fruit that doesn't taste the same from that bin in the supermarket all shiny with shellac to look as tasty as the colorful wrapper of the leftover Halloween candies I'm keeping in my freezer to dip into for some small bit of pleasure in between bottles of hard cider and the last of the dwindling Oktoberfest supply that acts as a reminder of that brief season to pad our summer levity before the harsh cold claws of winter rip our minds apart with its abusive lack of sunlight further filtered by thick curtains hung to keep the meager heat inside to not run up the bills so steep so as to prevent us from life's other unfortunate necessities like the car so wasted beneath its tiny hull to get us to a job where we type type type for eight hours in between the petty tasks to support a life we can't let age beneath the layer of dust that we know is our own dead skin cruelly settling itself about us to clean lest it remind us that this wasted flesh will eventually cease to renew which is a comforting thought when juxtaposed against all the rest of it.

Forgive me, Suu, for my complaint because I'm one of the lucky ones.
Forgive me, Suu, for my life because I did not wrest it from manipulative others.
Forgive me, Suu, for that single sentence and forgive Squiddy for mentioning run-ons in another thread and bringing it to pass.
Forgive me, Suu, for blaming Squiddy on my misdeeds.
Forgive me, Suu.   

The brilliance exibited by such people!  Here I've mistakenly assumed each work unequal in quality or sincerity, cynically believing some artists even produce purposefully manipulative and pointless drivel in simple search of revenue, some puppet of schemers aiming to eradicate quality in favor of the quickness and amount of money sacrificed by their audiences.  What foolishness.

Under this new guidance I instead intend to sit and drool in passive acceptance of whichever images flash before me, be they pointless raping of another man's work or snazzy reboots of the objects of my nostalgia!

Glorious day.

Since I'm writing this regularly from three different locations I'm using Google Docs for the whole thing.  Its Word Count automatically calculates the sentences per paragraph, words per sentence, characters per word, Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and Automated Readability index.

It's presenting an interesting game of how much I can fuck up those averages in a single day of writing.  Early on, it's been quite easy.  Later, I'll likely have the work judged as easily understandable to a 13 year old student.

Much belated edit:  I've been messing around on the website and I added a few writing buddies.  I'm EaterOfClowns on there if anyone's looking.

MS Paint comes with Windows. It's in the Bureau Accesoires / Zubehör folder in the Start Menu (damn I can't for the life of me remember what it was called in English, heh. It's the same folder that the Calculator and Notepad are in.

It's called just "Paint", btw.

It's called Zubehor in English as well, pronounced ZUBE-whore (ZUBE-hoah in New England spag).

Spawn soundtrack pwns all movie soundtracks so far for me. Even though the movie was awful. Ok and the Pulp Fiction soundtrack is of course classic.

What's the Fountain's soundtrack like? I can't remember.

And I'm pretty sure if Watchmen would have been made a TV series I never would've watched it or quit before getting halfway cause seriously, if you don't know about the awesome plotting going on, pretty much fuck all is happening in the entire comic right up until the conclusion.

It's kind've true.  I was largely unimpressed on my first read through.  Once I picked it up again I was completely in love with everything (minus the Tales of the Black Freighter part).

Zack Snyder is probably among the least imaginative directors I've ever seen.  It makes him great for capturing the imagery of his source material, which shot for shot Watchmen accomplished pretty well (though his treatment was much better suited to a comic purely about looking good, 300).  In stylizing the characters for the movie, he missed the point of them being past their prime and quite a bit out of their league.  Scenes where they fought nameless attackers, mostly when dealing with Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II, were beefed up with dozens of guys getting knocked down where in the comic it was only about two or three.

In remaining so faithful to the dialogue, he missed that the writing that lends itself so well to the comic is cheesy and stupid on film, further leadening one of the best written graphic novels with wooden, distant actors.  Rorschach was done pretty well though, by that guy who played the pedophile in Little Children.  I'm also strangely a fan of Billy Crudup aka Russell Hammond from Almost Famous, aka the son from Big Fish, aka that voice from those Mastercard commercials, so I was alright with his Dr. Manhattan treatment.

The ending, while more fitting to the movie than the comic ending would have been, still doesn't make a fuck ton of sense because

Spoiler alert from a movie from almost a year ago



Ozymandius pins the whole thing on Dr. Manhattan, thus supposely uniting the world against a common enemy.  It just doesn't seem believable when you know some foreign leader would just say "Yeah, but it was the American super-man that did all this, so it's their fault."  I guess that it's sort've the point that Veidt's scheming wasn't really worth it, though.

I stick by my earlier, less rant fueled review of "fuck that shit" and continue on to Darren Aronofsky, who seems a constant source of debate on this board.

I thought RFAD was great when I saw it, but one of those movies that on reflection doesn't hold up as well.
I never enjoyed Pi.
I never saw The Fountain, but I would like to.
The Wrestler was one of the most painful experiences I've ever been through, and as much as I enjoyed the movie I would never subject myself to sitting through it again.  I have the same feelings about the first Evil Dead.  Mickey Rourke was robbed of a best actor Oscar for that show, though.

I have faith in Aronofsky to deliver a pretty high quality movie, when it comes down to it.  His fans tend to take their hero worship of him too far and his detractors seem to do the same with his demonization.  He's neither the superman nor the devil he's made out to be, just another boy wonder director with a series of cult successes that will fluctuate between moderate critical success and spectacular failure before becoming a recognized and regular fare.  Give me Danny Boyle any day.

EoC,
douching the thread up a bit.

So not having done this wonderful thing before, I'm loving the totally insane shit appearing on the computer screen before me.  An excerpt:

Kurt removed himself from the breakfast table, a busy piece of furniture which moonlighted as a dinner table, in between renting its services as a key holder, coat hanger, or grocery bag handler.  If Kurt knew it dabbled in the dark art of lunch he ignored it, lest his anger drive him to smash the efficient thing limb from dovetailed limb.  He went upstairs to his room to retrieve essential working supplies, returning to settle himself upon his favorite office desk, a deep cherry surface with a glossy finish that's been known to, in its mercenary spirit, accept a job or two as a breakfast table.
A gloriously long sleep having cut so far into the day followed by an elaborate breakfast and what he considered pointed political analysis put the start of his work at about 2 o'clock.  Lamenting shortly afterwards a lack of available camera crew to document his horror upon realizing that, yes, he'd done nothing until 2 o'clock, as in 2 in the afternoon, as in post meridian, he set himself to type furiously and research with a vengeance unseen in academia, a resolute goal to have an admissions representative at each graduate program acknowledge that the document they perused had been written with nothing short of pure fury.  Precisely thirteen words into his first project of the day, he remembered Todd's phone call.
"Shit," he declared to the amazingly multi purposed table of which he'd so recently grown fond.