Tuesday, July 15, 2008

2.

Canada had been at work all day. It was the kind of work that most of us can appreciate. Flipping paddies, scrubbing floors and making smiley faces at people like you're an email emoticon. Her experience had taught her that people we're infinitely dumber when they took on the mantle of customers and that by some inexplicable gift of providence she was somehow spared from adopting this stupidity herself when she was on the other side of the counter. This made it all the more difficult to empathise when someone ummed and ahhed and changed their order for the nth time, but in spite of her superiority she played it cool, made it out like she understood indecision and sometimes even wished deep down that she really could...

"Can I take your order, please."

"How bout you make it and I'll take it."

Was that a joke, lame.
"Ha, of course sir. If you'd be so kind as to let me know what you'd like, we'll have it here in a flash and you can be on your merry way."

"You'd like that now wouldn't you."

"Excuse me?"

"you types are all the same with your shiny badges and matching uniforms, think you can talk down to the rest of us civilized folk. And if I wanted you to flash anything it certainly wouldn't be my meal."

....This wasn't one of those times. Canada paused for a moment took a deep breathe and felt a whole lot more justified about her stance on customers.

"I'm sorry sir, you're right, can I take your order please Mr. ****wit."

1 comment:

Loren said...

This was perhaps my proudest moment, the invention of the recursive metaphor (strictly speaking it's a simile, but for my purposes, I take similes to be a subset of the more general metaphor category). It's using an image of a smiley face as an object representing someone actually making a smiley face, the symbol becomes the real and the real the symbolized, brilliant. A real "This is not a pipe" moment in my creative oddysey. Oh dear, I'm getting carried away again.