Smile though your heart is breaking

This story just gets better and better. Today, in some more "getting to know you" chatting in the lunchroom, Alexandr the Czech told us about the time soon after he had arrived in the United States, "wit' no maney in my pawket, unly the chuthes on my back!" Pretty soon, though, he was running a McDonald's in Tonawanda, NY, just outside of Buffalo. There was an Old Order Mennonite community there, and some of the members would, from time to time, visit his McDonalds (Mennonites are apparently somewhat looser than the Amish when it comes to interaction with the outside world) (Also note Alexandr's use of the phrase "my McDonalds". In America you own McDonalds. In Communist Country, McDonald's own you!). McDonald's corporate policy is for the restaurant staff to smile at the customers, and Alex made sure with Moravian thoroughness that his people followed the rule.

The problem is that Old Order Mennonites think that when strangers smile they're making fun of them. Some of the local non-Mennonite kids working at the McDonald's knew this, and informed that he might want to think about modifying the rule so that they would smile at the other customers, but remain unsmiling (though still polite, I guess) with the Mennonites, who could be identified by their distinctive dress. Alex regarded this suggestion as a threat to his authority, and slightly akin to the 1968 Prauge uprising with him in the role of the Soviets. He put his foot down and ordered his crew to smile at all the customers. [He was careful to look at each of us today, as he sat in the lunchroom and told us about how he beat down the insurgents in his McDonald's twenty years ago.]

Well, of course, soon his Mennonite patronage started to drop off. Some of the older Mennonites complained to him that the staff was making fun of them; the younger ones simply stopped coming. Alex had placed himself in a good old-fashioned authoritarian quandry: corporate policy was to smile at the customers, but smiling was hurting his business. Most Americans would modify the smiling rule, but Alexandr was brought up in a dictatorship and couldn't disobey orders. So he came up with a "brilliant" idea.

[Here in the lunchroom his face took on a beatific expression as he basted himself in his own brilliance.] Using discretionary advertising funds, he told us, he had ordered a huge sign to be hung from the ceiling just in front of the entrance. It said "We're smiling because we like you! No one is making fun of you!"

He looked around the lunchroom for our reactions. Pedro, who had been following Alex's story with all the attention he usually reserves for Japanese porn, leaned forward and said "Brilliant, Alex! That was just brilliant!!" Alex basked at Pedro's skillful egolingus, but when no one else was forthcoming he asked "So, whadoya dink of dat?" He was staring at me.

I could only say, "Alex, I can honestly say that I never would have thought of doing that." Alex smiled and nodded, but I'm still worried. If he is a stupid jerk, I'm safe. But if he is a smart jerk (which I'm increasingly tending to believe) I could be royally screwed.