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Okay, there’s an article in this week’s PW I want you to read. Then I’m going to write about it. (This is kind of how things work on this blog, in case you’re new here.) I tried for about 15 minutes to figure out what I needed to excerpt here to make my point, but I couldn’t do it. So it’s just best if you go read the whole thing, and then hit the little back button at the top of your browser and come back.
The article is about how much of the waitstaff at Center City restaurants thinks Penn students are pretty much their worst customers. And, wouldn’t ya know, Monday is Penn graduation! So everyone will be going out in Center City looking for a pre-or-post grad meal.
When you’re done reading, come back here.
Are you back? Have you already read it? Great. Now let’s party.
If you’re a regular reader, you may know that I’m a Penn grad, class of ‘04, our graduation speaker was Bono. (Villanova, that year, got Big Bird.) Why do you know this? Well, because I’ve invariably let you know in one of my posts here.
I pretty much agree with the premise here: People in Philadelphia hate Penn students. And that’s fine. That’s our role. It’s like being Billy Wagner in the bullpen last night: Everyone was going to boo him, call him names, etc. But that was his job: He was the guy fans wanted to get on. And that’s the role of Penn students (and, to some extent, Villanova) if you pigeonhole every group in Philadelphia.
I may not have been a “typical” Penn student — although there were more of the regular upper middle class dudes from the city and suburbs than you might think — but I wasn’t from North Jersey or Long Island, and I tipped well.
I’ve always tried to tip well, probably consciously when I started dating a part-time waitress in high school and she began complaining about how little money she made. And waitstaffs are usually pretty cool, and, hey, an extra buck or two helps.
There’s another thing, though: If you don’t tip well, your friends will remember it for the rest of your life. Who doesn’t forget the guy or girl who doesn’t tip? Joanie C. Nicetynice may be the reincarnation of St. Katherine Drexel, but if she leaves a quarter on a $8.75 pitcher of beer, that’s what you’re going to remember.
So that’s a reason to tip well that, I think, even Penn kids can understand. But there were bad tippers from Penn, and they tended to come in two flavors: (1) the kids who worked really hard in school and to get where they were now, and felt that they were doing all of this so they wouldn’t have to be, say, a waiter, so screw you, Ernie, but no tip for you; and (2) the rich kids who were idiots and didn’t know better. (Oh, yeah, there’s a third, but he’s really, really rare and almost not worth mentioning: The leftist radical who hates the American system of tipping and how it can stiff the workers, and who rages against that machine by stiffing the worker as best he can.)
I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this — although I have told you that I went to Penn again, and that I tip well, so that’s probably a good enough reason to write it — but I suppose my advice to Penn kids who may be reading this and are graduating this weekend is this: Don’t be a jerk. Make sure you parents aren’t being jerks. Please tip well.
And, maybe, just maybe, wear a Temple hat? You might get better service.
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If you want something done right in Philadelphia, you usually have to go outside City Hall to find someone who can do it. The smoking ban is no exception. City Hall has failed to pass the ban approximately 400 times in the past year, even without Rick Mariano there to muck things up.
In Sunday’s Inquirer, Craig Laban 
Yeah, I know that 
