When A Fast-fooder Does A Restaurant

Thulaganyo Jankie | Monday August 31, 2020 13:24

I don’t do restaurants these days. In fact I doubt if many of us do. Coronavirus has decimated our wallets and reduced the frequency of visits to the ATM.

If you find the frequency to the ATM has not been seriously curtailed somewhat, it is most probably because you are selling illegal substances and have taken advantage of the liquor ban.

So, most law-abiding citizens go to the ATM solely to check whether their salary has been credited and promptly proceed to attack it. This is confined to only three days of the month – salary doesn’t go far these days. So next time you find people swarming the ATM around the 5th to 19th of the month call the police - they are involved in illegal activities.

Networks are erratic these days and the usual customary beep beep that alerts you of your salary being credited does not always happen. Let us say your payday is on the 25th and the 25th of that month is a Sunday.

Going to the ATM to check your balance now becomes a project. Common sense says since the 25th falls on Sunday you expect your dues on the Friday.

So your visit to the ATM starts on Friday in earnest. This is because you would have unwisely promised that pesky creditor you will have them sorted by Friday with the hope that the employer would do the needful. Friday first trip, balance P37. Second trip P37. Third trip P37. 327th trip balance still P37.

If your fuel lasts long enough, the penny would drop after making that 1, 789th trip which would be on Sunday. By then the creditor is threatening violence and is a permanent resident at your house.

Back to the restaurant. The restaurant was almost fully-packed and there were only 2 spots left. I chose to sit next to a very elderly pleasant-looking man with hair that looked like a failed attempt to grow lettuce. Big mistake! This played right into Murphy’s Law dictum – if something can go wrong, it will. In fact my whole experience inside that restaurant seemed like I was an actor in a Murphy Law Part III: The Return movie, played in slow motion.

Lettucehead kept snorting his nasal contents back inward as if he was saving them up to make a large humanitarian donation to the Mucus Bank. As this was unfolding and I furtively looked for an escape the last available space was taken up.

Then, there was a waitress who took forever to waddle over to our table. I think waitresses are trained at Waitress School to sniff out fast-food customers and filter them out from the usual restaurant patrons. This one wasn’t far off the mark and treated me like I was an irregular breach of restaurant procedure. 

I ordered a mild. Eating very spicy food is not my forte. Apparently in restaurants the mild is hotter than the extra hot in your usual fast-food joint. So I ordered the usual in the hope that it would be at the usual level of mild. What a mistake! The food was excruciatingly hot and spicy, like the armpits of a sweaty twerker who used Nandos sauce as deodorant.

Despite the advances in technology they still haven’t developed any sort of App that can convert restaurant ‘mild’ (which is actually fast-food hot) to fast-food mild. So I laboured through the food and felt like my head was dipped in a sauce that was a cross between Oriental and East African spices.

As my mind was still recovering from the harrowing ordeal that clung to me like a dirty sock caked in sewer sludge, Miss Attitude brought that little folder with the bill. If my soul and head had been in ICU it was quickly pushed into the morgue by the bill.

It was very expensive.

Of course I realise that “expensive” is a vague word, so in the interest of precision, fairness and -- above all -- objectivity, I will define it as: “Whatever I think looks expensive.” I believe that every restaurant is trying to paper the debilitating effects of coronavirus and are charging less-than-honest charges, but Lettucehead assured me it was a fair price. I wanted to kill him. Obviously, the little space on the bill that said TIP wasn’t filled.

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