But is it fair?

This Saturday, the spouse and I went to a local restaurant we loved before the pandemic. It recently reopened and we were super excited. Cue, disappointment.

Suffice it to so, nothing will ever be the same: the food was mediocre, the place felt cold, and what used to be bespoke condiments were now served in single-use plastic containers (for real?!). But the most immediately annoying aspect was that the place was packed, and people who came after us kept getting seated before us. The result was that we waited just short of an hour for a table, though we had been told it would be about 20 minutes when we arrived. Not from any maliciousness, the place was just busy and disorganized.

Now, I wasn’t super hungry, which is what saved me from making a total ass of myself by blowing up at the waitstaff who were truly doing the best they could.

But as I reflected on the experience later, it made me think about what “fairness” really is.

There is an immediate level of fairness which was clearly breached: we had arrived first, we should be seated first.

But there are other levels of fairness too. We are privileged enough to go out for dinner; we have plenty of options and could have left any time for another place, or even to go home to cook. The waitstaff had not been given a system to organize patrons “fairly” and were too stretched to institute one on the fly. The single-use condiments were likely a hangover from the extended pandemic close-down that had all restaurants scramble to figure out how to stay solvent while keeping key staff, and now was “old stock” that had to move. Conversely, my job has always been homebound and was little affected, solvency-wise, by the pandemic.

In short: there are levels and levels of fairness. Me blowing up a waitstaff for not getting a table in the order in which we arrived would have dealt with only one of them: the one that manifestly mattered the least.

I am sitting with that this morning.