Eurotrip 2022 Chronicles: That’s Too Much!
Context: every so often, Exodus employees meet up IRL to vacation and co-work together. Wonderful and memorable things happen. Unfortunately, half of those memories drown at the bottom of a glass. The other 49% disappear into the ether, casualties of bugs in short-term to long-term memory consolidation, exacerbated by certain individuals snoring themselves and everyone around them into an early grave. Sleep apnea is not a joke (yet).
Enough FUD. 1% is plenty. I’ve filled the gaps with poetic license, smoothed over inconsistencies with ambiguity and diluted the result with lies that I’ve since convinced myself are true, using the great science of homeopathy. The Truth is dead, long live The Truth!
Our first night in Grindelwald, we went out to a restaurant at the Hotel Kreuz & Post. We had a German waiter. He was stereotypically efficient, polite but distant, very professional. His waitering algorithms were top shelf, his unit test coverage at 100%. He humored Nacho’s attempts at German but didn’t encourage them.
After he served us the traditional post-meal round of Schnapps, we asked for the check. He brought it, and as I was writing in the tip, 15% or 20% percent, the kind of % you might see on an iPad swiveling towards you these days for a to-go order of coffee, trumpets blared with a German accent. “That’s too much!”
We all looked up like a pack of meerkats.
“That’s too much!” our waiter admonished us sternly. “You cannot leave a tip that big, that’s too much. It’s just too much. The most you can leave is one or two francs per person. What you’ve written is just too much!”
It sounded like he was saying it was too much. Clearly this was a matter of honor and not money. We politely took our money back and hastily apologized both for giving too much and for being too much. We gave him ten francs for the five of us and he was visibly relieved, like he’d just dodged a margin call bullet in a web3 version of Russian roulette.
Needless to say, for the next two weeks everything was too much for everyone all the time.
“Dimitrios has been showering for nine minutes already, that’s too much!”
“Diego, you pushed 3 PRs today. That’s too much!”
“Each tea bag is individually wrapped? That’s too much!”
“You’ve already said ‘that’s too much’ twice today, that’s too much!”
