A sure sign of America's decline

Let me preface this with a little personal history: I had a job as a dishwasher when I was 13. Yes, that was a bit young, but my older brother was the cook, and it was a small town. No big deal.
I have worked for someone else all my life. And after the Navy, it was mostly in the hospitality industry.
I have been an auditor at a major hotel chain, front desk, assistant manager, and pretty much done it all. I have been a waiter, cook, and everything in the restaurant business. I've been a fucking janitor cleaning toilets. In all of these jobs, service was number one. Treating people, whether they were a paying customer or a little kid in elementary school who asked me to tie her shoe, I treated them as the most important person in my day.

Flash forward to today.

My wife likes these weird shows like cooking competitions, how things are made, and other boring TV stuff, and we are currently watching Restaurant Stakeout. For those of you who aren't aware, this is a show where a restaurant is losing money, and they hire a crew to put in hidden cameras and microphones in the restaurant, and see what the problems are.

And invariably, the biggest problem is the waiters/waitresses. Idiots who pick their nose or scratch their ass as they greet the customers, get in fights with other staff and/or customers, ignore customers, drink on the job, you name it. The only thing they aren't doing, is treating customers to a nice, comfortable, worthwhile eating experience.

And this is just a microcosm of America as a whole. You have entitlement minded staff who think the job owes them a paycheck, treating customers who actually are entitled to good service more like inconveniences interrupting their fun than people providing that paycheck.

This absolutely astounds me. In today's economy, with the unemployment level what it is, workers are a dime a dozen. Yet I see this all over, in every place I go from grocery shopping to dining, from utility companies to hotels. And the owners and those who are supposed to be managing them could give a shit. More customers will come in, everyone needs groceries, people need a place to stay in a strange city, etc., etc. As long as the owner makes money, fuck the customer, like they give a shit or something.

And I say this is a microcosm of America, because it the way our country's 'leaders' behave. As long as they have their cushy jobs in government, guaranteed retirement, and a solid 'get out of jail free' card when it comes to obeying the very laws they enact, they aren't going to give a shit about we the people.

Take the latest scandal at the VA where the head of the administration has no clue what's going on in the hospitals, as long as he gets his bonus. The hospitals themselves making up numbers while fucking the veterans. But they get their bonus.

And the worst of this is, it actually starts from the top down. Obama. No clue. "I found out on the news.", or "I was too busy golfing while on vacation to be bothered with the piddly assed problems of the American peasantry". Doesn't care as long as Moochelle shoves it up his ass on occasion, and he can play another round of golf between screwing the country over and trading five terrorists for one deserter.

Wait staff works for the diners. Cashiers work for the buyers. Hotel room service works for the guests. And our goddamn government works for we the people!

Maybe we need to remind them of that.