March 11, 2005
SOB of the week
As I quietly ate my sub-average chicken curry in Union Station's underground feeding area, a Wilford Brimley-esque fat mustachoed man in stretchy pants swooped in to the two tables in front of me, throwing his substantial gut on one table, grabbing on to the other one with his fat, stubby hands as if he was tackling a family of Gypsy panhandlers. Once he was sure that the two tables could not escape under his considerable gerth, he yelled out to his wife to grab another table a few feet away as if he was demanding air support with one of those Vietnam-era backpack phones. His wife seized the strategic hill (by which I mean she set her backpack on the table). Some tweens then materialized and Wilfred ordered them to drop their backpacks and go get some lunch.
At two adjacent tables, a group of men wearing suits finished their meals quietly, anticipating the pushy putch that would come as soon as one of them stood up. Eventually, they left and our stretchy-pantsed hero nudged the tables closer -- from a foot and a half awy from his existing captives to right up next to them. He then positioned himself squarely in the middle, bending over and stretching out as far as he could, while his wife waited at the satellite table, now number five. Since his arms were not wide enough to cover all four tables, he held out a backpack with each arm to extend his reach, just in case anyone thought about sitting down next to the crazy oatmeal and diabetes equipment spokesman with the pink backpacks and stretchy pants.
Before the kids got back from Flamers or the Cajun Grill or wherever else, I went back to work, safe in the knowledge that my table would soon become part of this man's empire.
What's amazing about this idiot's paranoid table handling is that nobody asked him if they could use one of his tables. Nobody tried to muscle their way in, mining harbors or setting up other active or passive defenses against table incursion while he was looking the other way. In fact, there was no reason to believe that he would have had any trouble finding his family a place to sit had he sat down at one open table and put backbacks on the other ones.
But such is what happens sometimes when out-of-towners visit the big city. Fed for years a steady diet of crack whores, scam artists, murderers and plain old mean people by a media that gets ratings playing to peoples' fears, it's natural that anyone going to a big city who doesn't have experience in one would think they could be taken advantage of at any moment.
So is our fat paranoid friend the real SOB here, or is it the divisive media? Naah, it's Aggressive McStretchypants.
Posted by rj3 at March 11, 2005 11:19 AM
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Comments
brilliant.
Posted by: nm at March 11, 2005 2:16 PM
very funny. so sad so true.
Posted by: guy at March 12, 2005 6:42 PM