Lunch
This morning, I was reading the paper. On the front page was an article about how different races receive different health care from birth. As an actuary in that industry for many years, I closely looked at the article for the tell tail signs of bias. The first sign was that the article jumped to the outcome without explaining why it happened. Why do different races of babies receive different levels of health care? The second sign was a lack of a proposed solution, a clear sign that someone wants to propose spending more tax dollars on something. These kinds of articles are written to, hopefully, get you worked up and wanting to do something so the people behind the article can jump in and suggest spending more tax dollars.
But that is not what this is about. It reminded me of a group of actuarial students who about once a week went out for lunch in New Orleans. New Orleans has some wonderful food available and being that our office was in the Central Business District, there were several fine restaurants within walking distance. As a side note, at that time in my life I was more accommodating of walking several blocks in a 95-degree temperature with 97% humidity than I am now.
Anyway, we would go out to eat and, at that time, restaurants were not used to splitting the bill for you. One person would volunteer to pay the tab and then we would settle with him or her. Our starting inclination was to divide the total with the tip evenly among us. That became an issue after about the second or third time we went out.
One of us, Andrew (it only took me 3 hours to remember his name after 30 years has passed since this happened), was an actuarial student that worked in the Latin American business operation. He was single and spoke fluent Spanish. The single part is the key bit of information because, when we went to lunch, he’d order a big meal and never tried to economize.
Most of the rest of us were married and tried to choose our lunch entree in a more economical way. In retrospect, I believe that Andy, being single, choose to have lunch as his big meal of the day and picked accordingly. Most of the rest of us, with families, choose dinner as our big meal of the day, so lunch was a smaller meal.
As I mentioned, initially, we would just divide the total by the number of people and split it. After about the second outing, the rest of us were feeling taken advantage of and decided to create a spreadsheet with each person’s selection and allocating the tip accordingly every time we went out for lunch.
“Esau said, ‘Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has cheated me these two times. He took away my birthright, and behold, now he has taken away my blessing.’ Then he said, 'Have you not reserved a blessing for me?’” - Genesis 27:36 ESV
“Make room in your hearts for us. We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have taken advantage of no one. I do not say this to condemn you, for I said before that you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together. I am acting with great boldness toward you; I have great pride in you; I am filled with comfort. In all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy.” - 2 Corinthians 7:2-4 ESV
“The righteousness of the blameless keeps his way straight, but the wicked falls by his own wickedness. The righteousness of the upright delivers them, but the treacherous are taken captive by their lust. When the wicked dies, his hope will perish, and the expectation of wealth perishes too. The righteous is delivered from trouble, and the wicked walks into it instead.” - Proverbs 11:5-8 ESV
In my assessment today of the situation then, Andy didn’t intend to take advantage of our fledgling lunch system. He just approached his meals differently than the rest of us. Sometimes our own perception of things that aren’t intended get in the way of our relationships.
