Ridiculous.
You can’t tell me what to do. I’ve worked here for twenty-two years. I’ve got an office. An office with a window. A window with a view straight down Lexington Avenue. I know the books of Brantley and Sentson Accounting inside and out. I single-handedly saved us from tax evasion charges two years ago. Charges that would’ve sunk my company like concrete in flan.
So don’t you stand there, in front of God and everyone, and tell me I can’t substitute the beet salad with the turkey club lunch special.
I can have that salad. I will have that salad. And you, you can either make it happen for me, or I can go talk to your manager, or your maitre’d, or whoever the hell tells you which side your bread is buttered on, and I’ll have you out on the street so quick you won’t remember if your whole career as a waiter was real or just some pathetic, glorious American dream.
I need a beet salad, right now, my friend. I need the beets. Beets make my eyes work better. Do you want kind of strain my eyes are under? I stare at a rectangular screen all day that’s constantly shooting tiny beams of red, green, and blue light directly at my corneas. I have Excel worksheets and Outlook calendars burned directly into the tips of my optic nerves. My nerves need beets. They need them.
Look, and I need an ice tea. Need the caffeine. I know it doesn’t come free with the special. I know I get coffee or soda, but coffee’s got too much caffeine and soda rots your insides. Rots them. I need a cool, soothing iced tea that will perk me up during my afternoon slouch and simultaneously calm me. Keep my hand steady as I type an email outlining my recommendations for our third quarter budget.
I need beets and tea, and you can just cancel the club altogether. I want to pay for the club, but I don’t want the club. You take the club. I can’t fathom having a turkey club at this moment in my life. I want a cheesesteak. I know you don’t make them, and I know I’m not supposed to have them, and I know and I know. But I want one. You don’t have to bring one, but that’s what I want to order.
So please. Just bring me the turkey club special. But I don’t want chips, I want beets. I don’t want coffee, I want iced tea. And I don’t want turkey, I want a cheesesteak. So you just write that down, in your little book, and pull it off that little pad, and you give it to the kitchen, and tell them that’s what I ordered. And then tell them they don’t have to make any of it, but they have to acknowledge I ordered it.
And then I’ll have the check, please.