Waiters

Often, waiters make me feel more than just uncomfortable - they make me feel inferior. I feel they have knowledge of certain things that give them a superior edge over me. For example, I once ordered a wine (house wine of course) with a meal and said "Red please. O yes, and could I have a dry one please?"
The waiter in an evening suit looked at me with something close to contempt and said: "There is no such thing as a sweet red sir."
I felt he was mentally spelling "sir" with a "c" followed by a "u" and an "r".
I wish I had had the same agressive-like attitude that Christopher Hitchens possesses; he object to waiters pouring a small quantity of wine in your glass to "taste" it. They are interrupting your conversation; it's an act of rudeness; it's saying to you "hurry up won't you and order another bottle".
I don't think it signifies any of these things. What the waiter is doing is being a waiter, that's all. There are certain acts he carries out that distinguish him from other people and this pouring of the "taster" into one's glass is one of those acts.
"You see that waiter," Jean Paul Sartre is supposed to have said to a friend (probably a girl friend - and a young one at that!). "Well that waiter is playing the part of a waiter."
I never thought this remark carried much weight until I heard about Christopher Hitchens and his bitchiness, but now I do: many people do play parts they are given in life and they, sort of, follow a set of rules that give them a certain dignity.
So I feel sorry for Hitchens's waiters. And I feel a bit sorry too for the waiter who corrected me too, for he wasn't playing his part as well as he should have done. What he should have said when I asked him for a dry red wine was "Certainly sir," and gone his way. That would have been what a proper waiter would have done, the sort you get as a butler in Wilde plays or in Henry James stories. Perfect actors of parts they assume to give their lives some meaning.