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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
If the objects of the crushes are in the food service industry, particularly if they're waitresses, they seem both sexy and comforting. "In the public consciousness, in TV and films, waitresses are needy, a little sexually promiscuous -- a lot of them are single moms -- and they have a heart of gold," says Debra Ginsberg, 42, a waitress for 20 years and the author of "Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress." "They're providing food, which satisfies this basic need, but [sometimes] they're wearing provocative outfits."
Then there's the possibility of the hourly wage earner's "hidden depths," as Jim, the barista fan, terms it: the disparity between what that person is doing (serving you a beverage, for example) and what that person is actually capable of (who knows?). In other words, a bartender who went to Harvard Law School is for some of us more intriguing than a lawyer who went to Harvard Law School.
The customer service crush often goes unrequited -- at one fancy restaurant where Debra was a waitress, she wore "a pinafore and ugly shoes and a tie, and these 80-year-old dudes would be smacking me on the ass" -- but reciprocation isn't necessarily the point. Jeremy Jackson, 31, a novelist and food writer living in Iowa City, sees most customer service crushes as a form of entertainment during otherwise dull errands. "They're crushes of daily commerce," he says of the hippie-sexy cashiers at his local cooperative food market. "I wouldn't have the crushes except that I happen to be there every day." Increasing the illusion of chumminess, these cashiers' names are printed on the bottom of receipts, and, as Jeremy explains it, "The narrative of the new girl at the co-op is that they're really cute and nice at first. Over the months, they get worn down by the job. But then, of course, there's a new co-op girl. I can go in and there are layers upon layers of old co-op cashier crushes."
A more serious customer service crush reared up for Jeremy at an Indian restaurant a few years ago. The waitress "had short dark brown hair and was kind of pixie-esque but not too pixie-esque. It was one of those crushes that snuck up on me -- a few days later, I was like, hey, I could go back and see that waitress."
He devised a plan: "I would go by the restaurant, which had big plate glass windows in front, and I would walk really slowly and look in as casually as I could, hoping to catch a glimpse of this girl. Once I figured out that she worked on Tuesdays, I went in and sat down -- and she wasn't there! I had to sit and eat a whole damn dinner by myself, and I had brought these props, like an issue of Harper's that I didn't want to read. [I'd planned to say,] 'Oh, excuse me, let me move my issue of Harper's so you can put my meal down,' and then she'd say, 'I love Harper's!' But she wasn't there and I got served by the typical 52-year-old Indian guy." Adding insult to injury, the food that night wasn't even very good. After the meal, Jeremy officially retired his crush.
Rich, the outdoor gear fetishist (who didn't want his last name used), successfully got to the stage of asking out his customer service crush -- but he didn't get much further. After dropping by the EMS store a few times, "I went back with the intention of asking her to go kayaking -- I thought that was appropriate given the theme of the store -- and we started chatting, but some middle-aged woman came over and dragged her away because she had to buy her son a sleeping bag. It totally took the wind out of my sails."
Not for long, however: Propelled by the memory of how good Ms. EMS looked in her store-issued green apron, Rich returned when he knew she wouldn't be working and left a note with his phone number. Ms. EMS did indeed call Rich and they made a date to kayak but, Rich says, "Then she bailed the day before because she said she had to go to a funeral. We tried to make another plan, and she bailed on that, too, and I was like, OK, I'm getting a sense of what's going on."
Several months had passed, and Rich had begun dating somebody else when Ms. EMS called him one day -- while he was eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant with his new girlfriend. "At that point, I'd lost interest," Rich says. For a period, he even stopped frequenting EMS, highlighting the dark, or at least the awkward, side of the customer service crush: the self-enforced boycott of a place where you might even kind of need to shop. "And then about three weeks ago, I decided to be a grown-up and go back in there," Rich says. "Of course, who do I run into in the water bottle section? I looked at her and she looked at me -- I'm sure we both knew who it was -- and I just went back to looking at the water bottles."
