Labor of Patience

How would you like to make 100 dollars in three hours of doing nothing.

Imagine the offer ...

You get to have drinks, sit in a nice room, enjoy the artwork on the wall, watch and appreciate actors who perform various shows with great dexterity. At the end, you will have a nice meal and get to have conversations with loved ones that are deeper than anything you have done for a long time and meet some really nice people. And yes, at the end you will have earned the equivalent of one hundred dollars.

Sounds too good to be true. And what is the catch?

Last night, my wife, my daughter visiting from Chicago and I went downtown for a quick bite to eat. One thing about Rochester downtown is that on the night before Labor Day, the town is really quite quiet, especially so on a Sunday night. Many restaurants seemed to know that it would be a slow night and were closed. But this new restaurant we wanted to try was open and it got benefited from little competition downtown on a Sunday night. Benefit was not the right word, it was caught unprepared.

After quite a wait, when we got to our table, the owner confided in us that they are really understaffed tonight. "We had no idea on a Sunday night and on a Labor Day weekend, we would have a full house," he said, "Service was going to be slow."

We said OK. We smiled we understood. We have been too slow restaurants before, we could be patient.

Time ticked by. More than two hours later, the owner gingerly came and told us, "We have a slight problem."

They had to prepare more ingredients for our order and it would take another 2o more minutes. To make up for the inconvenience, he would give us a 50 dollar credit for the next meal which he promised would be quicker. He also gave us a choice whether we would stay for another 25 minutes or not as they finish preparing the ingredients for our meal which he would give to us free.

We looked at each other and decided why not. We had no place to go. The place is nice. In the last two hours we sat at the table, we we had settled into a pretty good conversation about politics, work, life and books--things that as a family we seldom found time to talk about.

Finally, when our meal did show, it was delicious, maybe we were just hungry. And we were the only customers left at the restaurant. Looking around, there just us us three and the people who ran the restaurant left -- it was as if we had become their family.

After we finished, the owner and we had a good conversation. We found out he came from Mexico. and had worked at Dell in Austin. He found out I was retired. He took my wife's business card. We got to know a new friend. He was very sorry about the service. He was sincere, nice and warm. I am sure that his restaurant will get better once he gets a feel for the traffic. We had a great meal for free and also got a 50$ couple to come back.

So, that's how you can make 100 dollars for just being kind and patient for three hours, in other words for doing nothing. Besides, we really had no place to go to anyway and might as well appreciate what the universe had to offer.

And that was probably a spiritual act.