Too smart to be good at slinging pancakes?
So, there's this New York Times essay in their "Lives" section written by a recent high-school grad who decides to sling pancakes at IHOP for a hot minute to, like, learn something about life. It's making the rounds on a few blogs for the apparently insufferable whine from its author, a (probably white) upper-middle-class college-bound gal who has to get one of those pesky summer jobs and deal with the real world and learn about herself and all that crap before heading off for the insular ivory tower. But instead of breezing through something any old immigrant ex-con can do, she fails miserably. So: is it funny, or just infuriating?
...she detailed the duties of an IHOP server. But I absorbed almost none of it. Waiting on tables, it seemed, violated my very constitution. Accuracy, speed, balance — I could never master any combination of the three.
I guess your response depends on a few things, like whether you've waited tables before, and if you did it for actual money or for funsies. (The author did not need the paycheck.) I guess it depends on whether you buy into the whole abstract "smarts of the college-bound" vs. "street-smarts of the uneducated" thing.
