I stopped by a popular bar/restaurant yesterday to grab a few beers and shoot the shit with the owner, who is a friend of mine. It’s April, during a pandemic (an important fact!), and they are naturally a bit leaner-staffed right now. As a result, her staff was busy and she had to keep jumping up to greet people at the door, take their temperature with the laser gun thingy, and give them a squirt of sanitizer. After being closed for most of the high season, restaurants have been issued a whole list of rules and restrictions to implement if they want to stay open, and if they are caught not following the protocols, they can be fined or even shut down.
Masks are still required in restaurants, except for when you are seated at your table.
I’ll repeat that.
MASKS ARE STILL REQUIRED IN RESTAURANTS, EXCEPT FOR WHEN YOU ARE SEATED AT YOUR TABLE.
I know. I KNOW. It’s literally the hardest thing in the world to do. Loosely strapping a bit of fabric over your mouth and nose for 13 seconds to help a place stay in compliance is practically moving you into a concentration camp. Your online BFF Q and your sentient bag of wet diapers TV boyfriend Tucker told you it’s the Mark of the Beast or something, and you’re no sheeple, you’ve read 2/3 of an article from unfakesciencenews dot com AND watched some Truth From a Real Doctor Youtubes AND ALSO something something Bill Gates.
We get it. You are INFORMED. A real free thinker. And it’s just super, trust.
In the short time I sat there, I watched as TWO groups of grown adult humans gave her the hardest time when she asked them to please put a mask on to come in and sit down, and to please put it on if they got up from the table for any reason. One woman pulled a full-body eye-roll and heaved a great sigh as she dramatically dug through her purse, while her cargo shorts-clad husband whined about how they’ve been to 8 places today and “NUNNA THEM MADE US WEAR IT.” But they put them on and sat at the bar, where they immediately took them off and continued to complain about their horrific ordeal for a few minutes before deciding to storm out anyway. The other group gave her shit about the mask rule, AND THEN just to be extra, acted like they didn’t have phones and couldn’t use the QR code menus and insisted that they needed regular ones. Just unreal levels of cringe here.
Now, I would rather eat a bag of glass a day than argue about “science” with you. It’s not about that.
It must be hard enough to run a restaurant in a tourist town where people are not always on their best behavior. Living at the mercy of Tripadvisor reviews has got to wear real thin, real fast. But now on top of that, business owners have a whole new goofy set of hoops to jump through, and for some insane reason, people have a Big Mad about those hoops. It’s exhausting. And I was only there for a couple of hours, I can’t imagine doing this on the daily.
How about we just pretend to agree with you that the pandemic is fake, masks are mind control, the vaccine will track you, and sure, why not, the earth is flat – and YOU pretend to care about a business owner staying afloat and keeping their place open after months of being forced to stay closed? When you go home, you can demand maskless entrance to Dollar Tree and say you hAvE a MeDiCaL eXeMpTiOn, but here in Vallarta where someone’s livelihood is on the line, just act like a goddamned adult for five goddamned minutes.
–sips tequila–
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
