“You guys know what you should do?” asked the man standing two people back, wedged in sideways.
He didn’t even know where or how to stand in that crowd.
“I can’t reach you there, and I can’t hear you from that far away,” I had to say.
He had to be directed on his drink order as well: “What kind of martini?” “What kind of gin?” “Olive or a twist?” So, taking advice from him wasn’t the highest on my list of priorities.
Our bar was full — as was our restaurant — and both had been full not just for the evening in question, but for almost every other evening in recent memory, and perhaps for quite a few in distant memory, too. One might conclude that we did, in fact, know what we should do. Besides, we weren’t asking for his advice; it was being offered unsolicited. What do they say about unsolicited advice? It’s always criticism.
It doesn’t just happen in the restaurant business, it happens everywhere, every day. I have seen men offer unsolicited advice on women’s makeup, women offer unsolicited advice on men’s clothing choices, older people comment on younger people’s behavior, and those same younger people further comment on the older people’s life decisions.
None of it is neither appreciated nor accepted by anyone.
“I’m just trying to help,” they will say.
But are they?
A therapist once told me that you should never say “should” — a sentence that I still find funny. I never mentioned the grammatical problem to him because he wasn’t asking, and I think that might have been the crux of the lesson — maybe even the entire lesson.
I thought about telling this man that maybe he should learn how to properly order, and how to properly stand to receive that order. But I didn’t.
Once I had a customer get angry because I had set his drinks down on the bar instead of attempting to hand them to him.
“That’s not good service,” he had said.
So, I picked the drinks up and handed them to him.
“That will be $32.47,” I said, once he was holding them.
“I want to run a tab,” he had responded.
“I will need a credit card to run a tab,” I said, pointing at the sign that read exactly that.
Watching him juggle the two drinks in order to grab his wallet was extremely validating, I must say. And watching him eventually have to set the two drinks down exactly where I had originally placed them was priceless. But I never said anything. And I certainly didn’t offer him any unsolicited advice.
Let’s get one thing straight, nobody “should” ever do anything. They do what they do and that’s it. Let them figure out the “should” for themselves.
My newest guest was unrelenting though. Two dozen made drinks later, and he posited exactly the same question again.
If there’s one thing worse than unsolicited advice, it’s aggressive unsolicited advice. And you see that on the internet quite a bit.
• That person who can’t keep a job is giving advice on employment
• That person who can’t form a sentence is telling you how to write
• That person who can’t play any instrument is telling the accomplished musician how to play their instrument
It goes on and on.
I was told back in journalism school by an instructor to never show your writing to your family. The reasoning was: Why? Are they writers? It’s either going to be obsequious flattery, or unsolicited criticism, and neither one is going to help.
A family member recently told me that I should write a book. When I showed her the books I had written, she responded by telling me that I should try and do some interviews. When I showed her all the interviews that I’ve done, she said I should do a podcast. When I showed her all my podcasts, she told me, you should do some events. When I showed her all the events I’ve done, she finally stopped talking to me.
“You know what you should do?” the unrelenting sideways-standing man asked for the third time.
“What?” I said, more than a little exasperated. “What should we do? Please tell me. I am dying to know.”
“You should put drink rails in the bathrooms, so that way no one ever has to leave their drink unattended.”
I looked at him in disbelief. That was, in fact, a great idea!
Leaving me with these thoughts:
• Advice is what you give when you’re too old to set a bad example.
• Never accept criticism from people you wouldn’t go to for advice.
• “You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one,” once opined UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.
• Sometimes the third time’s indeed the charm.
• The ability to look critically at oneself might be the best criticism available — albeit if you can trust that critic.
Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com
