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

Someone made a place card reading 'THIS DINER'S FEELINGS HAVE BEEN VERIFIED STERILE' and put it beside a pepper grinder. Apparently that's supposed to be me. If you're going to mock me, at least put it beside the bread, where the actual argument has been for three days.

ramekin · #83 where the actual argument has been for three days

the other picture is a tiny pellet in a velvet rope queue. caption: 'sorry sir, your material origin doesn't meet the dress code.' honestly this thread has done more for meme artists than the gala did for the children.

velvet_underground · #84

ramekin · #83 where the actual argument has been for three days

this thread has done more for meme artists than the gala did for the children.

You can laugh all morning. Every joke still asks the people who were eating there to sit politely while a celebrity puts bodily waste beside their food. The funniest part is watching people who weren't invited appoint themselves the manners police for everyone who was.

secondhelping · #82 auditioning for the position of Vey's conscience

You keep saying I didn't concede the bag. I did, more than once. The problem with your position is that you can write 'bring a bag' and then stand applauding while other people call her disgusting. A moral distinction that never changes what you do is a decorative distinction.

And yes, I know you will call that another audition. You've used the line already.

ramekin · #83 Someone made a place card reading

A fan account has posted Vey's statement with her face replaced by a bin. Half the replies say it's cruel; the other half ask for the template. We had an avoidable problem at one table and now thousands of people are participating in a competition to be the last person to feel ashamed.

My shop has had three requests for 'Vey-proof' evening wear today. One customer wants a sealed pocket the wearer cannot open until after dessert. That's a bad garment sold as a moral improvement. Give the wearer a usable pocket or suggest an ordinary bag, and tell the venue where bins are. The people commissioning these gowns seem more interested in visibly punishing a mistake than making a usable dress.

pinsandseams · #88 One customer wants a sealed pocket the wearer cannot open until after dessert.

I am begging both camps to stop sending me the same picture with different captions. Yes, the pellet should have gone in a bag or a bin. No, nobody needs a restraint pocket sewn into a gown. You can think a thing is gross and decline to put it on your table without organizing a festival of humiliation.

phasechange · #2 Same danger, different story about where the object has been.

The four-panel image now circulating puts phasechange's 'same danger' beside trayreturn's line about guests asking staff to handle unpleasant things. It labels them 'Cairn user' and 'anti-Cairn waiter.' Those labels are invented. The posts are from different times and neither person said the other should handle the pellet.

Please check the post links before using the collage as evidence that anyone here demanded a waiter touch it.

marginread · #90 anti-Cairn waiter

That's me, apparently. I didn't say I was at Vey's gala, and I use Cairn myself. I find my own pellet ordinary. I still don't want a guest's open palm pushed toward me while I'm carrying soup. My point was that asking staff to handle something includes asking whether staff are comfortable handling it. Somebody has pasted my face from another thread under a drawing of a bin. Please take it down where you see it.

trayreturn · #91

marginread · #90 anti-Cairn waiter

asking staff to handle something includes asking whether staff are comfortable handling it

At work we're getting both versions: guests asking if it is offensive to request a bin, and guests demanding that staff tell other diners their disgust is irrational. There is no menu option for 'be the room's moral referee.' Stock the bins, answer the request, and let the table work out its own seating.

ten minutes to consider whether my joke adequately respects the pepper grinder. i think it does. also the collage is rubbish; trayreturn's actual post is funnier and angrier without somebody drawing a uniform on it.

stillanalog · #8 My Cairn-using brother won't let me use the bathroom his children use.

I have now been told by both sides that my brother is imaginary because my example was useful to the wrong people. One side uses him as proof every Cairn user is a hypocrite. The other treats my wish for a clear dinner table as the first step toward his bathroom rule. If you need me to be fictional before you can keep cheering for your team, that's a fairly direct answer to what this argument has become.

He is real. I still love him. He still sends me to the other bathroom. None of that tells you what Vey should have put on the table.

Today's bad infographic says the pellet is 'basically sealed faeces' on one side and 'a perfectly sterile bead' on the other. Neither label tells you how the device works. The sterile lignin-and-mineral core and inert polymer coat are distinct; the everting sleeve protects the release path; a handled exterior is just a handled exterior. A nick in the coat can shed dry material, not uncover live gut bacteria. You can put the pellet loose in a bag and then in an ordinary bin.

I cannot engineer an answer to the question of whether a guest wants to look at one while eating. Please retire the graphic before another thousand people use it as a substitute for asking that question.

phasechange · #86

secondhelping · #82 auditioning for the position of Vey's conscience

A moral distinction that never changes what you do is a decorative distinction.

There you go again, handing out grades on strangers' souls. I have said the insults are ugly. I have also said the pellet belonged in a bin. You hear the second sentence and decide the first must be a lie because otherwise you would have to argue with something a human actually said.

Sanctimonious bore. There, you can put an actual insult in your next speech instead of manufacturing one.