I actually walked out of a restaurant this morning, leaving ![[info]]()
la_nausicaa and her friend Kerry waiting to give their orders to the man behind the register, walked across the street to another place, ordered, was served, ate breakfast (dawdling over the weekly paper as I did so), came home, and started typing up this entry—the girls still aren't back yet. What happened was that I violated my own local rule and got on a line at all manned by a cashier who was a white men. I should have left the second I saw him rather than waiting fifteen minutes while he struggled to deal with the shocking order of two cups of coffee the pair right ahead of us wanted.
White male cashiers in Berkeley, with some few exceptions—literally Owen at Moe's and other people whose names I've actually gotten to know because they stand out as so peculiar in this town—are terrible. So too women of any race between the ages of 25 and 40. Younger is okay, as is older. But white dudes and women in that age bracket are the worst possible people to plunk down in front of a cash register, and God forbid that they have to do two things at once, like talk to someone, or write something down, or pour a coffee or hand someone a fork or point a restroom. They are the most useless human beings on the planet; I wouldn't chop them up to feed 'em to a dog.
It's actually difficult to understand, even as I watch these white men and women of a certain age range, how they can be so slow. My great-grandfather with his walker would clunk and thump his way around the kitchen more quickly into his late 80s, and even after his stroke when he was virtually bedridden he could move his own good hand to get soup up to his mouth more swiftly than these cashiers can work with two good arms. They seem to literally be surprised every time they look down at the buttons of their cash register, as if the positions of the keys have changed, as have the nature of the symbols—Arabic numerals one time, Chinese characters another, perhaps tiny images of barnyard animals or old Brazilian heads of state the next. When actually communicating, they need to invent human language anew every time a jaw drops open. "Caaaw-fee?", yes it's so strange and wondrous, this caw-fee your store is friggin' named after. Oh, and then when you hand them money, that's utterly perplexing. Am I supposed to wipe my butt with this? Hand you all the similarly green pieces of paper in my drawer? Eat it? Money and money, what is money! Perhaps if I stare at it long enough the little man in the cameo will start talking and tell me great esoteric secrets...And then when you get your order, well let's just say that last night my friend Gary (from Los Angeles) ordered chicken and literally got cactus at the Mexican joint we were in. The female cashier he ordered from was just too old, or too young. (I cleverly shifted over to the second register, where a dude was running the show.)
So, my rule in Berkeley when shopping for groceries or entering a luncheonette or going to some other store—find a man who isn't white! The less English they appear to speak, the better, honestly. Perhaps the subtleties of the mother tongue are too much for our poor native population, and their brains have just collapsed into a sinkhole of some sort, the hollow-skulled honkey bastards. And the women, God, I don't even know what is wrong with them between the ages of 25 and 40. Before 25 they've not yet been defeated by life, but by 40 they've sufficiently resigned themselves to their existences that they've stopped using incompetence as a tool of resistance? I don't know, all I know is that this sort of thing doesn't happen in Oakland or in SF proper. Or New York, New Jersey, Boston, or Vermont. Not in Ohio or Florida, not in Greece or London...never in Chinatown, only rarely in a Little Italy.
It's a lucky thing most customers in Berkeley are just as simple; otherwise most local cashiers would have been grabbed by the ears and brained to death on their own machines ages ago.
Yes, I typed all this up and the girls still aren't home. I'm tempted to run back over there and see if they've even received their food yet....
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1)
la_nausicaa and her friend Kerry waiting to give their orders to the man behind the register, walked across the street to another place, ordered, was served, ate breakfast (dawdling over the weekly paper as I did so), came home, and started typing up this entry—the girls still aren't back yet. What happened was that I violated my own local rule and got on a line at all manned by a cashier who was a white men. I should have left the second I saw him rather than waiting fifteen minutes while he struggled to deal with the shocking order of two cups of coffee the pair right ahead of us wanted.White male cashiers in Berkeley, with some few exceptions—literally Owen at Moe's and other people whose names I've actually gotten to know because they stand out as so peculiar in this town—are terrible. So too women of any race between the ages of 25 and 40. Younger is okay, as is older. But white dudes and women in that age bracket are the worst possible people to plunk down in front of a cash register, and God forbid that they have to do two things at once, like talk to someone, or write something down, or pour a coffee or hand someone a fork or point a restroom. They are the most useless human beings on the planet; I wouldn't chop them up to feed 'em to a dog.
It's actually difficult to understand, even as I watch these white men and women of a certain age range, how they can be so slow. My great-grandfather with his walker would clunk and thump his way around the kitchen more quickly into his late 80s, and even after his stroke when he was virtually bedridden he could move his own good hand to get soup up to his mouth more swiftly than these cashiers can work with two good arms. They seem to literally be surprised every time they look down at the buttons of their cash register, as if the positions of the keys have changed, as have the nature of the symbols—Arabic numerals one time, Chinese characters another, perhaps tiny images of barnyard animals or old Brazilian heads of state the next. When actually communicating, they need to invent human language anew every time a jaw drops open. "Caaaw-fee?", yes it's so strange and wondrous, this caw-fee your store is friggin' named after. Oh, and then when you hand them money, that's utterly perplexing. Am I supposed to wipe my butt with this? Hand you all the similarly green pieces of paper in my drawer? Eat it? Money and money, what is money! Perhaps if I stare at it long enough the little man in the cameo will start talking and tell me great esoteric secrets...And then when you get your order, well let's just say that last night my friend Gary (from Los Angeles) ordered chicken and literally got cactus at the Mexican joint we were in. The female cashier he ordered from was just too old, or too young. (I cleverly shifted over to the second register, where a dude was running the show.)
So, my rule in Berkeley when shopping for groceries or entering a luncheonette or going to some other store—find a man who isn't white! The less English they appear to speak, the better, honestly. Perhaps the subtleties of the mother tongue are too much for our poor native population, and their brains have just collapsed into a sinkhole of some sort, the hollow-skulled honkey bastards. And the women, God, I don't even know what is wrong with them between the ages of 25 and 40. Before 25 they've not yet been defeated by life, but by 40 they've sufficiently resigned themselves to their existences that they've stopped using incompetence as a tool of resistance? I don't know, all I know is that this sort of thing doesn't happen in Oakland or in SF proper. Or New York, New Jersey, Boston, or Vermont. Not in Ohio or Florida, not in Greece or London...never in Chinatown, only rarely in a Little Italy.
It's a lucky thing most customers in Berkeley are just as simple; otherwise most local cashiers would have been grabbed by the ears and brained to death on their own machines ages ago.
Yes, I typed all this up and the girls still aren't home. I'm tempted to run back over there and see if they've even received their food yet....