The irrationality of rationality

Here’s an interesting observation, based on a discovery of mine earlier today. If you enter ‘Place de la Mairie Aix-en-Provence’ into Bing Maps, it will sit there for the rest of time, calmly asking you to “wait a moment” while it does the square root of fuck all. On the other hand, you can enter the same search string into Google, and within 0.35 seconds, it’s found the address, shown it on a map, and displayed beneath it the first ten of 2,980,000 web results. Now, consider this. If your chip pan caught fire, and you needed to know the best way to put it out, which search engine would you call upon?

I did actually see a chip pan fire once. It was in a mobile display vehicle outside a Sainsbury’s store, as part of a roving Strathclyde Fire & Rescue public awareness programme, and when I say it went up in flames, I mean the flames were two feet out of the pan. I’ve never cooked chips at home since, and I have had a great respect for the staff at Mr V’s in Battlefield from that day to this. They risk their lives so you can eat greasy carbohydrates, and I bet you don’t even tip them when you collect your deep-fried heart attack with extra pickles.

Which brings me onto my Rant for the Day (you knew it was coming, didn’t you?) Why do we tip people? It’s completely irrational that we tip the person who carries plates across a restaurant, rather than the person who actually cooks the food we’ve gone there to enjoy in the first place. We tip taxi drivers, but not bus drivers. We tip the guy who carries your luggage to your hotel room, but not the maid who’s charged with removing all the evidence of last night’s debauchery and bodily fluids. I tip delivery drivers who bring me the aforementioned greasy carbohydrates, but I’d no more tip my doctor for giving me sound medical advice than I would fly to the moon. And if I did fly to the moon, I probably wouldn’t tip the NASA astronauts who ensured I returned to Earth in the same number of pieces as when I set off. Nor would I play among those stars, but to be frank, that’s another story.

In America, where immigrant children earn $2 a day sewing chillies onto goats, tipping is a valuable way to supplement meagre incomes, and it is regarded as something of a necessity. In Britain, it’s pretty much superfluous, not to mention hugely selective. I worked in retail for six years as a student, and never once did I receive a single penny in tips. And before you judge this (perhaps correctly) to be the embittered rant of a never-tipped sub-minimum-wage shelf-stacking gimp, I didn’t need to be tipped – I was paid for what I did. I would only have spent any tips on solvents and alcopops. And yet I feel guilty leaving a restaurant without tipping, even if the waitress has poured hot consommé into my crotch while picking her nose and criticising my other half’s hairstyle. Admittedly, it would be difficult to manage all three of these things at once, but I’ve met a few waitresses who looked ready to give it a try. One, down in London (where else?) was so surly, she remains a running joke in our house seven years after her night of the long faces.

So anyway, Neil’s Tip of the Day is this. Don’t tip anyone. You’re just sustaining a culture of complacency and expectation that has little justification in the modern age, and what’s more, you’re tipping the wrong people. Tip the ambulance driver who collects you when you dial 999, not the barman who pours you a pint of lager, which is his bloody job, after all. You don’t tip search engines for giving you a world of information in 0.35 seconds, although since Google don’t pay corporation tax in the UK, they’re hardly short of cash as it is. Ooh, I can feel another rant coming on...