The further adventures of an earthbound alien

I thought it started off as a good day. “Yankee Doodle Dandy” had just started on TCM. I’ve never seen the beginning before. I usually come at the part where he meets Mary. He’s dressed as an old man and she is stupid enough to think that he really is an old man, and he does that wild, out of control dance thing that would have sent any normal woman scurrying out of the room. I never knew the movie started with him meeting someone who is doing a really shitty FDR Imitation. At least I think it was supposed to be FDR. It could have been Hoover. I don’t really know what Hoover sounded like so if it was supposed to be Hoover then maybe it was a pretty good imitation. I guess someone doing a Hoover wouldn’t really sound like FDR at all, now would they? Anyhoo, I decided to do my morning computering from the comfort of my own couch while the movie played on.
Then I went to meet “G” for lunch at a place called the Cartel Café. I had passed by the Cartel café the day before and looked in at a family eating. Imagine my surprise to find them not eating bananas covered in Peruvian Marching powder, but a good, old-fashioned, American, Sunday breakfast. …Eggs, sausage, pancakes… the works! I made a mental note to give the place a try next chance I got. So, “G” and I sit down, the waiter comes up and we get a couple Cokes. (It wasn’t really two cokes. I got the coke and “G” got some weird squeezed fruity drink. “A couple cokes” is so much easier to say than one weird fruity drink and one coke. I’m sure “G” won’t mind if I abbreviate his order.) I try to explain to the guy that we are waiting for someone, so we would hold off ordering the lunches until he got there. The guy just stands there. He picks up the menus and shows us the lunches in the menu. That’s when the radio station went a little off, and the song took a tinty turn. I smiled and told him to bring the drinks and we’d order in a little while. He took the page from the order pad and put it on the table, and left. No cokes. We waited. We were going to have a big meeting later in the day and we were guessing what was going to happen. It was fun at first, making plans on what we’d do if someone said “X”, and I’d be all, like “Y”! We had been guessing on the subject for so long I was beginning to sour on the game.
I flagged the waiter down and asked him where the cokes were. He picked up the ticket and walked away with it. In about a half hour the cokes arrived. The radio station slipped a little further off. By now the residual good feelings I had stored up watching James Cagney encapsulate an idealistic chunk of American history into a series of linked scenes had worn off. I called “B” and he said he was just leaving the office and that we should order the food. The waiter brought the bill ($7 for two cokes; $3.50 each) I told him that the radio station was not tuned in and the songs sounded like there was an electrical storm coming. He told me it was the building that was interfering with the signal, then walked away. He was surprisingly quick with his answer. He must say that to everyone who complains. I guess in his mind it’s really the building’s fault so there isn’t really anything he can do about it until someone decided to tear the building down.

My coke was gone and another waiter asked if he could take the glass. I asked for a refill and she said no. Just water was entitled to a free refill. She asked me if I wanted more water. I told her that the radio station was a little off. She tried to take my glass again. And I wouldn’t let her. “G” read the menu and found out it was a special restaurant. I said that explained the retarded service we were getting. Apparently it worked like this: you read the Menu, fill out the card then take it up to the counter where you pay up front. When they feel like it they bring you your food. Basically this little system they cooked up encompassed all the worst things about ordering food. Sit, Order, stand, pay, wait, then eat. We decided not to wait for “B” because if their kitchen was set up by the same guy that set up the ordering system we weren’t likely to eat until Easter. And that would have been too long. All of my Yankee Doodle would be gone by then, for sure… Plus I would have been dead. So we fill out the card, I draw a bunch of stars on it (because I’m starting to get a little mad) and I take it to the counter to pay for it. I also took the receipt for the cokes with me so as to settle up everything at once. The girl at the counter takes the ticket and says that I don’t have to pay for the food right there. Today they were doing it differently. I did, however have to pay the $7 for the drinks. I told her that since they were going with something new today, I’d pay for the cokes when I paid the bill for the food. She looked a little confused and called the manager over. As I waited I noticed that the radio had slipped slightly into another station. This is when I decided to see if I couldn’t out weird them.
When the manager arrived I showed her the stars that I drew all over the order form. I told her that some might mistake them for suns but since there were so many of them, and they didn’t have little sunglasses on they were stars. The manager said I could pay for the food and the cokes at the same time. So she took both receipts tore them up and made one receipt with everything on it. I asked her if I could have the pieces of the ripped up receipt because I was rather proud of all the little stars that I drew on it. She refused. I asked her if I could eat my lunch right there at the counter because I wanted to be near the ripped up stars and I didn’t want to return to the table because I thought my friend had cancer and I didn’t want to catch it. She said I couldn’t eat there so I returned to the table. The food arrived almost instantly. “G” was a little surprised at the way the waiter tossed the plates on to the table from a distance, and dashed back to the kitchen. (…presumably to wash his hands.) I had, probably, the worst chef salad I have ever had in my life. They couldn’t have fucked it up any more if they had actually made it out of a chef. We ate and about a half hour later “B” showed up and started talking about what might happen at the meeting. He didn’t want to eat there because it was American food. He said he’d rather go to McDonalds. I congratulated him on the interesting distinction and flagged the waiter for the check. The waiter was thoroughly confused as he had never delivered a check to a table before. Apparently this required some sort of special training because he couldn’t really sort out what we wanted. To make matters worse both “B” and “G” tried to explain at the same time. I stopped them and said to the waiter, very calmly, “Oh! What a fine bunch of rubens, Oh! what a jay atmosphere; They have whiskers like hay, and imagine Broadway only forty-five minutes from here.” I don’t think he watched the same movie I did that morning because he didn’t get it.

That little lunch pretty much set the pattern for the rest of the day. I felt like I was in a comedy that I didn’t understand. Needless to say the meeting didn’t go that well. Nothing really big happened and nothing was really decided. It did rain a little during the meeting and the rain sounded nice on the tin roof. Other than that nothing really big happened.

Next time: “Tall in the saddle” and the Singapore museum of Chinese art.