We had this rather weird day this past Friday. Well, in retrospect, maybe not more weird than usual, but certainly quirky. It was Friday and the weather was great, and, hey, it’s the weekend! We decided to pick up lunch at Subway. Whoopee.
Megan and I were in line, she and I were splitting a 12″ chicken-bacon-ranch and David wanted a 6″ meatball sandwich. The line was short when we started and we were rolling along building the two sandwiches just fine. What kind of cheese? “Provalone.” Toasted? “Yes” David’s sandwich looked particularly good, three fat juicy meatballs in sauce smothered in melted provalone.
But the line got longer and the girl making our sandwiches passed it on to a lanky young male with dark hair and a dark expression to match. He seemed bothered and almost put out adding every new ingredient we requested, “Everything except no banana peppers and no pickles.” He finished Megan’s and mine, “Hey don’t forget the spinach!” Ours was wrapped and in the bag when he started on David’s 6″ meatball. “Yes, everything as well, just no banana peppers and pickles. Oh, maybe the siracha sauce!” (thinking how perfecto that would be for David). The kid was wrapping David’s sandwich when I was blindsided by the appearance of one juicy meatball sitting on his prep counter. “Hey, one meatball fell out!” I announced, as he apparently hadn’t noticed. He shrugged his shoulders as he was shoving David’s wrapped sandwich in the bag. “That sandwich is missing a meatball. It only has two now! What the heck! Why don’t you just wrap up the third meatball and throw it in the bag and we can add it back on when we get home?” “Can’t do that” he said flatly. What? I looked to my right at the long line of hungry customers and the other three employees behind the counter running their sandwiches through the assembly line, one of them with headphones obviously filling the drive though orders. What a hassle it will be even to ask this kid to bust into the line to retrieve another meatball.
What were our options? Take a couple bucks off the order? That wouldn’t be satisfying in the least. With me still frozen in place glaring at that meatball, the kid offered to throw in a cookie. “Okay.”
We arrive home and greet David with the “Good news and bad news” concerning lunch. “The good news, honey, is that Megan got a free chocolate chip cookie thrown in with her lunch, which she ate in the car on the way home and enjoyed very much. The bad news is … well, one of your meatballs fell out on the counter when this strapping kid who was either (a) a new employee who didn’t know what the hell he was doing but knew he hated his job, or (b) a seasoned employee who knew what the hell he was doing but was burned out and hated his job … was making your sandwich. And so it only has two meatballs.” “What?” said David. “Why didn’t you just ask him to make you a new sandwich?” “I thought of that.” I said. “But the place was mobbed and I didn’t want to turn into a Karen or some crazy person wrangling with that sour employee over a meatball.”
Then later on Friday I returned home from an appointment close to dinner time to be confronted in the kitchen by a very irritated husband. “Where are the scissors that belong in the knife block?” he practically hissed at me because, apparently, it surely was me who misplaced them? I guess, in retrospect I can understand his irritated state as he was once again hung with the task of making dinner since (a) I obviously arrived home too late to make dinner and (b) it didn’t matter because I hardly ever make dinner anyway. Plus he was probably also “hangry” having eaten only 2/3 of a 6″ meatball sandwich for lunch. But in any case, he had started on dinner and couldn’t locate the scissors that were supposed to be in the knife block.
“I’ve no clue, honey” I said, as I started pulling open a kitchen drawer. “I’ve looked there already!” he chimed. “I’ve looked everywhere in this kitchen and the scissors are just not here.” I suspected I knew exactly what was going through his mind … I’ve spent the past 45 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back looking for those damn scissors that someone else misplaced (ahem) so I can make dinner because my wife, off getting a massage, is obviously not cooking dinner . Or something of the sort. I guess I could have arrived home a little earlier to, in the least, offer lip service to assist with making dinner.
But I was indeed relaxed and calm after my 1-hour massage. “Honey, I hardly ever use those scissors and when I do, they don’t leave the kitchen. I use the other scissors” (mostly for opening Amazon packages). “You know, I read something recently. Did you know that misplacing things and then accusing others of taking them or losing them is one of the early signs of Alzheimers? And by the way, did you look for those scissors on your workbench in the garage?”
He shot off to the garage because that was apparently the one place he hadn’t already thought to look. Returned empty handed. Sat at the kitchen counter, looked at me, and said,” “Did you just accuse me of having Alzheimer’s?”
At that moment I was compelled to reach over and pull out a far drawer in our kitchen, a catch-all drawer that I mostly use, and “voila” there were the scissors! “Oh.” said David. “Megan must have put them there when she emptied the dishwasher.” Yeah, well, I then informed David that I always wash those scissors by hand.
Now that David had his scissors back he made a pretty darned good pork stir fry for dinner.
And later, before bed, I opened up the microwave to show David the hardened, red splattered mess covering the insides, because “someone didn’t cover their food.” The mess looks an awfully lot like dried spaghetti sauce. Of course, I was out to dinner with friends a few nights ago when David and Megan ate leftover spaghetti for dinner. But, yeah, I suppose I should just clean the microwave.
The Decompression of a Boomer 