It is easy to become dispirited in these dark days.

So let’s have a joke or two.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *    

Once seated in a fairly upmarket restaurant, the customer looked about him and noticed that all the waiters appeared to be carrying a spoon in the top pocket of their jackets.  When his waiter came to take his drinks order, he questioned him about this. 

‘Ah, sir has noticed.  We’ve had the efficiency experts in, you see, sir, and they found that valuable minutes were lost every time a customer dropped an item of cutlery.  One of us would have to retrieve the item and straightaway go back to the cutlery drawer to get a replacement.  They also discovered that the most common item to be dropped was a spoon.’

‘So you carry a replacement spoon and don’t waste time fetching another.’

‘Exactly so, sir.  It is estimated that over the course of an evening, we save a full four minutes and 35 seconds this way.’

While he was waiting for the drinks to arrive, a diner at a nearby table dropped something and sure enough, it was a spoon.  It was quickly replaced with virtually no loss of service efficiency.  The diner was impressed.

When the drinks arrived he told the waiter so and raised a second issue. 

‘I can’t help noticing that besides the spoon, you all have a piece of string dangling from your flies.  Is this something to do with efficiency as well?’

‘Ah, sir is very observant.  Yes, the same experts noted that in the course of an evening, each waiter will, on average, make two visits to the lavatory.  These cannot be avoided, but at each visit, washing and drying our hands takes up almost 4 minutes.  They thought a considerable saving in time was possible.  You see, each string is attached to one’s, er, …’

‘Ah, I see.’

‘Quite so, sir.  So we don’t need to use our hands to, er, pull it out.’

The customer was flabbergasted at the ingenuity on display.  But only for a moment.

‘But that won’t work.  The string can pull it out, but you can’t put it back with the string.  You’ll have to use your fingers, so you will still have to wash your hands and there won’t be any savings in time.’

‘Of course, sir.  That’s time and motion experts all over, isn’t it, sir?  Never properly think things through.  But the management still expects us to save the time.  I don’t know how the other waiters do it, but I use the spoon.’

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *    

Now that is a made-up joke.  What follows is a real life joke.

Newly-minted US Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, is a firm opponent of the ‘regulatory burden’ that the dead hand of government imposes on the spirit of free enterprise, stifling innovation and undermining the can-do, go-get-ʼem, motherhood and apple pie blah-blah-blah.  No surprise then that his first proposed piece of legislation would open up the Atlantic coast to offshore oil and gas drilling. 

But he has also hit the headlines for recommending the abolition of a particularly insidious restrictive practice of the nanny state – the regulation that restaurant workers must wash their hands after using the toilet.

Let the market decide these things, he says.  If any restaurant let their employees serve food with faeces- and urine-tainted fingers, he says, it would soon go out of business.  No need for government involvement at all.

But how would consumers know which food outlets were serving the pee soup and the crappuccinos, so that they could boycott them into bankruptcy?  Easy, says anti-regulation Sen Tillis, you have a regulation that requires them to display prominently a sign with the message ‘Our employees don’t wash their hands after a poo or pee’.

You see, these free-market small-government small minds only say they are against regulations.  In fact, they’re quite happy with regulations of the right kind. 

Sen Tillis graduated to the US Congress from the North Carolina legislature where he championed a law requiring voters to show ID of a certain kind.  Estimates are that between 200,000 and 300,000 NC voters have no such ID.  It will cost the state over $800,000 to provide them.

But the law will help prevent voter fraud, where somebody votes in someone else’s name.  This is such a massive problem in Sen Tillis’ home state that in the last elections, a whopping 28 cases were sent for prosecution out of 3.79 million ballots cast.  Wow, imagine how that affected the election results.

Voter fraud is not the problem, either in North Carolina or all the other states that have been bringing in such legislation.  The real problem is that most of those voters without ID tend not to vote Republican.  Better then that they not vote at all.

And they won’t have to wash their hands afterwards, either.

About author:  Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).