[01.17] - Biggin'-up Biggity

A cosy new family restaurant with a kick-ass dish. Spot so fresh the paint still gleamed, the home-photocopied menus still warm from the printer. I’d found it the week before; the food had been great, the fresh-faced waitress accommodating, the bathroom sparkly clean. I returned with three guests, ready to feed.

When the waiter told me my substitution was impossible (though I was willing to pay more) and snappily suggested I just order something on the menu, it didn’t go down well.

I ordered nothing. After a minute’s thought, my guests and I left, though their orders were already being cooked. Shy as I am, I had to share my sorrow with the waiter so he knew his rude approach wasn’t welcoming—and, worse yet, grossly disappointing.

I used to be a quiet soul. I still don’t like to be up in people’s faces. But the more time passes, the older, more bitter, more tired of pushy people, rude people, people who want to share their bad moods with me, the more I find myself finding my tongue.

I’m pretty sure some weeks hence I recommended letting things go, keeping stress down. Hypocrite I may be, but today, I advocate biggityness.

Maybe you know my neighbour, the poster girl for verbal assertion. If Nassau wasn’t so small, I’d call her name, though you’ve probably heard her already where her mouth so big. She talks as fast as a hillbilly auctioneer and can cuss your ass with a surgeon’s precision. Whether she’s chiding her bad chirren for bringing the po-pos by her home, upbraiding her cock-slinger husband for dragging his picky-head bastards up in her house, or damning her slack daughter for them pom-pom shorts, her mouth makes a Mac truck horn sound like a whisper. It doesn’t help that her voice is siren-shrill.

I don’t want to be her. But, increasingly, I believe in speaking up.

Lately, I feel like the law-abiding non-troublemakers feel so disgusted, distressed, and afraid of the levels that some people take assertiveness to that they have to overcompensate. Some people, yes, take aggression to terrible heights. It’s ridiculous to be so biggity you need to blow someone’s head off for borrowing your car.

Taking the other side of the scale, though, is by no means a guaranteed answer to the world’s ills. Confrontation, carefully used, clearly has its place. Witness the joys of Yo Mamma jokes, the Black American tracing tradition or, our own phrase, das ya ma (and all its glorious synonyms).

Equally valuable, equally vital, is the ability to be honest, to tell people how you feel. Sometimes the issues are small: sweetly letting that person who pushes in front of you in line know that actually, you were waiting too, not just standing there for pretty.

The restaurant incident was important to me because it not only involved telling the owner how his behaviour was disappointing and unacceptable, but also because it let me speak up in a way people tend to hear; with cash (or, in that case, the withdrawal of such). Maybe he was just having a bad day; maybe he won’t change his approach to customers. Either way, I can tell you this: I didn’t pay for crappy service and a stank attitude, and that made me feel damn good.


- ja**ly