I think you can learn a lot about a person by watching the way they treat waiters and waitresses. Do they acknowledge the server? Are they kind? Are they patient and understanding if things don’t go as planned? And the kicker: Do they treat the entire interaction as a clear “this person is a subordinate” situation?

We live in a culture that rates and ranks everything and everyone—but, in the end, is anyone actually our subordinate? Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu apparently doesn’t think so.

“When we realize that we are all children of God and of equal and intrinsic value, then we don't have to feel better or worse than others,” he said.

Back to restaurants: One summer in college, I landed a job as a waiter in an Italian restaurant that was upscale to the point that I had to try to be pleasant and competent while wearing a tuxedo. I’d only progressed to busboy in my previous restaurant work, and if there was a worse waiter on the East Coast that year, I haven’t heard of him. I was 19, looked 14, and was in way over my head.

My least favorite activity was serving wine to diners and attempting to open the bottles at the table. I’m not a wine guy, then or now, and had little expertise with a corkscrew. Thus, wine service was always a crapshoot. The low point came the evening I broke a cork pretty much exactly in half while trying to remove it, leaving the lower half solidly wedged in the neck of the bottle. As my diners looked on, pompously and most unsympathetically, I used the handle of one of the spoons on the table to push the remaining half of the cork down into the bottle so I could actually pour some wine out. As I should have anticipated, after shoving the cork into the bottle, any attempt to pour was slowed to a mere trickle by the now loose and floating cork remnant. I ended up pouring wine with one hand while using the other to keep the spoon in place to fight off the recalcitrant piece of cork.

My party of four made little to no effort to conceal their utter contempt for my alleged skills, and I don’t remember the tip I received at the close of the meal, which I today believe is a kindness my brain did for me.

That summer was my last in restaurant work, after having worked in a number of eateries in high school and college. In the decades since, though, I’ve patronized a ton of dining establishments. At times, it seems there’s a disconnect between diner and server in which the diner doesn’t seem to grasp that the individual taking their order and bringing their food is an actual human.

Studies have shown, though, that they actually are (excluding the occasional robot that delivers food in some places now), and the odds are pretty strong that waiting tables isn’t their dream job, either. Of all my fellow restaurant employees from way back when, I only remember one waiter and one waitress who’d made a career of it (and one busboy, but that’s another story).

Servers in restaurants, as well as every other person with whom we cross paths, are just trying to do the best they can with the life they’ve found themselves in. As the very wise mole in The Boy, the Mole, The Fox and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy put it, “I think everyone is just trying to get home.”

Or, as Catholic priest and prolific writer Henri Nouwen wrote, “We’re sisters and brothers, not rivals or competitors…Different as we are, we belong to the same household and are children of the same father.”

So smile. Tip well. Your siblings will appreciate it more than you know.