American Pie

It’s 9pm in Zio’s, a small Italian restaurant in Sydney that specialises in selling tiny portions to tourists who will never come back. The staff are getting a bit frazzled because Tony the boss wants the clientele turned over every 45 minutes. So when you’ve just put your fork down after eating the seven pieces of Tortellini that they call a ‘main’ meal they shove a menu for desert under your still hungry nose.

I don’t normally eat afters but the main course didn’t fill me and I start to understand their business model.

As I’m pondering over the tiramisu or gelati a bunch of Americans come in. You can tell they are yanks because of their size. Europeans tend to have one fat friend in every group (I used to rent myself out for this purpose). But Americans are the opposite. They are a bunch of fat people who hang around with one skinny guy that they abuse for having an eating disorder.

They spent an age studying the menu while the waiter hovered over them. Ginny ordered first. “I’ll have the side salad with no olives and no dressing”. Now I don’t like olives myself but I’ve never found the need to refuse them. They are fairly easy to spot after all and I usually push them to the side and then offer them to one of my dining companions who doesn’t mind something with the taste of rubber and the texture of an old boot.

But Americans can’t look at a menu without changing it. Louis was Ginny’s companion. He wanted the Veal Cutlet with no breadcrumbs, presumably working under the assumption that the chef had a live calf out the back and could kill and prepare it any way you chose.

The waiter tried to explain that most of the food was prepared earlier and when you order it, they basically just heat it up. He might as well have said that he fiddles with small boys by the look the Americans gave him.

I assume they think everything is cooked fresh which is ironic considering they come from a country that invented spray on cheese and food that tastes like it was cooked in the 1970’s.

But it’s easy to poke fun at Americans. They offer a big target after all. Some of them are smart it must be said. My bosses, bosses boss (basically a lot of levels above me) was in Melbourne this week and she came across as a smart lady. She understood there are 14 hours difference between here and New York in Winter and 16 hours difference for the rest of the year. Seems logical to me that clocks change one way in the Northern hemisphere and they change the other way in the Southern. But it seems to confuse most Americans who think it’s normal that I should get up at 4am for a conference call.

I’m sitting here typing this on an Apple Macbook that was invented in America (although probably built in a cave somewhere in China) while listening to music on Youtube, a website also set up by clever people in California. And if you want to see more smart Americans then go and watch “The Social Network”. It’s full of nerdy yanks doing complicated things with maths and computers that leads them to set up Facebook.

I saw it last week in the company of three hundred Gen Y kids. A group of them sat in front of me and as the opening credits rolled they took out their smart phones in unison and logged onto Facebook so that they could poke their friends (I believe that’s the technical term) with the witty message that they were watching a movie about Facebook while surfing the website. It was all very 2010 and made me feel suddenly old.

The social networking phenomenon has passed me by. Although that hasn’t stopped Linkedin sending me messages every day telling me that the world and his brother want to connect with me. I may not know much about these sites, but it’s clear to me that Linkedin is the next big thing. Myspace is now an abandoned theme park and Bebo has gone back to being the name of a Spanish clown and not a means for 12 year olds to post dodgy pictures of their teachers.

Facebook might have thought it had a clear run of that space on the web reserved for people without the social skills to talk to real live humans, but Linkedin is coming up on the rails. I received an invitation to join three years ago and invites to connect to others used to come in every six months or so. But this week, I’ve received three. So I’m going to make some predictions. Jesse Eisenberg will win next years Oscar for best male actor and Linkedin will overtake Facebook in membership. It’s aimed at desk bound professionals after all and they spend more time on the internet each day than even the Gen Y people.

Back at the restaurant, Ginny pulled out her Blackberry, the communication toy of the sort of people who prefer Linkedin to Facebook. “I’m just going to email Steve in the Santa Monica office. He told me this place was excellent and they can’t even do a Decaf Double Shot Soy Latte. I’m not going to listen to him again”.

“Isn’t it like 10 o’clock in Santa Monica or something?”, Louis said. “Is that 10 o’clock in the morning or the evening?” replied Ginny. A strange calm descended upon the table which made me realise that the best way to shut Americans up is to ask them a timezone question.

The moral of the story is that you can’t reduce a country that has produced both Woody Allen and George Bush to a simple cultural stereotype. And anyway, we’re all part of a dynamic global community now. One in which Ginny had just unfriended Steve, her erstwhile restaurant suggester.