Get what you ordered: Four ways to make sure you receive your bagel with cream cheese
June 3, 2008 at 5:00 pm by Jamie Allen in rocket scienceROCKET SCIENCE —
1. Go to the café. Stand in line. When it is your turn, approach the counter. Order a toasted bagel with cream cheese from the cashier with the purple hair. Pay for it. Tip with change. Move to the receiving area. Once the cashier and her sidekick with the tattoos forget about your order and begin to serve people who ordered after you, put on a chauffeur’s outfit. Take out an 8-and-a-half-by-11 piece of paper that looks like you found it in your car’s trunk, under a body. Write in black marker the “name” of the “person” you are here to pick up: TOASTED BAGEL WITH CREAM CHEESE. Hold the sign at chest level. Make hopeful eye contact with everyone who looks at you, as if they might be the Toasted Bagel with Cream Cheese you’re looking for. Approach the cashier and her sidekick behind the counter. Say, “Excuse me, are you Toasted Bagel with Cream Cheese? I’m here to pick up Toasted Bagel with Cream Cheese?” Act completely innocent when the cashier calls you “asshole” under her breath. Receive your toasted bagel with cream cheese. Thank the cashier and her sidekick for helping you find “him.”
2. Find a jet engine. Take it with you to the café. Stand in line. When it is your turn, approach the counter. Order a toasted bagel with cream cheese. Pay for it. Tip with change. Move to the receiving area. Once the cashier and her sidekick forget about your order and begin to serve people who ordered after you, put on those headphones that airline people wear on the tarmac. Turn on the jet engine. When the cashier and her sidekick look at you like, “What are you doing, weirdo?” take out those hand-signal things that tarmac people use to direct jets into the terminal. Make the signal that says, “I am waiting for my toasted bagel with cream cheese! I ordered it several minutes ago! Please send it this way!” Keep making these signals until you guide the toasted bagel with cream cheese into the terminal that is your mouth. Turn off jet engine.
3. Since you apparently possess special powers that make you suddenly and completely invisible to the people from which you order things, use this to your advantage. Stand in line at the cafe. When it is your turn, approach the counter. Order a toasted bagel with cream cheese. Pay for it. Tip with change. Turn on Invisibility. Move to the receiving area. Walk behind the counter. Stand over the cashier’s shoulder. Use a straw to tickle her ear. When she turns, be Invisible! Poke the cashier’s sidekick in the butt with a plastic fork. Watch out! Your Invisibility is off! Duck that punch! Be Invisible again. Reach in the tip jar with your Invisible hand and make a dollar bill “float” out of it. Say, in a ghostly voice, “I am the café ghooooooost! I am huuuuuuungry! Give me a toasted bagel with cream cheese right awaaaaaaay! Or I will take your tip moneeeeeeey! A-wooooooo!” Receive your toasted bagel with cream cheese. Turn off Invisibility.
4. Before going to the café to order a toasted bagel with cream cheese, write a Broadway musical about living in the city and how it’s easy to get lost in all the humanity, and how it makes you just want to stand up and say, “Hey, I am here, I am alive, and damn it, I matter!” Go to the café. Stand in line. When it is your turn, approach the counter. Order a toasted bagel with cream cheese. Pay for it. Tip with change. Move to the receiving area. Give the signal for the orchestra to enter. When they are set up, perform the number from your Broadway musical that’s set at the café – the tune that starts slow and lonely but ends BIG, the song about how you always order a toasted bagel with cream cheese and pay for it, but for some reason the cashier with the purple hair and her sidekick with the tattoos always forget to make it, and how time passes and people who ordered after you get the things they ordered, including other toasted bagels with cream cheese, and then you have to ask the cashier, who’s now filing her nails, if she’s going to get that bagel soon, and she asks you what you ordered? Like, it’s the first time she’s ever seen you? And you have to tell her again that you ordered a toasted bagel with cream cheese, and then you have to present the receipt for proof, and then you have to endure her half-hearted apologies while she makes your toasted bagel with cream cheese. And the cashier’s sidekick then realizes what has happened and looks at you like you’re some sort of zoo animal and says to the cashier, as if you cannot hear her, “The guy that’s been standing here for 15 minutes ordered a toasted bagel with cream cheese? And he just now finally said something about it?” … And when you’re singing this Broadway number with full orchestra swinging while waiting for your toasted bagel with cream cheese, remember to finish BIG! Get other people in the café to join you – lots of choreographed dancing and handholding! Lots of singing along! Lots of laughter between lyrics! BIG FINISH! Bow. Receive toasted bagel with cream cheese. Thank the cashier and her sidekick.
Jamie Allen is an Atlanta writer whose column, Rocket Science, appears occasionally on Fresh Loaf. To read more Rocket Science columns, click here. He’d very much like you to visit The Duck & Herring Co.’s Pocket Field Guides website, which he edits.
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