Restaurant Hacks and A Reformed Prank
When I was younger all the restaurants carried these refillable glass salt and pepper shakers with metal screwed on lids. They made every table feel a little classy. It was a nice touch that saved the restaurants from the insane mark up on disposables.
If you are ever in the restaurant business, rethink disposable anything. All that waste and plastic and permanent poison in our Mother. And all that lost profit.
Go with classy or distinctive refillable everything you can possibly think of. Go local handmade to reinvest in your community and customers and bring in more of that local feel. And you bet grandma is going to bring her friends to eat and see her bebito's water jug or her own hand made plates, bowls, cups, and flatware. Everything locally made extremely well with local support who want to keep you happy and coming back for more of their distinctive stuff. It doesn't have to be the perfectest, trendiest, best brandiest, or serious or whatever. Just unique is good enough. Your customers want local, not generic classy or fake classy like the Met Gala.
Unique is just another word for beautiful.
YOURS TRULY
Just try to find things that vibe.
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Here's where things get personal.
All children, no matter how young, knew the old joke to unscrew the lids of the salt and pepper shaker as a joke. And all children, no matter how old still laughed at it. And sometimes little old Amish ladies would do it and giggle like girls.
My more progressive friends pointed out that this ruined somebodies meal who was likely on a short meal break and wasted the restaurant's money and reputation.
So I started playing my own version of the old prank.
The reason the salt and pepper shaker heads prank is so funny is because everyone knows it and knows that if any such children have ever sat at this table, the lid might be off. So everybody just casually checks the lid before they shake. And then somebody who's too trusting or forgetful aligns with a child's mischievousness and happenstance gets hit and everyone laughs, the restaurant apologizes and makes a big show of reminding the busboys to check after every table
I knew everyone checked. And I always liked messing with people's heads rather than their food. (You don't mess with people's food. That is my poverty mindset and I really resonated with those arguments about time, money, and quality of life for hard-working low-income folk, and not making things harder on the workers.)
So I took a napkin, opened it all the way up, put it over the mouth of the open salt shaker, made a little indent, filled it with pepper, screwed the cap over it all and tore the napkin carefully away from the edges now that it was firmly held by the lid.
Did the opposite with the pepper and thus my mind trap was laid.
Like a playful mimic, they waited for the unsuspecting patron to add salt to their fries only to get pepper!
The confused diner would look down at their hand and the clear salt shaker full of salt in it. then look back at the pepper on their fries. Perhaps it was just some pepper dust? More salt! More pepper? What witchcraft be at work here? They shake the shaker and see the salt sparkle and tinkle. They pick up the pepper, look at it and shashshake it, look down on their fries, it couldn't be... they pepper their fries and see salt scatter. da fuck? They continue to salt and pepper things out of the magic opposite shakers in disbelief until they open them up and laugh. I used to even leave my own little "Hi! 🙂" just to leave my mark on this world.
I got my brother into doing this and we taught our friends as well. It was a fun little thing to share that protected a lot of people from asalt.
I like to think that my humor brought some joy into some worlds and make some people's dinner a lot more fun.
