Tis the season

for insistence

Oh I insist!

You hear that everywhere at this time of year. Whether it’s a seasonal office party or your annual visit with distant friends, the instances of insistence in your life will likely increase over the coming weeks.

We all insist at various times in various ways. Serving staff in restaurants see this stuff all the time. Patrons, puffed, swollen stiff with insistence make a huge spectacle of being generous. Wallets wielded, pride on the line, people puff and prance and make all kinds of wild displays hoping that the server will pick them.

It’s a funny thing really. One moment, the job of the server is to meet the needs of everyone. The next moment, they need to decide which of these assholes is going to give them the biggest tip. Assholes? I can hear you now: But they are being generous. Why do you call them assholes?

Insisting is a polite form of assholery. It’s a fucked up form of being really pushy. When we insist, we’re demanding something forcefully, not accepting refusal. T…