A Luxembourg City waiter is being called “a harbinger of doom” who is “not a trumpeter of the apocalypse, but something close, maybe his kid brother with a kazoo” after he explicitly requested a tip from a customer.
The portentous act occurred at a restaurant in Howald during an otherwise normal Tuesday when the employee handed 45-year-old Arlo Kemp the bill and asked, without any hint of irony, if the man would like to give a tip.
The server produced a card reader displaying tip options ranging from 10 to 25 percent, prompting Kemp to reach for his reading glasses although he has never in his life worn or needed glasses. Somewhere in an adjacent room, a child cried.
Kemp pretended to choke and ran to the toilet to wait out the situation in the hope that the server and his request would just disappear and he could pay at the bar.
When the victim ventured back out, however, he was surprised to see that the server was waiting nearby, wielding the credit card reader and its tip options like a weapon.
“Well, okay, why not,” a flustered Kemp said and pressed the 10-percent button although, as a rule, he never leaves more than a two-euro coin.
The most disturbing part of the encounter, Kemp says, is that he detected a slight chilliness from the server after selecting the smallest amount, which he believes is quite a generous tip.
Experts say that if a single waiter in Luxembourg City has begun explicitly requesting tips, it is likely that servers in other parts of the country are also doing so. “It’s like the Spanish flu, but far more pernicious and totally irreversible,” explained one.
A psychic from Differdange named Bernadette who despite her socialist leanings is fiercely opposed to the giving of tips says she has looked into a crystal ball and interprets the incident as a sign of the end of times.
“I see, a Reddit post, from the future, asking why, you have to tip, in Luxembourg, when in neighboring countries, it’s optional,” she said with dramatic pauses. “There is, no hope, for us.”
When officials were asked about the incident, they claimed the case had been transferred to the Gratuity Indecency Unit, which is part of the Office of Payment Etiquette, which is part of the European Financial and Economic Crime Center, which is part of Europol.
A rumor is circulating that the request for a tip is somehow linked to an episode from more than a year ago when an American visitor allegedly left a 38-percent tip for a mediocre meal and poor service at a brasserie in Clausen.
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Originally published by RTL Today
