i understand the historical reasons why English is the most common language
but if I was writing a speculative fiction novel
and I said “the language that most people learn as a second language, usually for professional reasons, is also the only one with a spelling system so terrible that spelling words correctly is a broadcasted competition”
you’d be like “extremely unrealistic 0/10”
i never thought of this, do other languages not have spelling bees?
I just randomly remembered something about the Harry Potter movies that enrages me.
Okay we all know the Goblet of Fire movie was one gigantic mess. We all know about the ‘calmly’. We all know about the ‘calmly’.
Oh god the ‘calmly’.
But there’s something even worse…so much worse…
It’s even worse than them omitting Hagrid’s bloodline or the scene where Cornelius Fudge intentionally gets a dementor to suck out Barty Crouch Jr.’s soul so that he couldn’t testify or Rita Skeeter’s secret or god this film was such a horrible injustice to the books!
But none of that, none of that is even remotely comparable to this scene:
THIS MOTHERF—ING SCENE
WANTS YOU TO BELIEVE THAT HARRY JAMES POTTER WOULD HESITATE NOT ONCE, BUT TWICE, WHEN IT COMES TO SAVING A FELLOW HOGWARTS STUDENT’S LIFE IN A TOURNAMENT HE NEVER WANTED TO BE IN IN THE FIRST PLACE!
It is such a disgrace to Harry’s character, to everything he’s gone through, to the sheer amount of compassion he built up over the years of abuse by the Dursleys. Harry would never, in a million years, hesitate to save Cedric and he definitely wouldn’t have his head flying back and forth between a shiny prize and a dying teenager screaming his name are you kidding me movie!?
(Cedric screams it four times by the way, in case any of you were wondering, I counted as I grabbed these screenshots.)
And to make it worse, to make it even worse, you have Cedric gave Harry a weak smile and say, “For a second there, I thought you were going to let it get me.”
Only for Harry to stare right back and say, “For a second there, so did I.”
WHAT?
In case anyone’s forgotten, here’s how the scene plays out in the book:
Notice how HARRY MF JAMES POTTER DIDN’T EVEN HESITATE WHEN CEDRIC WAS IN DANGER, HE IMMEDIATELY ACTED BECAUSE THAT’S HIS THING, THAT’S HIS WHOLE CHARACTER, HIS “SAVING PEOPLE THING” IS WHAT MAKES HARRY POTTER HARRY POTTER! THE FACT THAT HE AUTOMATICALLY TRIES TO SAVE EVERYONE REGARDLESS OF WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN TO HIM IS BOTH HIS GREATEST STRENGTH AND HIS GREATEST FLAW AND IT’S BROUGHT UP AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN IN THE BOOKS BUT THIS MOVIE THINKS IT CAN JUST THROW ALL OF THAT OUT TO GIVE YOU A SUSPENSEFUL SCENE IMPLYING THAT HARRY HAS TO STRUGGLE TO…YOU KNOW…NOT MURDER SOMEONE!?
AND DON’T WORRY, MOVIE, I’M NOT SCREAMING AT YOU! BY YOUR DEFINITION, I’M TALKING TO YOU CALMLY!
“Amy Poehler was new to SNL and we were all crowded into the seventeenth-floor writers’ room, waiting for the Wednesday night read-through to start. […] Amy was in the middle of some such nonsense with Seth Meyers across the table, and she did something vulgar as a joke. I can’t remember what it was exactly, except it was dirty and oud and “unladylike”, Jimmy Fallon […] turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said, “Stop that! It’s not cute! I don’t like it.” Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. “I don’t fucking care if you like it.” Jimmy was visibly startled. Amy went right back to enjoying her ridiculous bit. With that exchange, a cosmic shift took place. Amy made it clear that she wasn’t there to be cute. She wasn’t there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys’ scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not fucking care if you like it.”
Okay now that I’ve finally quit Denny’s let me tell you guys about the bizarre fucking otherworld it is
The music and the room temperature are controlled by corporate. Corporate plays a lot of pop covers of Disney princess songs I’ve never heard before. I now have a dance routine to the K-Pop sounding version of Let it Go.
Our sign flickered fast and red and demonically for a week and the repairman said he couldn’t find anything wrong with it.
People did drug deals in, like, broad daylight in the middle of the parking lot multiple times a week.
It’s open 24/7. We had a backup generator none of us knew about until there was a massive storm one night and we looked out to see a tree knocked over and our lights the only thing on for miles. You could weather the apocalypse with no idea the apocalypse was even happening.
Regular customers included:
A man convinced the chemtrails are real who gave me six separate pieces of literature on the subject
A little person named Kevin who told me “sometimes I call myself a dwarf when I’m feeling whimsical”
An actual group of Neo-Nazis
An actual Earth, Wind, and Fire cover band (they played for us)
Twins who came in separately on the same day and I thought they were one woman changing outfits rapidly for the longest time
A Scottish landscaper who told us we “couldn’t prove he doesn’t know Simon Pegg”
I have more these are just off the top of my head
I can’t believe I forgot
two line cooks got into a really heated argument about whether Vin Diesel is bisexual or not
I asked an elderly man if he wanted to use the AARP discount and he said “No, I’m not a socialist”.
“A new trend has emerged in the [Western] fashion world. Or so they say. Fashion bloggers, stylists, and prominent members of the fashion industry are all talking about the ‘dress over pants’ trend, which Pakistanis have been sporting for as long as we can remember.”
I saw this Kendall Jenner tweet awhile ago on the internet and I remember thinking, “Hey that’s what us Pakistani and other South Asian women wear all the time; we’ve been wearing these for years. What’s so special about this?” and then I remembered that if you’re white, everything suddenly becomes sooooo chic and stylish!!! And when the rest of us wear it, we’re insulted or stereotyped, get nasty looks, racist remarks etc etc. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of other celebs in the West wearing clothes like this too and of course they all get praised by the media and fashion bloggers for starting some new and creative trends, but the rest of us get crap for wearing our original cultural clothes.
This dress is pretty common in Pakistan, and other South Asian countries. Pakistani women rock this look pretty well:
Why do they take our fashions and create some bland and boring version of them?
Here’s another article with historical and modern examples of South Asian (Pakistani and Indian) fashion of which these gorees stole, i mean….were “inspired” by lmao
ok this post canceled due to recent events…I was talkin about some 26 year old pop star calling things “gay” in 2007 not a 50 year old hollywood producer who’s been actively pursuing 14 year old girls since 1976
a very important distinction. it’s one thing to fuck up, as all of us are apt to do, and it’s another thing entirely to be an abusive piece of shit with a history of sexual harassment.
- skewed sense of time eg; i can easily get there and back before my eggs cook!
- altered sense of reality//tendency to get sucked up in daydreams and temporarily lose track of real life
- extremely vivid daydreams// alternative realities
- feeling really lonely but getting the urge to isolate yourself for no reason
- getting overwhelmed by too many choices and freaking out
- hearing the instructions but not really being able to hold onto them
- people cant speak to you while you’re really focused on something because you can’t hold on to multiple things in your brain at once
- repeating things over and over in your head to try and remember them
- feeling like you never really appreciate things as much as you should because you get too sidetracked
- getting super excited by small things but sometimes feeling indifferent towards the things everyone’s raving about
- being self conscious from everyone telling you you’re annoying but being scared you’ll come off as boring
- getting hyperfixations on a certain person and getting really wrapped up on them regardless of if they like you back
- putting too much into things and getting disappointed when it’s not reciprocated
- constantly being told that you’re too intense and need to chill it out a bit
- ^ thinking you’re cool and desperately wanting to just be chill and laid back but your personality is just 24/7 overdrive
- building things up so much in your head to the point that it gets stressful because what if it doesn’t live up to expectations??
- extremely over-emotional (this includes when it’s inappropriate such as giggling at sad things and then feeling really bad after)
- feeling when you just don’t know when to stop
- getting increasingly uncomfortable in a situation for no apparent reason until you feel like you’re gonna cry or scream but you do none of that and just sit there
feel free to add on!
Repeating to remember is such a mood, I’ll go into the kitchen to get water and food and put the water by the doorway, then spend the entire time it takes to prepare the food repeating “remember the water” in my head so I leave with both food and water. Then I forget my phone
when someone is a christian they are not constantly asked their position on the holocaust the transatlantic slave trade the extermination of native americans or any of the thousands of atrocities committed by christians so why do muslims get asked about terrorism and jewish people about israel and are grouped in with specific bad people while christians are not required to explain themselves??
goyim and non muslims can and should reblog
[christians and all sectors of christianity that means you]
like ok today this lady was at my register and said “oh i forgot something I’ll be right back” and when she came back i went “sorry ma’am i’m actually waiting for someone” and she was like ??? me?
when i watch old movies i’m constantly surprised by how much acting has improved. not that the acting in the classics is bad, it’s just often kind of artificial? it’s acting-y. it’s like stage acting.
it took some decades for the arts of acting and filmmaking to catch up to the potential that was in movies all along; stuff like microexpressions and silences and eyes, oh man people are SO much better at acting with their eyes than they were in the 40′s, or even the 70′s.
the performances we take for granted in adventure movies and comedies now would’ve blown the critics’ socks off in the days of ‘casablanca’.
there’s a weird period in film where you can see the transition happening. right around the fifties, I think. the example my prof used when i learned about it was marlon brando in “a streetcar named desire” - he was using stanislavski acting methods and this new hyper-realistic style and most or all of his costars were still using the old, highly-stylized way of acting. it makes it way more obvious how false it is.
i even noticed it in ‘the sting’, which was 1973. i actually think they used it on purpose to get the viewer fished in by the second layer of the con; the grifters at the bookie’s were acting like they were acting, and the grifters playing the feds were acting for reals. if you’re used to setting your suspension of disbelief at the first set’s level, then the second set are gonna blow right past you.
or possibly the guys playing the grifters playing the feds just happened to be using the realistic style for their own reason, and it coincidentally made the plot twist work better. but i like to think it was deliberate.
i was thinking about this again, and when you know what to look for, it’s really obvious: old movies are stage acting, not movie acting. it just didn’t really occur to anyone to make the camera bend to the actors, rather than the other way around. just image search old movie screenshots and clips and gifs, you’ll see it. the way people march up to their mark and stand there, the way they deliver their lines rather than inhabiting the character. the way they’re framed in an unmoving center-stage.
this is a charming little tableau, quirky and unexpected, but it’s a tableau. it lives in a box.
now, i usually watch action movies, and i didn’t think it was fair to compare an action movie with what appears to be an indoor sort of story, but i do watch some comedy tv. so i looked for a brooklyn 99 gif with a similar framing, intending to point out that the camera moves, and the characters aren’t stuck inside the box. but i couldn’t even find the framing. they literally never have all the characters in the same plane, facing the camera, interacting only within the staging area. even when they’re not traveling, they’re moving around, and they treat things outside the ‘stage’ as real and interact with them, even if it’s only to stare in delighted horror.
as for action, it took a while for the movies to figure out what, exactly they wanted to show us, and how to act it. here’s a comedy punch:
here, also, is a comedy punch:
the first one looks like a stage direction written on a script. the second one looks like your friends horsing around and being jerks to each other. the first one is just not believable. the physics doesn’t work. the reaction is fakey. everyone’s stiff. even the movement of the camera is kind of wooden. the second one looks real right down to the cringe of his shoulder, and the camera feels startled too.
i’m not saying this to dis old movies, i’m just fascinated and impressed by how much the art has advanced!
I’m going to bed, but I also want to say that I think, without actually bothering to explore it and make sure, that there’s been a similar shift in comics, probably related to the shift in acting/camera work. And I think you still see remnants of old “stage acting” comics in the three-panel style set ups (you might still see it in long form comics, but you’d probably call it bad composition)
Now can someone explain why people in old films talked Like That
Y’all, THAT’S HOW PEOPLE TALKED.
Seriously, I used to work in a sound studio, and one series of projects required us to listen to LOTS of old audio recordings. Not of anything special - just people talking.
AND THEY TALKED LIKE THAT.
It was so fucking wild to hear just a couple of people being like,
“WELL HI THERE JEANINE, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?”
“OH, NOT TOO BAD, JOE, THOUGH MY HUSBAND’S BEEN AWAY ON BUSINESS FOR A FEW WEEKS AND I MISS HIM SOMETHING TERRIBLE.”
“WELL IT’S A HARD THING, JEANINE, BUT YOU’LL GET THROUGH IT.”
“WELL I SUPPOSE I’VE GOT TO, HAVEN’T I JOE?”
All in that piercing, strident, rapid-fire style we associate with the films of the era. If you’ve watched lots of old movies you can imagine the above in that speech pattern.
I don’t know if people talked like that because it was in movies but I suspect it’s the other way around.
Same goes for the UK - When they made the TV series The Hour, set in the 1950s, they had to tell the very well spoken, privately educated Dominic West to tone down his imitation of a 1950s newsreader because being accurate would have sounded to a 2011 TV audience as if he was doing a parody. When you watch Brief Encounter they’re not speaking like that because they can’t act, they’re speaking like that because it was the norm on screen. It now sounds unnatural because it’s not the norm any more.
Obviously there were people with regional accents and who didn’t speak in a heightened manner, but they didn’t get to be on TV or in movies unless they were villains. (And usually the villains were putting it on, like Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock. Sure, he was Richard Attenborough, but he was brought up in the Midlands, and by the on-screen standards of the time, that was common.)
Even the Queen’s very posh accent has changed over the last 50 years and become “more common" - check out newsreel footage etc for proof - and recordings of her father are almost like someone from a foreign country (well, it is the past).
There is, for many film historians/critics, an actual turning point from mannered, theatrical, or “overplayed” acting on screen to naturalistic/American Method realism on screen. It happens in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, during a traveling shot in which Marlon Brando’s character and Eva Marie Saint’s character are walking together. Eva Marie Saint accidentally drops her glove in the middle of the scene. Marlon Brando instinctively picks it up as his character, and continues the dialog, all the while playing with the glove–turning it about, trying it on, etc. Eva Marie Saint stuck with him, never broke, and the director didn’t call “cut.”
Before that scene in that movie, if an actor dropped a prop by accident, they would have re-shot the scene–because Brando mostly disappeared out of frame as he bent down to pick up the glove, and (as is explained above) movies were framed to keep the people in the scene in the frame. I
t’s a pretty famous scene in movies because Brando’s character doesn’t give the glove back, but instead uses it to amplify what the two characters are experiencing, naturally and without artifice. It is, for all intents and purposes, the exact moment that screen acting changed.
Okay, but here’s the thing about television specifically: given the size of TV screens when they first came out? Stage acting was the only thing that could be READ. Watch Star Trek: TOS on a modern screen and it looks absurdly overacted. Film of the same era is not, and yet the TV is.
And that’s not a fault of the actors; they were all very capable of naturalistic film acting (yes, even Shatner) – as the later movies would bear out. It’s because they were acting for the small screen, not the big one.
Stage acting and stage makeup is what it is because people are far enough away from the stage that you have to cake on the makeup garishly and exaggerate the hell out of your for it to be VISIBLE. And in early television? Yeah, those constraints actually very much applied. You could move the camera, sure, but the quantity of visual information you could send was just damned limited.
Here’s another example of that.
Watch some Classic Dr Who. You may or may not notice it without watching for it, but every shot of the TARDIS is taken from the same angle.
The TARDIS was, at that time, a stage set. The camera was behind the fourth (Sixth?) wall. It was fixed. And most TV sets were built like this. They had a specific fourth wall and everything was filmed from that angle.
Fast forward to the new series, and you’ll see that the TARDIS is being filmed from different angles all the time, including following the actor around.
Three things have changed:
1. Cameras have become much smaller.
2. Set building for TV has developed as an art. Those early sets were built by people who were trained to build stage sets.
3. Overall technological improvement resulting in things being cheaper.
The TARDIS set that was just retired? Each of its walls was designed to slide out. So you could put the camera anywhere you wanted. Presumably this is the case with the new one too. They couldn’t imagine doing that back in the day. Nor could they afford the complexities of a set like that.
It’s actually my opinion that TV has very much matured as an art form…this century. This decade. We are doing and seeing things that couldn’t be done ten years ago, twenty. Heck, even five.
Going back to speech patterns for a moment – I was a young child in the 80s, so my memories of the norms of the time period are limited (especially because I was incredibly sheltered), but the books I read at the time and the popular movies of the time all have this kind of – whimsical, sardonic speech pattern going on. Think John Waters dialogue.
I always thought it was kind of stylized. But then I ended up in a weird part of YouTube one night and found someone’s home video of just walking aroud a 7-11 convenience store at midnight talking to people in Orlando, Florida. Just trying out their new camcorder for shits and giggles, talking to other customers, talking to the cashier, etc. And you know what? They all talked like a goddamn John Waters movie. It was the weirdest thing, like I was watching outtakes from The Breakfast Club or Say Anything. I expected one of the Cusacks to walk into frame any second.
Anyway, so I think it’s super cool how human speech and interaction shifts over time, and if you’re living through the shift, you don’t really notice it as it happens.
I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click
And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”
I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
This is my new favourite story.
When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.
There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server.
The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors.
During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”
So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound.
I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.
So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…
“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”
It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.
There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.
The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring.
Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.
But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.
Seriously, this is legit.
In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline. Here’s the ad they posted.
Only problem is, they misprinted the number. And the number they printed? It went straight through to fucking NORAD. This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay. NORAD was the front line.
And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD. Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red
one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the
number,” she says.
“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War,
and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on
the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in
December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a
small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His
children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was
annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then,
Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized
that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him,
ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your
mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper
yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad
looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had
children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the
phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You
know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering
Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.
And then, it got better.
“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and
Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam
says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was
a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,”
Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re
sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’
Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called
the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat
Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks
like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour
and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.
For real.
“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people
saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor.
And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a
briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she
says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s
known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”
So yeah. I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
Teachers: Wikipedia is very unreliable *Hands out 25 year old textbooks instead*
Alrighty guys ,gals, and other genders and lack thereof I’m gonna teach ya a thing.
A lot of teachers will go on about not using wikipedia as a source.
“It’s bad,” they say. “I will deduct points if you do it.”
Well wikipedia is actually a great source of information and fuck what your teacher said, you absolutely can use it.
The key though is knowing
A.How to use it.
B. How to source it.
and
C. whether it is good info or trash.
NowFirst Lets look up something on wikipedia. Say your writing a paper on Gregor Mendel and Mendelian Inheritance.
So you zoom over to the Wikipedia page on Mendelian Inheritance.
Now there is a lot of information here. Not all of it is strictly necessary for that essay you are writing. So you read through and suddenly you see something that is good info for your essay.
Boy oh boy this information is useful. To bad your teacher said No Wikipedia Ever.
However there is a loophole.
It’s right there.
No. Go closer.
You see that little four? Its a citation number. Think of wikipedia as it’s own essay. It got it’s information from other sources out there. Just like you are trying to right now. And since there is a citation, it’s going to be listed at the end of the wikipedia article.
Look at citation number 4
Look at that you have your first citation. From Wikipedia.
And look. Do you see it. There is a link. It’s the blue words with the boxy arrow thingamajig.
That thing. Click it.
Why did you leave wikipedia you ask? Wikipedia is great. You have several sources from there. But There is more than what the put in to that wiki article. Those sources Wikipedia gave you are helpful. And now that you are at the source, you can utilize it.
But what if its a book that’s the source.
You can either head to your local library and see if they have it, order it, or avoid the book source. Online sources are just as valuable.
Also do not quote directly from the wikipedia. Quote from the source and then use quote citation.
And MLA citation. Use MLA citation. Since you are linked to the sources cite them. Not the wikipedia.
Your teacher will never know. And now you can finish that sweet essay you got planned.
You’re on your way to greatness.
For anybody not aware you can abuse the absolute fuck out of Wikipedia for any papers!
I’m an academic librarian and I 100% endorse this post
I am also an academic librarian and I 100% endorse this post. CITATIONS are important.
Old People Restaurant Scam. You know the scam. Whine about perfectly good food to get some sort of comp.
In their old age, my parents befriended another older couple who would pull this stunt everywhere they went. After my mother told me a few stories about how their new friends had shown them how to get discounted or free meals, I felt like I was suddenly the responsible adult, concerned about the bad influence these people were on my parents.
While visiting my parents with my girlfriend, this other couple attended dinner with us. As I expected, the food was brought to the table and they immediately began dramatically complaining to one another about the quality/taste/temperature/etc. They were making a scene in order to attract the attention of the waitress. When our waitress returned to ask how we were doing, the miserable old bastard who played the lead role in their act took a deep breathe, struck a dramatic pose (with his hand raised to begin gesticulating for emphasis) and bega–I leaned forward and cut him off before he could finish the first word: “Everything is absolutely fantastic. It’s all great! Thank you very much!” She smiled, and began her obligatory “Great, well if you need any–” when he made a second attempt. “We come here all the time an–”. I didn’t acknowledge that he was speaking at all, repeated that all was just as we ordered and thank her again.
He was stunned and thrown off from his routine by my interruption. During this pause the waitress walked away (It seemed clear that she knew what they were trying to accomplish). He turned bright red. I turned to my girlfriend and, smiling and without lowering my voice, stated how pitiful it is that some people could be dishonest, deceitful and put at risk the livelihood of a cook, server or hostess for a pathetic discount or a free early-bird special. My passive-aggressive reverse-parenting broke my parents of the habit in short time.
And baby boomers talk shit about Millennials being entitled
As a Jimmy Johns employee for three years, the largest demographic that scams us for sandwiches are older than 40.
