I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
During the course of his travels, Bryson encounters an awful lot of bad service in restaurants. Granted, he also encounters a great deal of good, go-the-extra-mile kind of service too, but the latter can become annoying after a while from a fiscal perspective; after all, good service must be recognized by good tipping. When one is traveling the country, and enjoying table service at almost every meal, tipping can really do significant damage to a budget. This is why Bryson is quite cheered by bad service. He does not feel obligated to leave a tip if the service is horrible - ironically, great for his pocketbook on what could be an otherwise expensive odyssey.
And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me, I don't mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off.
It is not a coincidence that the world in days gone by where there was much more personal contact between people was a much kinder place that the world we live in today. Bryson's world that he remembers was constructed so that personal contact was unavoidable; the milkman delivered your milk in person, for example, which meant that he would have a certain level of communication with you. You would tell him when you were going on vacation, and you needed to stop the milk. On your return he would ask you about your trip. A conversation would occur, during which both people would find out a little bit more about each other than they knew before. This is the world that Bryson saw disappearing and being replaced by a world where there was more impersonal service, where nothing was delivered in person by the same individual more than once; our online purchases are not delivered by our friendly local deliverer, but by a different employee on a busy route without the time to converse with the person delivering the package.
The village pub is also a place of refuge for those who like to converse and experience the company of others, and he sees this beginning to vanish as well. It upsets Bryson to see the places that really mattered to him growing up and the places that foster community bulldozed to make room for large-scale development. It is not progress to him when it makes things a little worse in the long run than what it was they replaced.
The Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations. Blue Ball, Bird In The Hand and Intercourse to name but three. Intercourse makes a good living by attracting passers-by such as me who think it the height of hilarity to send their friendsand colleagues postcards wih an Intercourse post mark and some droll sentiment scribbled on the back.
The author spent a great deal of time pondering the meaning of the place names he encountered on his journey. He observed that most towns were either named after the last Native American to leave them, or the first settler to arrive. The names he encountered in Amish country were different in that they were more creative and seemed to have nothing to do with the people who had built up the towns around them.
This thoughtfulness is also amusingly juxtaposed with Bryson's mischievous humor and his predilection for sending his friends amusing touristy snippets from his trip. Traditionally, places with names that have a double meaning are extraordinarily popular when it comes to purchasing souvenirs or postcards to send home. In the north of England lies a village by the name of Little Piddle - harmless, one might think, except for the fact that a little piddle is a British euphemism for a quick visit to the restroom. The town of Intercourse is even more amusing when it comes to sending out postcards and purchasing apparel with a town name on it.
