I’m in Manhattan, about a block away from today’s actually-not-a-bomb scare. So I can verify that in real life, people do say this phrase.
But in movies, maybe they shouldn’t anymore.
/via Scott Murphy
Do you tip studio valets?
I don’t know what to do with the valet guys at studios when I go in for meetings. Do I tip them? How much?
— Van
I follow the keys rule: If at any point they are touching my car keys, I tip them a buck or two at the end. But I never know whether they expect it.
When you’re valet parking at a restaurant or an office building, you tip. You’re paying for parking, so it seems natural to tip the guy who brings your car back. It’s a pretty thankless job, so a small monetary acknowledgement of their efforts feels right.
But it’s more ambiguous when you’re on a studio lot. You’re not paying to park there. Generally, the only reason studio lots have valets is because they’re trying to fit more cars than the parking lot can really accommodate.
Yes, they’re providing a service, but so is the executive’s assistant who is bringing me water, and it would be weird to tip her.
I guess I tip studio valets because it’s the same job no matter where they’re doing it. The guy parking cars on a studio lot is functionally the same guy doing it for a restaurant. I would hope he’s getting paid better, but I don’t know. So I tip him.
To my recollection, Sony used to have a sign saying tips were not accepted — but then the sign went away. And at times, even fancy screenwriters get banished to the dungeon of self-parking across the street at the plaza, so I’m feeling flush and happy any time I can drive through the Madison gate.
At Warners, I follow the keys rule. The valets at the executive building will often point you to a spot rather than take your car, particularly later in the afternoon.
Dreamworks has a tiny parking lot, but the guys in charge feel like security rather than valets, so it would be odd to tip them.
As far as agencies, I tip at UTA. If I can help it, I never park at CAA. It’s the most expensive garage in Los Angeles. When parking costs more than lunch, something’s wrong.
Readers as customers
Ken Auletta looks at how writers and publishers are trying to figure out their roles in the age of [Kindles and iPads](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta#ixzz0mKike1Kn):
> Tim O’Reilly, the founder and C.E.O. of O’Reilly Media, which publishes about two hundred e-books per year, thinks that the old publishers’ model is fundamentally flawed. “They think their customer is the bookstore,” he says. “Publishers never built the infrastructure to respond to customers.” Without bookstores, it would take years for publishers to learn how to sell books directly to consumers. They do no market research, have little data on their customers, and have no experience in direct retailing.
Is Amazon a bookstore or a publisher? A partner or competitor? Adding Google and Apple to the equation only makes it [more complicated](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/on-amazon-apple-and-dick-moves). But it’s a mistake to confuse uncertainty with doom.
> Publishing exists in a continual state of forecasting its own demise; at one major house, there is a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business.
Auletta’s lengthy [New Yorker article](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta#ixzz0mKike1Kn) is worth a read.
(Thanks to Quinn for the link.)
Backpacking through Africa, cont’d
Updating the [earlier post](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/backpacking-through-africa), Ian and Gillian Ross passed along a link to their blog detailing their [trip across the continent](http://slackersonsafari.wordpress.com/):
> How many people can you pack in a minivan?
> We learned the answer to this question is 23 for a small minibus during one of our many bus rides recently. We’ve been in transit for the past three days from Nkhata Bay, Malawi to Iringa, Tanzania and wiped out.
Their trip also included a stop to visit FOMO in Malawi.