From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 13:21:33 MDT
--- Lee Corbin <lcorbin@tsoft.com> wrote:
> Peter writes
>
> > >So let's say that I finally decide to cross the Atlantic,
> > >and go to Paris, which I'm sure I'll never re-visit. I
> > >think that I ought to leave a $20 dollar tip, if I don't
> > >want them to think I'm a cheapskate. Twenty dollars is
> > >not trivial to me. It's *very* safe to assume that no
> > >one who knows me knows that I am in the restaurant. I
> >
> > It doesn't sound like a safe assumption to me. I don't have enough
> > data about my friends travel habits to make a good estimate of the
> > probability that one will be in Paris at any particular time.
>
> This is getting absurd. The odds of you meeting an acquaintance
> in a restaurant in Paris are ridiculously small.
Yet not out of the range of possibility. Nor, it seems are you taking
into account the 'six degrees of separation' phenomenon. Let me tell
you a few stories:
1) I was based at McChord AFB south of Tacoma, WA in 1989, over 3000
miles from my hometown, when who pops up in line behind me at the chow
hall? The guy who sat next to me at high school graduation three years
before. He was stationed at Fort Lewis next door and had heard we had
better chow than the army grunts got.
2) I was traveling between New Hampshire and Seattle in 1994 on a
layover in Atlanta when I ran into an old girlfriend I had been
stationed at McChord with five years prior.
3) I consistently run into people all over the country who know people
that I know from various other places: from New Hampshire or Vermont,
from Seattle, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, etc.
The moral is that most people really do not appreciate how few links
there are between us and anybody else on the planet. THIS is why
tipping and other such behaviors work so well as social lubricant and
stimulant.
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