Double Life – Service

By Daniela Fubini*

After coming back from four years in the United States, aka the most service-oriented place on earth, I was once with my dad in a restaurant and the waitress did a terrible job. She was not polite nor kind, made mistakes with our orders and was overall not professional. I got really upset and I wanted to call the manager, when my father said hold on, how do you know that this will not be the last straw and your complain will not result in her being fired? Do you want to be responsible for this lady losing her parnasa?

This happened many years ago but I remember it as one of the big lessons in my life. After that, when I made my Aliyah and I had to learn how different – to say the least – is the very concept of service in Israel, my immune system was ready for the challenge, and when I see fellow new immigrants who struggle in their absorption because of their higher standards I feel for them. I built my perfect trick: when someone who is supposed to provide me with any service falls short on patience or alertness, I exercise my imagination and make up a story that explains why. The yawning waiter has to work endless shifts to pay his university debts and when he finishes that he will finally fly to India and reunite with a long lost girlfriend; the clerk at the Ministry of Interior is so bored with her job that overnight she meets with her ex-comrades from a secret cell who arrived from the USSR in 1991 and plans an uprising that will bring chess players to power; the bus driver who pulls the break randomly and makes us all jump as if we were riding a very unwilling camel is rehearsing the dance that he is learning in order to surprise his wife on their 30th anniversary.

Imagination is power, you see.

*Daniela Fubini (Twitter @d_fubini) lives and writes in Israel, where she arrived in 2008 from Turin via New York