This week: emotional tips, budgeting tips, the tip of the iceberg, and travel tips.
The fish was a little on the dry side, but we will rebuild
Having a bad meal is like surviving a terrorist attack — linguistically-speaking — according to a study which found that the emotional language of bad restaurant reviews was similar in tone and form to writing by survivors of the 9/11 attacks.
Incredibly, our traditional system of paying servers leaves them to dependant to that kind of scenery-chewing emotional range. Livelihoods depend on it — average pay for a server in our state, including tips, is just $27,650. Meanwhile, the people doing the service work are compelled to restrict their range of visible feeling to that of the Jack-in-the-Box ball.
Slave to the Needle?
There’s a second reason why workers at the Space Needle restaurant feel like they’re just spinning in circles without getting anywhere: they haven’t gotten a raise in more than 4 years. Instead, management found the perfect Northwest-style passive-aggressive gift for people whose living standard hasn’t improved: a webinar on how to “live on less”. Seattlish has some alternative tourism suggestions.
A different Tri-Cities: Pasco, Ferguson, Staten Island
Nearly a thousand people in Pasco gathered to protest the police shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, an unarmed Mexican immigrant who had worked in nearby fruit orchards. The killing of Zambrano-Montes was captured on video, but this was not an isolated incident: Pasco police have shot and killed three people since July. The community response in the city of 68,000 has been powerful, with protests and political accountability sessions focused on the links between police violence, inequality, and political unrest, much as in Ferguson, Staten Island, Seattle, and elsewhere.
Flying can be like Pitfall, just without the vines and the tar pits
Show dog owners refused to just roll over & accept questionable animal-handling policies involved in getting their pooches back into Sea-Tac from the Westminster kennel club competition.
Despite the motion we filed in the court of public opinion, a trial date was set for defendants facing civil disobedience charges from the We’ve Been Robbed protest at Alaska Airlines Headquarters in SeaTac.
And symbolizing the sting of poverty wage jobs in the airline industry, a scorpion boarded an Alaska flight out of LAX and nipped a passenger. A flight attendant reportedly killed the scorpion. As always, we appreciate the solidarity.