You may recall that about a year ago we ran a post here titled, “Remember When There Were No “TIPS” Jars?” It was a pretty terrible piece and I forgot about it almost as soon as I published it. Well, about a month ago I received an email from someone who had prepared an interactive graphic on tipping for an organization known as the Hospitality Management Schools. She had come across the tipping post, and wondered if I could take a look at the interactive graphic on tipping, and see if perhaps it would be of use to my readers.
My first thought was that I was not sure if anything posted here is of use to my readers. But after a month of procrastination, two follow up emails, and a very bad dream in which I found myself inside an interactive graphic that showed my recurring dreams by subject in high school, I finally checked out the tipping site. And if you check it out, I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I did: the graphic is much more valuable than the static text you find here.
What did we do before we had these nifty interactive graphics? We had to imagine the characters and figures moving. Back during the oil embargo of the early 1970s, people had to imagine the reduction in the production of oil and the corresponding increase in gas prices and pants bottoms. Back during the Plague, people had to imagine the increase in rainfall and corresponding graphic of corpses piled atop a wooden cart being pushed by Eric Idle, yelling, “Bring out yer dead!” Back during the Roman Empire, the emperors would have had to imagine a little arrow along a timeline that could be pushed with a corresponding red splotch growing all around the Mediterranean Sea.
I wish there had been an interactive graphics website when I was taking chemistry. There would have been a red stick figure for the acid and a blue stick figure for the base, and they would join hands and become salt and water and a polypropylene bottle to hold the water.
An interactive graphic would have become really handy when we were reading Hamlet in English class. The landing page would have stick figures of all the main characters—Hamlet, Ophelia, the joking friend who always comes in through the kitchen door—and clicking on each one would start an animation of their gruesome death without the effort of parsing through the lines of “What ho, Sirrah?” and “S’blood” and “Methinks this play hath much movie logik.”
If you search for interactive graphics, you are likely to find graphics on topics in economics or history or something else that isn’t going to make you the life of any party on this planet. What they need are more interactive graphics about the practical side of life. Like an interactive graphic on mowing the lawn. There would be buttons showing different sizes of lawn, and a corresponding meter showing the day in the week in which the mower of the household would start being asked if he was going to mow the lawn that weekend.
Or an interactive graphic showing the Nielsen rating of Keeping Up With the Kardashians on the X-axis, and the number of people who place the Civil War in the correct half-century on the Y-axis. Or demonstrating how to politely take a seat in the middle of row at a crowded movie that has already started. Or on how to keep an open syrup bottle from making all the adjacent containers sticky.
But I guess tipping is as important a practical activity as there can be. I was so engrossed in the interactive graphic that I forgot to go out to a restaurant, get a pedicure, or have a café au lait sculpted by my town’s most celebrated barista.