Sleeping on tables
Nov. 11th, 2025 04:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI’m listening to an odd lots episode about land bubble in China, which is pretty good, it’s an interview with Mike Bird who recently wrote _The Land Trap_. But Tracy has just told a story about you used to be able to go around Beijing at night in the early 2000s and see the waiters sleeping on the tables in restaurants. This is being told in connection with the system by which control to various state supplied goods are connected to where you were born and are not movable, so if you move, you don’t have those any more.
Anyway.
I distinctly remember an off hours (probably late lunch) meal at a restaurant in Concord (one town over), and looking out the window onto the patio (summer) and seeing one of the servers just completely asleep half in a chair half sprawled out on a table. (Very carefully not naming the restaurant.)
I think of stuff like this as another reason to tip heavily. I didn’t need another reason, but it is.
Apropos of nothing other than sleeping on tables, years ago when I was still reading a lot about domestic life in the nineteenth century, there was a bunch of stuff I ran across about the sleeping accommodations for live-in “help”, and debate around just how appalled anyone should or should not be about a maid having a table designated as her bed, and whether one should be appalled on her behalf, or on behalf of the folks who ate at the table.
Anyway.
I distinctly remember an off hours (probably late lunch) meal at a restaurant in Concord (one town over), and looking out the window onto the patio (summer) and seeing one of the servers just completely asleep half in a chair half sprawled out on a table. (Very carefully not naming the restaurant.)
I think of stuff like this as another reason to tip heavily. I didn’t need another reason, but it is.
Apropos of nothing other than sleeping on tables, years ago when I was still reading a lot about domestic life in the nineteenth century, there was a bunch of stuff I ran across about the sleeping accommodations for live-in “help”, and debate around just how appalled anyone should or should not be about a maid having a table designated as her bed, and whether one should be appalled on her behalf, or on behalf of the folks who ate at the table.