A majority of the capital city’s waitstaff do indeed hate you, according to a recent survey conducted by the agency that provides answers to residents’ nagging questions.
While 13 percent of employees in the restaurant sector say they “don’t mind” you and six percent agree that you’re annoying but “better than a visit to Contrôle Technique,” a full 81 percent of respondents express an intense loathing of you.
“The reasons are quite clear,” said Dr. Marc Jacoby, a researcher for the Institut National des Questions les Plus Fréquemment Posées. He visited more than 200 restaurants to collect data, and consequently heard plenty of stories about you.
“If I may be so bold as to provide insight, this is the typical encounter: you waltz into a restaurant, your face full of sunshine, as if you possessed the magic ability to compel the staff to lay out a rainbow-colored carpet, just for you,” he said. “But this assumption merely causes everyone to immediately dislike you.”
“And instead of holding up your fingers and angrily grunting to signify the number of people in your party, as every savvy diner knows to do, you pathetically labor to communicate in the staff’s mother tongue,” he continued. “Your accent is so awful that it induces nausea and causes some waiters to actually get sick in the mop bucket.”
Jacoby says that after you are seated, any possibility of a passable encounter is eradicated by your unrelenting horribleness.
“Before you’ve even sat down, you insist on making eye contact with the waitress, as if she weren’t already conscious of — and disgusted by — your toxic presence in her cramped workspace,” he said. “And when she does arrive five minutes later to take your order, you act surprised by her appearance, and only then decide to examine the menu as if this restaurant service routine were totally new to you.”
Worst of all, says Jacoby, is that you always waste precious minutes of everyone’s lives with unfunny jokes, clumsy attempts at small talk, and feigned interest in house specialties — when you will end up ordering the cheapest item on the menu, as every waiter in Luxembourg-ville can attest.
And what really crosses the “t” in their hatred of you, says Jacoby, is your conduct at the end of a meal.
“You engage in this ridiculous crippled ostrich act wherein you stand up half-way, stick your butt out, crane your neck, and maniacally flap one arm,” he said. “And when you finally get your server’s attention, you make an absurd writing-with-a-pen gesture to imply that you want the check.”
“Are you going to pay by check? Do you have a check? Does anyone in Luxembourg have checks?” he continued. “Of course not, so stop acting like a buffoon before some heroic waiter, a real Clint Eastwood of the food service industry, stabs your hand with a steak knife.”
“Which would be legally and morally justified in your case,” he added.