Demanding locals

Dear Editor:Despite my college education, forays into various professions and myriad lottery entries, I’ve been doomed to a life of service. I blame it on the jerk I must’ve been in a previous incarnation, but I digress.While providing life-sustaining nourishment to the wealthy for a pittance at one of my jobs, I was horrified as I witnessed firsthand the entitled attitude carried by “The Local.”In case a (secretly hated) tourist reading this is unfamiliar with this rare creature indigenous to Aspen wildlife, allow me to classify. They are a lot spoiled with the best Food & Wine, have at least 10 weeks off a year, funnel the working class upon whom they thrive into the Centennial and Hunter Creek hives away from view, refuse to allow anyone a membership into their Upton Abbey without Obama birther-worthy documentation and will become agitated and aggressive if presented with an accurately rung full bar tab, as well as lash out if a table is as unattainable as a Kardashian’s virtue.For example, in one of three jobs I hold, the room was fully booked – weeks in advance. We still were accommodating walk-ins, albeit with what would be to any normal homosapien, an understandable wait time.A local came in with his family and asked for a table. When he was told the wait would be 30 minutes, his temples visibly throbbed as his face flushed. He exclaimed that he would “not wait for a table in this place” as it “was ridiculous” he should have to wait as he “was born here” and “grew up here.”We had calmly explained to the gentleman that the geographic locale of the birth canal from whence he slithered four-plus decades ago (of course in a more civilized way) had zero bearing on a table’s availability today and that he, like every other living, breathing, consuming, excreting human being, would have to wait. He found this unacceptable, and to my chagrin, management went out of its way and created space.Halfway to the custom-made, specially ordered table, as though the have-nots satisfactorily suffered and worked for him, he ordered his family to about-face and leave.Normally, I’d file something like this in the isolated “Man Hating His Family Needing to Take it Out on Servers” folder, but similar AADD (Aspen Adult Dissatisfaction Demonstration) tantrums are displayed all too often. I witnessed a man demand a wedding be stopped because it was too loud, locals leaving angrily because they missed happy hour by 20 minutes, a woman demanding a salad with no romaine, chicken, cucumbers, olives or dressing despite it being a salad; the list goes on.I suppose these are all just symptoms of AADD while the underlying cause is a simple failure of a parent’s, servant’s or human’s right to “just say ‘no'” to these people, as they’ve not heard it often enough. But then again, I’m not from here.Greg StudleyAspen