New and Old #182
Friday roundup and commentary
We Asked: “How Do You Get to Your Restaurant Job?”, Eater Chicago, Ashok Selvam, September 10, 2024
“Most of our employees live super close, and not everyone has cars. Cars eat income, which is why so many of us cooks ride bikes! Cars are a big responsibility, with permits, parking, insurance, tickets. Bike riding, scooting, and carpooling are great solutions. Just like what we used to do in school.”
It’s a problem, of course, when the housing situation makes it impossible for service works to live near their jobs. Back during the pandemic, there was an article about late-night restaurant workers in D.C. who commuted from the suburbs, and couldn’t ride transit home because their shifts ended after the last trains (some buses run overnight, at least now—I’m not sure about then).
Here’s another good quote:
“Avoiding a bad commute gives you a peace of mind coming to work. Otherwise you spend so much time getting ready, or getting stuck in traffic, like, ‘Oh shit, I’m stuck, I’m an hour late because of something like Lollapalooza going downtown.’ It takes forever to get downtown. For me, I worked eight years downtown, like, just getting to work meant preparing an extra 45 minutes just to make sure I’m turning up on time. That mental burden is gone once you can just, like, wake up, change, go to work in two minutes. It’s a whole different lifestyle.”
Both of those employee quotes capture something important: the benefits of proximity are in a sense lifestyle perks, but they’re also real enhancements for our wellbeing. I can just hear someone going, “Oh, you want to just waltz to your office five minutes before your shift starts? Nice to want.” As if making things easier is inherently suspect or lazy. In reality, all that extra time means better sleep, more family time, more time to eat well, money saved on minor work around the home you can do yourself, etc. And probably better work performance, too.
Read the whole thing.
What’s Europe for?, Notes From Exile, Laura Skov, September 1, 2024
He didn’t have a job, so in the considered estimation of the bank, he didn’t need a bank account. That he had money in the U.S. didn’t matter. It wasn’t a factor in the Swedish equation. These rejections are commonplace here, but incomprehensible to the American mind. Jeff was in a bind because Sweden is a cashless society and there are some payments you can’t make with a foreign bank card.
He adopted the only strategy there is for this, making a million appointments at different branches of various banks, each time with a different employee. Eventually, he figured, he’d hit an outlier, someone who wanted to be helpful or that would show mercy, even if out of sheer perversity. He spent weeks leaping off trains and bounding onto trams and buses as he rushed to appointment after appointment. “I was busier than a sailor in a regatta,” he said ruefully. After a few months, Jeff succeeded.
The TLDR here is that Americans who float around in Europe for a few weeks or months and think that experience is “Europe” are mistaking the psychology of being free, unattached, and adventurous for the actual place(s) they’re in. And that mistaken conflation becomes very apparent if they actually go full expat. Read the whole thing.
Going into business with the Amish, House of Green, Alexandra Fasulo, September 5, 2024
This is a little weird, but it’s a very interesting account of working with Amish people and some insight into how their communities work, especially with regard to technology. Like any community, and especially any fairly closed community, there are problems, but there’s something alluring about the way of life they carve out for themselves.
For the final item today, I want to share a cool, pretty random subreddit dedicated to coins people find left behind in the Coinstar return chute. Ever since I was a few years old, I would run over to the Coinstar machines and look in the chute and also get down on my hands and knees and look for coins. I still do (usually not on my hands and knees) and I still have a bag of all the various foreign coins I’ve picked up over the years this way. I’ve never actually counted how many countries’ coins I have, but it’s quite a few, included some Asian and Latin American ones. (Euros and Canadian coins go without saying.)
Go peruse people’s finds for a little lighthearted diversion.
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Using a long commute to signal committment to work might make sense under highly specific circumstances. Accusing someone who doesn't do the same of laziness is bizarre.
These eclectic posts are marvelous musings. I never ride the bus in ordinary circumstances. The purring cat that is my Mazda 6 suits me just fine. However, last night I flagged the bus for a single errand. I waited twenty minutes for my transit because it was delayed in vexing traffic. My driver waved the fare. Then she made a further accommodation, stopping mid-block so I could exit virtually at the door of my destination. The irony? The streets were clogged, but the bus was empty.