The Mock Dock

Last evening, I decided to stop in at a Ruby Tuesdays for a quick burger, even though I was alone…solitary…empty inside. I carried in a book to read, so that I didn’t end up looking like “that guy” sitting alone in the corner…as he does each and every day…to the extreme of knowing all about the wait staff and their families.

As I pulled open the front door, I was greeted by a chipper young lady. It was nice to have some human interaction…finally. “How many?” she queried.

“Just one,” was my vacant reply.

As these words pierced her virginal ears, a look of fear wrangled her brow into furrows fit for soybean growth. She stared at the dry-erase board that contained the “basic layout” of the store, which she had drawn only moments before my arrival. She pursed her lips, bit on the end of her wax pencil and shook her head.

I glanced around the room to maybe offer her some form of counsel…something to grease the wheels of critical thinking that seems mired in black wax and Bleu cheese dressing. It appeared that one young couple…yes, only one young couple… had also felt the pang of hunger that a “Avocado Turkey Burger” could salve.

I made a flailing gesture, uttered a muffled, “Anywhere is fine.”

Seated at my table, I grabbed my napkin and placed it on my lap and prepared to read. As I gazed up, my eyes were blinded bluntly by a beam of brilliant sunlight. No matter how I crunched my neck, tilted my cranial compartment, or straightened my spine was I unable free my optical field of this glaring radiance.

As my hostess sauntered by, obviously feeling the release of pressure after completing the seating puzzle, I asked, “Is it okay if I move to that table? The sun is really….”

Before I could even finish my thought, she countered with the only applicable response in this situation. “But that is Marcy’s section.”

I know that many of you, who surpass this old man’s mental capabilities, are able to follow this logic train all the way to the station, but I could not.

It was then explained to me that I had been seated in Denae’s section and by moving, I would be taking the table away from her.

Could not Denae simply serve me at the table there, you ask? It is merely physically divided by a a tiled yard, simply 3 linear feet. (sorry international audience, I don’t know my metric conversions)

This is where my years of not working in the food service industry bit me on my awesomely developed calf muscles. For what I did not realize is that only moments before I had arrived, the hostess (the true heroine of this saga) had used the previously mentioned wax pencil to draw a line between these two tables, as well as others, thus denoting the sections for Denae, Marcy and their collegial regime of uniformed iced-tea-pourers (story for another day).

So… much like the DMZ definitively pressed to the borders of North and South Korea, I was forced to meagerly enjoy my ground turkey sandwich alone, blinded by the setting sun, waiting for “Suicide is Painless” to play in far off distance.