How Waiters Should Serve Drinks

By Scott Blickensderfer on April 21, 2014

Recently I was at a restaurant, and my friend and I ordered a couple of soft drinks to go with our meals. I ordered a Dr Pepper because the restaurant unfortunately serves Pepsi products, and my friend ordered a Pepsi because he is less enlightened when it comes to the “Coke-Never-Pepsi” lifestyle that I proudly live by.

‘Glass of Coca-Cola’ Source: Simon Cocks, CC-BY-2.0, via Flickr. 2010 Aug 21. Available from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon_cocks/4915110442/

When our waitress returned to serve our drinks, I was surprised to find they already had straws in them, bobbing among the ice cubes.  My friend with the Pepsi had a bare straw, while my straw had a little piece of leftover wrapper on top. This was clearly a method our server employs to tell the difference between our similarly colored beverages, and it was not the first time I have come across such a situation. However, this was the first time I found myself questioning it.

I have become accustomed to servers placing our wrapped straws on the table, leaving it to us patrons to open them like Christmas presents and place the straws into our drinks with our own dirty fingers. I am not the biggest germaphobe out there, and I do not aim to convey servers as a subhuman species so disgusting that if they happen to touch something, it should be incinerated. I realize how much incidental touching inevitably occurs in the behind-the-scenes action of the restaurant’s kitchen, and I have come to accept it. We all have to as part of the agreement for dining out; some germs are going to find their way into you. Icky germs are present in all aspects of life, but for some reason people generally have a more heightened sense about them when it comes to the serving of their food.

We said our polite thanks to the waitress, and my friend went ahead and slurped his drink without a second thought. I pulled my wrapper off and swallowed my concerns along with my Dr Pepper, deciding it was not worth fretting over in the grand scheme of things. After being scarred as a naïve youth who watched the movie Waiting, I tell myself if I am polite, then no harm will come to my meal.

But then I went out to eat last night, and the waiter asked my girlfriend to remove her straw while he took her glass to get a refill. This system makes sense to me when going up to the counter at the movie theater, but there was something unsettling about watching my girlfriend awkwardly holding her straw, wondering if she should set it down on her plate.

I realize that all I am after is a reassuring system when it comes to how waiters serve drinks. By seeing that a straw is unwrapped, it pings something in our brains that this straw is clean, even though there are plenty of reasons why it might not be. It is the illusion of cleanliness that we are after, and we can go along with the fantasy with this small gesture. We unwrap our straws and place them in there ourselves because it decreases the mystery behind the straw. When it comes time for a refill, the waiter should simply give us a new glass, which is guaranteed to not have melted ice diluting the beverage. Then we can transition the straw we have been keeping track of all this time into the new glass ourselves, because we know just how icky our hand is, and we do not care (because we secretly think our grime is special).

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