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Since my return home from my short trip last week, I have been very, very busy. I’ve had to catch up on assignments that I had to get extensions for, as well as work on the final projects/assignments since the summer session is winding down for the two classes I’m taking. My mom got surgery a few days ago and I’ve been busy with taking care of her and keeping house. I’m trying to wrap up loose ends for my upcoming trips, like plane tickets and accommodation, which is never an easy task.

These responsibilities have been compounded with headache-inducing frustration and stupidity from various “professionals” in my life. All the stuff I’ve already mentioned has been pretty commonplace for me this summer; classes, vacation-planning, and family responsibilities aren’t exactly new territory for me. But there are some other things on my plate that have become far more complicated and drawn out than is necessary, which has been causing me untold amounts of stress. All of it comes back to the same thing: I have to chase up various professionals in my life for overdue answers.

• The results of a blood test
  I had a blood test done a month ago. Nothing fancy, just routine check up stuff. She told me that the nurse would call me in 4-5 days with the results of my test. 4-5 days passed… nothing. 2 weeks passed… nothing. By the time the one-month mark was hovering along the horizon, I placed a phone call to the nurse and asked what was going on. Cue several more instances of phone tag before I got my results – one month after I had been promised them, and only after I had called the nurse multiple times. What ludicrousness. What if I had been dead and dying of some horrible, deadly disease? More importantly, why was it up to me to push and push the nurse to do her job of obtaining the results of my blood test?
• My banker’s inefficiency at her job
  At the closest branch of my bank, there is this one lady who is an absolute trainwreck. She’s incredibly careless. She forgets to tell you things like required minimum balances or service fees. She also has a tendency to make typos when it comes to bank account and routing numbers, which is obviously a huge mistake in the world of banking. A month ago, I had to get a letter from my bank with my account and routing number information. She wrote it and I mailed it; I had thought that was that. Wrong. Apparently, she mistyped one of the numbers, because I got notified that the letter couldn’t be processed. I probably should have double-checked the numbers in the letter before I mailed it, but come on – the woman is a banker. Bankers should know better than to mistype account and routing numbers. After an additional, and very frustrating, trip to the bank, I got a copy of another letter with my correct information.
• My school’s abroad office’s lackadaisical manner
  Being lackadaisical isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when it comes to running an office that sends students abroad, it is a very, very bad thing. I need a visa to study abroad in China next year, and until I get documents from my abroad office for proof of student status, I can’t apply for the visa. The office has known since April 15 (read: they’ve known for two months!!) how many students are going to China. However, I have yet to receive any forms for my visa. This is a problem. Starting July 1, I am out of town, and starting July 27, I am out of the country. How am I supposed to take care of my visa if I am not at home to a) receive the visa documentation and 2) apply for the visa? This is an abroad office. They should know that students travel during the summer. Hell, I have made it clear to my advisor that starting July 1, I won’t be around to apply for my visa and if that happens, I’m screwed. I just really want my documents so I can get my visa and secure entry into China for next year. Is that too much to ask for from an abroad office? I don’t think so.

In all three instances I have had to make numerous phone calls, send various emails and even make trips to the office to get things done. It’s stressful, it’s ridiculous and it’s not part of my job description. It’s not fun to be a nagging bitch; I don’t particularly enjoy it. All of these people are paid to do their job. So why do I have to chase them around until I get answers? Why am I the one scrambling for information that was promised to me weeks ago? Why has it become my responsibility to make sure things get done or risk things falling apart when they are the professionals, not me?

First and foremost, I feel that I should say that I have never worked as a waitress, so I’m sure some will discount the rest of this entry because of that fact. But this entry has been a long time in the making and is the result of numerous observations in my experiences dining out at restaurants where there is wait staff involved.

It is customary for wait staff to ask diners if they would like anything to drink once they are seated. Wait staff almost always ask about the drinks first, leave, return with drinks, leave again, and then come back after an interval once the customers have decided what they want to order for food. And so on and so forth, until the bill is paid (inclusive of a hefty tip) and the table is cleared and the next round of diners are seated. Everyone who’s ever dined out before knows this drill.

Based on this pattern and my vast experiences dining out (yay college!), I’ve come to the following conclusion: The quality of service you get from your respective waiter/waitress depends on what type of drink you order.

If you order an alcoholic beverage (expensive), you are treated more attentively by the waiter/waitress. If you order a soda or a juice (average), you are treated decently. But if you order a water (free), good luck with getting the kind of attentive treatment the person who ordered alcohol would get!

It all comes down to the tip factor, doesn’t it? The more expensive the stuff you order is, the more expensive the bill is going to be and thus, higher the tip. Therefore, if you order an alcoholic drink or soda or juice (or anything other than water, really), there’s hope for a great tip yet. But if you order a water, more often than not you get automatically judged for being a cheapskate and one of the following happens: 1) the waiter/waitress tries to subtly hurry you along so they can turn over the table faster, or 2) the waiter/waitress tends to the rest of their tables before they tend to you. Hey, you just ordered water, so unless you order something monstrously expensive your bill isn’t going to be as expensive as the table that just ordered cocktails!

As someone who almost always orders water in restaurants, I find this all to be more than a little frustrating. I don’t always order water because it’s free. (Not that I’m complaining about the price.) No, I order water because 1) I can’t legally order alcohol as I’m underage, 2) I already don’t drink enough water during the day so whenever I get the chance to I drink it, and 3) it’s the healthiest option. If I’m out at a restaurant the chances of me ordering a small-sized, healthy and non-fattening dish are about zero, so the water will help me feel less guilty about what I eat!

What I don’t really understand, though (and this is where my lack of waitressing experience becomes a relevant factor) is why this beverage-ordering theory of mine impacts the quality of service by the waiter/waitress. I understand the whole final-amount-of-bill-affects-amount-of-tip thing, but the percentage paid in tips isn’t set in stone. It’s like a sliding scale; people pay anywhere between 10-20 percent. I’m far more likely to pay a 20 percent tip if the quality of service I receive is great; I’m more inclined to pay only 15 percent if the waiter/waitress blows me off after I place my order for water.

So, wait staff of the tipping world, take note: if you roll your eyes at me when I order water (this has happened before), it doesn’t matter how much the dishes I order are or what the final price of my bill is. Your tip is not going to be anything to write home about.

Dear Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg/The Facebook Powers That Be,

I can see straight through your PR spin of “building the social web together” when the new Facebook platform was announced. I don’t need new ways for my online experience to be personalized, because essentially that’s just another tool to divulge more personal information about me and my dis/likes for everyone to see across the World Wide Web. I don’t even bother reading the stuff that my friends choose to “Like” on Facebook because more often than not it’s stupid stuff like “Why do I even miss you?” or “If you ask me to hold your drink, I will drink it”¹. So why would I want to be privy to this kind of stuff all across the web? Do I really have to know what specific type of Levi’s jeans my friend chose to “like” on the Levi’s website? No, not really. If I really wanted to know, I could just, you know, do it the old school way and ask him or her instead.

I already have enough qualms about how addicted to Facebook my generation has become over the last few years and how much Facebook has permeated society and created various societal norms that are continually reinforced². This is especially disconcerting when considering that much of Facebook’s recent changes to the platform eliminates previously established privacy settings. Despite Facebook’s claims to the contrary, Facebook is more public now than it ever was before and users need to check through each and every single setting under the “Privacy” tab of their account to make sure they’re not sharing private information with strangers.

I also have a problem with how this new “Instant Personalization Pilot Program” and how all users are automatically opted into sharing personal public information with third party websites such as Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora and Yelp. Sure, public information is fair game, but when your relatively recent privacy changes affected which personal information became public, a lot of users are going to end up sharing information they thought was private. Even if I uncheck the box that says “Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites” I’m told that my friends that participate in this personalization program can still share my public information. So then I have to individually block the applications for the third party websites involved in the personalization program to ensure that my personal information remains, well, personal. Even then I’m not sure I’ve wholly prevented third party websites from accessing my information.

I’m not the only one that thinks the new platform and the personalization program sucks. While I don’t realistically think Senators asking Facebook to reconsider the way they divulge user information to third party websites is going to do anything, it’s definitely a sign that something is amiss when it comes to Facebook’s new features.

1. Both of these are taken directly from what’s currently on my news feed. I’m not making this stuff up. [↩]
2. Wow, my professor was totally right when she said the theories and communication models we studied this semester would be relevant in every day life. Props to her. [↩]