Mara Vey's pellet: are we seriously doing this at dinner now?

A number for anyone treating this as ordinary consumer etiquette: the 2038 Cairn tariff is US$270 quadrillion a year. That doesn't tell us what Vey personally pays, but it does tell us what sort of accommodation the gala should have expected. Someone sold this as a premium way to avoid a toilet, and the banquet still had no bin within reach.

sealcheck · #35 That doesn't tell us what Vey personally pays

Or what any user owns. My employer pays for mine. If that arrangement ends, Cairn goes into bypass and I use a toilet again. I carry an ordinary bag because I don't want my colleagues or waiters to absorb the inconvenience of my implant. Please don't turn me into a duchess so you can win an argument with someone else.

coatcheck · #36 Please don't turn me into a duchess

My brother's building sends people without Cairn to the service-entrance toilet. I don't need to know his bank balance to know whose discomfort is considered a design defect and whose is called a bad attitude.

If the gala had made Vey walk down that corridor, we'd have forty replies about her dignity. A waiter can walk it all night.

stillanalog · #37

coatcheck · #36 Please don't turn me into a duchess

whose discomfort is considered a design defect

That building rule is indefensible. Make the toilets available to everyone. It still doesn't follow that putting an intact packet on a table is comparable to barring your sister from a bathroom. The answer to a cruel rule is to end the rule, not to borrow its vocabulary for a woman in a photograph.

phasechange · #38 That building rule is indefensible.

There it is again: ten sentences about our vocabulary, none about the table. You can afford to make every request sound like an assault on freedom when the actual request is being made to somebody else.

what's happening to vey today is also being done by people with money and leisure. they saw a woman at dinner and found a way to spend a workday inspecting her bathroom habits.

velvet_underground · #40 a way to spend a workday inspecting her bathroom habits

She put the product of those habits beside dinner. I wouldn't have been thinking about it otherwise. Your talent for assigning the blame for an action to everybody who saw it is almost athletic.

ramekin · #41

velvet_underground · #40 a way to spend a workday inspecting her bathroom habits

assigning the blame for an action to everybody who saw it

The room was raising money for children. I still don't know what the projects were, because the picture has eaten the event. There is a reasonable objection to the table. There is also a crowd enjoying the chance to say ‘waste’ next to a singer's name six hundred times. One of those things would have ended when the bin arrived.

I work hall service, though not at that gala. The segregated toilet thing is real at venues I cover. Guests ask where the nearest one is; staff are told which answer to give based on the guest's licence status. You do it because a contract says to, then you go home wondering why a building with twelve bathrooms needed a caste system.

hallshift · #43 because a contract says to

And when one of those guests is offended, the person explaining the rule takes the anger. We didn't write it. I would happily hand a bin to a Cairn user. I'd like to be allowed to do that without also being told what face I'm permitted to make.

trayreturn · #44

hallshift · #43 because a contract says to

the person explaining the rule takes the anger

A host that can pay for this gala can put a lined receptacle at every service point. That is not an engineering problem. It's a line item someone thought would look inelegant on the floor plan. Then the missing line item became a worker's emergency.

And a dress can have a pocket. Designers omit it because buyers accept the approved silhouette, not because the fabric has taken a vow. I can say that while also saying Vey should have waited for the bin. Several people here seem unable to hold two thoughts unless one fits in a handbag.

pinsandseams · #46 a dress can have a pocket

Now we have a price, a dress, a venue floor plan and a building rule from another address. All relevant to how this fight grew. None changes whether Vey's actual pellet was sealed. Please stop smuggling ‘filthy’ back in every time the class argument gets uncomfortable.

phasechange · #47 whether Vey's actual pellet was sealed

You keep clutching that one fact like a toy shield. Nobody here forgot the seal. You just prefer a problem you can solve by repeating the spec sheet to one that might require telling your own friends to let somebody use their toilet.

Fine. Here is the claim, without diagnosing anybody's soul: Cairn lets you choose when to release. If the bin isn't there, wait. If you've already released it, hold it in your hand until the bin comes. Do not set bodily waste beside another person's food and make them ask you to move it. I await the next forty-seven replies explaining why the verb ‘hold’ secretly means ‘exile.’