[Sca-cooks] Mildly amusing, fairly surreal, tangentially food-related anecdote...
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Sat Oct 25 13:18:22 PDT 2008
Hullo, the list!
Well, it's rainy and miserable here, and I'm about to go out into it
for the evening nonetheless, but something extremely odd just happened
and I thought I'd take a minute to share.
I live in an apartment in what, around here, is a middle-sized co-op
apartment building of some 85 units, with people working strange hours
and engaged in all manner of comings and goings. There're a lot of
urban professional-types living here, and it seems like many of them
don't cook very often, because the local options for picking up the
phone and having food delivered to your door are fairly broad.
Consequently, we get a lot of stacks of restaurant take-out menus left
in the lobby, and occasionally we come home to find them slipped under
our apartment door.
I was out on some errands earlier today, and my arms were sort of
full, and when I entered our apartment, I noted a menu from a local
sushi bar was lying on the mat just inside the door; while I was out,
either a delivery was made to the building or someone simply came
around, rang doorbells until someone buzzed him in, and went from
floor to floor, slipping menus under doors.
Since my arms were full, I stepped over it, figuring at some point in
the near future I'd retrieve it and either add it to the stack or
throw it away. I returned to the front door to do this, when the
apartment doorbell rang.
I opened it to find a guy who looked vaguely familiar standing in the
hall; apparently he works for one of the local places from which we'd
had Chinese food delivered at some point in the past. He was
apparently going from door to door, hand-delivering menus in the same
way as the other place, but this was the more personal approach; I
don't know if he was going specifically to the homes of known
customers or not. Essentially, he was there to give me their latest
menu, and to ask if everything was all right, since they had not heard
from us in quite a while; I explained that everything was fine, but
that we were away from home more often, and that I had had some
medical issues which severely limited my diet for the past several
months.
In the course of our little chat, the man, all smiles, noticed the
Japanese menu on the mat between our feet, and said something like,
"Here, let me get that for you," and picked it up. Still smiling and
chatting pleasantly, he gave me a couple of his place's menus, thanked
me, said he was glad to hear I'm feeling better, and left. Just a few
seconds after I shut the door, it occurred to me he had left without
giving me the sushi bar menu.
He stole my Japanese menu. All I could think of was the "Seinfeld"
episode where the Kramer look-alike walks off with the box of raisins
from NBC Studios.
A few minutes later I looked outside from the balcony and thought I
saw the menu lying in the street, but I'm not sure... I'll look and
see when I go out.
I assume that he either made an honest mistake, or felt it was an easy
move to make it that much more difficult to order food from a
competitor (although I'd posit that you could argue competitor status).
I just thought it was a little strange, in a "Did I really just see
that? Did that really just happen? I must have imagined it, because
who in their right mind would do something like that?" sort of way...
Now, I'm tempted to call this place and try to order sushi, but I
expect whoever answers the phone won't get it.
Adamantius
"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's
bellies."
-- Rabbi Israel Salanter
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