P L U S: A clerk responds "The customer is always wrong"

SERVICE TENSION Cretinous clerks, -- woolly-headed waiters, angst-ridden attendants -- you just can't get good help these days. - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS | My sandwich is being held hostage. It's the fad-friendly lunch of the moment -- a grilled chicken Caesar wrap -- and it is there on the Specials board for all the world to see. I am firmly convinced that this delicacy exists somewhere behind the lunch counter, but I'm equally certain I'm going to have to suffer to get it. That's because the person taking my order is, in a word, an idiot. On the one hand, we are a nation of workaholics. Friends who brag of 60-hour weeks are branded sissybutts by those who work 80-hour ones. I see women at my gym editing financial reports on the Stairmaster. Neighbors won't go out unless armored up in beeper, cell phone, Pilot notebook and laptop. Yet while one segment of society is working harder than ever, another seems to be barely working at all. Somewhere in the last few years, I gave up expecting anything approaching decent service anywhere. I assume my coffee order will be screwed up, that my cab driver will be surly, that clerks in the video store will greet me with open hostility should I distract them from their Factsheet Five to inquire after the availability of a Keanu Reeves title. At first my friends and I simply tried to avoid destinations with particularly cruel or insipid staff. But eventually we realized that we are outnumbered, and that we simply can't stop going to the supermarket or the takeout deli. So now we once again roam freely in a world in which we have to tell the bartender how to make a cosmopolitan, where we hand out business cards with our correct phone numbers handwritten above Kinko's interpretative version. And to preserve the shreds of our sanity, we talk about it constantly. We one-up each other's tales of interactions with rude, pathological or clueless service people. We point each other to places that have the most profoundly disturbed crews of cretins ever assembled and dare each other to use their goods and services. Go ahead, we taunt. See if I'm kidding about the dry cleaner who will chain-smoke Marlboros while telling you it's 15 bucks to freshen up your silk shirts. We are not pioneers who crossed the plains in covered wagons. We are not survivors of the Depression who wore the same tattered pair of socks for five years. But by God, we'll tell our grandchildren about the time we ordered thin crust pie and got a Sicilian instead. My own personal service hell is the fashionable little home of trendy grilled chicken Caesar wraps. I go a few times a month, yet I've rarely if ever gotten every portion of my order just right. They give me lemonade when I ask for iced tea. They give me roast beef when I request ham. They put it on wheat when I look the lunch guy straight in the eye and say, "Rye," as clearly and meaningfully as I know how. So it does not surprise me today when I rattle off my order and counter dude looks at me blankly, as if this act of asking him for food has caught him quite off guard. He seems genuinely puzzled that the mere fact that he is standing behind a lunch counter and in front of a cash register has led me to leap to this wild notion. I briefly entertain the hope of him having an epiphany, like in those dreams where you suddenly realize you're naked -- "Whoa! Look at that! I'm a lunch counter guy!" -- but he does not. He simply looks at me, looks at the menu and finally grunts, "Sandwich?" I wave bills at him, which he eyes with suspicion but takes. Then, guessing it'll be easier on everyone if he just plays along with me, he mutters an order to a surly-looking young woman who glowers as she hurls croutons into the flatbread. Nearby, another patron is on the verge of handing over his Rolex if he can just get someone to agree to put a slice of cheese on his BLT. And yet, every day from 11:30 to 3:00, there is a line out the door to get into this place. I myself return again and again, with all the inexplicable loyalty of a Kennedy wife who just can't stay away from her lumpen and inattentive spouse. Why are we so preoccupied with these people? Part of it may be the simple need for a reality check -- to have someone reassure us when we ask, "Am I crazy, or does the guy at the corner grocery store never know how much anything is?" We bond on the field of It's-Not-Us-It's-Them. I'm so fixated on half-assed and even quarter-assed attention I've started classifying it. The way I see it, ministers of inferior help take two basic forms -- the dumb-as-a-post type and the I'm-too-good-to-be-here type. Let's start with the more numerous dumb-as-a-posters. Dumb-as-a-posters may be genuinely sweet or sullenly bored, but either way, they will be vastly unprepared for the basic challenges of the job at hand. This is the cashier who doesn't understand cash registers, the cabbie perplexed by commands like "Turn left." I don't expect everyone I encounter as I go through my day to be a "Jeopardy!" champ. But is it too much to ask that the service people I deal with know just a little more about their fields of specialty than I do? When I call an airline reservation clerk and ask for fares to the District of Columbia, I would rather not be asked, "That's in Canada, right?" I'd like to think that someone who spends all day sending people to various points all over the globe might know what the capital of our country is. I would like the operator, when I call directory assistance for the number of Garden Golf and Sports, to be able to deduce for herself before asking, "Is that a business or a residence?" Still, for all her simple ways, I get the feeling that the truly stupid person is making some small effort, that she believes in her heart she is performing adequately in a demanding role. She may wear me out, but I rarely detect true malice in the way she goes about her business. The I'm-too-good-to-be-here type presents another problem. This is the embittered, overqualified laborer who feels it necessary to let you know that in a truly fair and just world, you would be taking orders from him. This type believes that manifesting any signs of efficiency or, God forbid, cheerfulness represents a loathsome pride in menial work. So he does not. Maybe he's fresh out of school or still working his way through it. Maybe he's the victim of downsizing. Maybe he's an unrecognized genius waiting to be discovered. Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass. All I know is that I'm pretty sure that whatever his current job description, it doesn't include making me painfully aware he is capable of much much more. I empathize with the frustration of having a shitty job. But these tortured artists and slumming debutantes don't seem to realize that most of us in the professional world have had to do time as wage slaves someplace. When I go to the movies, I don't assume that it was the usher's dream all through film school to someday have the honor of ripping my stub. I know that people have rich and complicated lives outside of selling handbags or hostessing at Chi Chi's. I'm not trying to hold anybody back; it's just that for the business at hand, we don't need to exchange SAT scores. When I'm at the used bookstore, I don't need the clerk to engage in any eye-rolling, any loud sighing, any dramatic tossing aside of the current Lingua Franca because I want to buy a postcard. At least he can take comfort in knowing that long after his shift is over, I'll still be pondering, "What's his deal, anyway?" Because I have to. If my friends and I go on and on about the ill treatment we receive at the hands of parking valets and hotel concierges, it's out of a profound need to work out our hostility. It's our only option -- we can't exactly start a revolution under the banner of Citizens for the Eradication of Spaced Out Waiters Who Won't Bring You Your Check No Matter How Hard You Try to Get Their Attention. Think how hard it'd be to work up a rallying cry. So if you can't beat 'em and you can't join 'em, you can at least tell your friends droll anecdotes about 'em. The only way not to have one's head explode from rage every single day is to channel exasperation into amusement wherever possible. Rather than snapping, "What's the holdup here, Gomer?" at some skill-challenged gas station attendant, I can get on with my day, secure in the knowledge that he is already immortalized in my storytelling canon as Pump Boy the Wonder Boob. And in the telling of his tale, I become less outraged at his behavior and more plain amazed at his very existence. When I worked in New York, I spent three and a half years going to the same muffin shop five days a week. Every day, the cashier looked upon me as if I were a complete stranger and asked me how I took my coffee. Sometimes, she'd fix it wrong anyway. I could have gone to a different place, but now I think it was her utter indifference to me that kept me coming back. I wanted her to get it right one day, and by the same token, I was impressed with her perfect record of nonchalance, not just toward me but everyone who came in. Those mornings, I was frequently on my way to a 10-hour day, and it seemed almost enviable that someone could barely be working at all and still attract a clientele. There are times at my local chi-chi grilled chicken Caesar wrap cafe that I want to leap behind the counter, slice myself some bread, put a little chicken salad in between and yell, "Is that SO hard, you monkeys?" But I have no intention of relinquishing my patronage (I actually tried to stop going for a month once; it didn't stick). I doubt it's just the food that keeps me coming back -- after all, I rarely know just what I'll wind up with when I place my order. It must be something more. I'm no masochist, and if one day the staff were to turn suddenly hard-working and cheerful, I would be well pleased. I don't think it's a likely scenario, though. Instead, I have to settle for wondering in what new and creative ways they'll misinterpret the request "no onions" and pondering what they possibly could have said on their job applications that would have made anyone trust them with sharp knives. I've grown almost fond of them -- they're all that and a bag of chips nobody ordered. And if nothing else, I know that if I go there for lunch, I'll have something to talk about at dinner. SALON | Oct. 15, 1997 Share your tales of service agony in Table Talk.

ILLUSTRATION BY ERIC WHITE