Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/08/david-sedaris-unfunnily-proposes-a-citizens-dismissal-law-that-lets-anyone-fire-service-workers-at-any-time.html
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…And he locked his Twitter account. Wonder if the working class had objections.
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Sedaris should stick to his essays. He’s turning into a humorless crank these past few years.
Too much time spent living in Paris has warped his sensibilities, I reckon.
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1992 vs today:
In 1992, David Sedaris first read “Santaland Diaries,” the tale of the horrible time he had working as a Macy’s elf. The story includes him recounting an awful customer threatening to have him fired, which he imagines responding to by saying, “I’m going to have you killed.” That was the ‘90s, though, and Sedaris is no longer a lowly department store elf
source: Maybe, David Sedaris, now isn't the right time for jokes about firing workers
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The Karens already have too much power.
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It’s almost like having a successful career based on droll narcissism leads one to believe that plain old narcissism will also be well-received.
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Wow. Read the room, David. There was no right time for this piece, but this is especially not the right time.
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French waiters are grown ass men and women and they don’t need your shit. They have a professional job to do and they do it well. Kissing Karen’s arse is not that job.
Americans need to grow up about this.
ETA this is not to suggest that you were whingeing about French (or Spanish) waiters. I just have heard it so often from Americans in Europe. It’s like they go out to be annoyed rather than realise that this is a grown person with a families job and they have a big room to deal with. They are not paid to chat with you and lick your poo hole. Nor are they working at being rude. They are busy. Unless you click your fingers at them. Serving staff will have theirs if you do that. And you deserve it.
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Irony is dead (probably from Covid-19 because, you know, Americans)
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Are you saying Sedaris’s piece is meant to be ironic? That’s what I went there looking for myself, and my takeaway was “Wow. I don’t think he’s being ironic.”
My world would be a little less sad if he were being ironic.
[edit: forgot closing quotation marks.]
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Yes, David. We do.
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The ‘Sunday Morning’ essays are as much performance pieces as anything else (see Jim Gaffigan) so, yes, I will suppose a certain level of irony, until Sedaris proves me wrong.
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Yeah, I don’t think he was ironically swimming at the YMCA or ironically buying cups and saucers with his sister…
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It’s like a citizen’s arrest, but instead of detaining someone, you get to fire them!
We already do get to fire them, David. Every time you give a pissy low rating to a customer service or gig worker or complain to a supervisor you’re potentially adding to a “fire for cause” file with HR.
The really unfortunate thing is that the corporations that employ these people are somehow immune from the same consequences.* The company gives the customer service person a very limited range of cookie-cutter options to help a customer, and then when they can’t provide a satisfactory resolution they take the brunt of the customer’s ire while crappy managers and executives are untouched by it.
And then those same managers and executives express puzzlement when their brands’ reputation goes downhill or when it goes out of business.
As someone who has to spend time thinking about these things, bad customer service is in my experience more often the fault of bad training, corner-cutting under-investment, inflexible management structures, and policies rooted in short-sighted penny-ante greed than it is the fault of the individual rep.
[* “hurf durf Invisible Hand”, respond the “free”-market fundies, but no…]
I’ve enjoyed enough of Sedaris’ pieces over the years to recognise when he’s being ironic. Watching that video, this doesn’t strike me as one of those times. He just sounds like another cranky and privileged white guy.
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I forgot that was written by Sedaris! I went to a staged reading of that a few years ago and it … did not hold up, eek.
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'cept he moved to England some time ago.
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He’s become that turd in one of his funniest essays that just refuses to be flushed.
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It still works for me, mostly because of an underlying compassion and self-deprecating humility that just isn’t present in this video.
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If I go to dinner out (well, prior to the pandemic, obvs) with a friend, and they are rude to the wait staff, they’re not my friend for too much longer. Even if the wait person does a terrible job, I still treat them with respect. It’s a tough job and here in the states, you rely on tips to make ends meet.
Anyway, so Americans are often shitty to wait staff, but also Americans love going to places like this…
So… 
Amurica… freedum?
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