Tipping Tips

I have, when necessary, been able to tip competently in America. Reading articles on the internet helped me going into most tipping-required situations, as well as knowing that I could always resort to yelling "I'm an Aussie mate, G'day G'day G'day" if things ever became confrontational.

We only needed to tip a handful of times in New York, as we carefully chose eateries without table service and our apartment was room-serviced weekly rather than daily. We were carrying our own bags, opening our own doors as much as possible and walking dozens of blocks instead of catching taxis. In Boston, however, things changed. We checked into a five star hotel that we'd found a good rate for via a "Secret Deal" on Hotwire. After five hours on Amtrak we dumped our bags on our floor and headed into Boston to find dinner before the Celtics game. When we returned after the game we found that our housekeeper Rosa had visited our room, avoided our hastily discarded luggage and turned down the sheets for us complete with slippers by the bed and chocolate on the pillows. This was a whole new level of service that I hadn't been expecting and I quickly started to calculate how often I might need to tip for room service and if this secret deal was going to turn out to be a bad investment. We tipped Rosa about five dollars for every day we spent in Boston. We decided it was a good exchange for a few chocolates and refills of the coffee bags. The slippers never fit me, which was disappointing, but I guess we got our money's worth by having the linen changed every day.

We never met Rosa, but we left her notes with our tips each time we went out. Actually, I don't know for sure that we never met Rosa. We could have passed her in the hall once or twice. She never wrote back to us. Towards the end I was really close to tipping her a copy of John Grisham's A Painted House which I bought second hand in New York to read after my phone died. I decided not to, not because I thought it would be socially acceptable, but because it was such a terrible book. I found it at The Strand bookstore off Union Square on a rack of books that said "Half-Priced Mysteries" and as I'd never read any Grisham and the price was good I decided to buy it without much diligence. The Strand was such a momentous, lovely bookstore and from that day I regretted not finding a better book. The mystery was, "Who's painting our house?" (Luke, the pre-teen narrator wondered allowed). "I think it's that disabled hillbilly kid who's staying with us while his family harvest our cotton," his mother replies less than a page later. THAT WAS THE MYSTERY!? I put up with two hundred pages of visual depictions of post-war rural America and 1960s baseball for THAT? I forced myself to read it to the end, partly because I don't like giving up on books and partly because I had some constipation around the midpoint of the trip from so many different foods that I needed to eat. I finally finished reading it somewhere in Connecticut and sighed with disgust. Bloody Grisham. So in the end I did not leave it for Rosa and instead abandoned it on a table in Faneuil Hall Marketplace with an attachment "Free Book. One out of five stars."