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Not alone, unexpectedly
Mar. 29th, 2003 03:28 pmLast night, I went out to Long Island for some boardgaming. I do this every Friday evening that I can find the time, which usually means twice a month. There's a group of people who have been meeting weekly for board games for something like eight years; I've been going for the last five.
This time, I had a passenger; one of the other regular attendees was without automobile, because his fiancee had to spend the night in New Jerseyfor her sins in a past life so that she could get up early today for a work-related meeting. I volunteered to help Jordan overcome this transportation handicap, and picked him up around 6:15. (I made good time on the Cross Island Parkway, which is really not a sentence I get to form very often.)
Jordan and I talked about all sorts of things while we rode to Hempstead and then to Seaford (the former for Bojangles chicken, which is my favorite fast food in the world and which is very hard to find in New York; the latter for the gaming). One of the odd things I do is Mystery Shopping, which means that a company sends me to stores (fast food, gas stations electronics shops, used piano warehouses, and all sorts of other places) to pretend that I'm a typical customer and evaluate the service and the goods. I started doing this in high school, which means I've been doing it for over twenty years now. I like the work for a variety of reasons: I've always liked acting, though never enough to actually do anything about it; I like reviewing; it gives me a good feeling to tell bosses that their employees are doing a good job (which, surprisingly, they usually are), and it gives me a sense of divine justice when I rat out bad employees. (Face it, haven't you always wanted to be able to officially Write Someone Up for being snotty and incompetent?)
Most of all, though, I just like getting out of the house and going to neighborhoods I wouldn't otherwise think to go, even if all I'm doing there is parking, eating a hamburger, and going home. I did that today--I ended up on Martin Luther King Blvd. in the Bronx, a mixed black/hispanic neighborhood where, judging by the faces I saw, white people almost never go.
But that's not what this post is about. It's purely a set-up for this bit:
So I was in the fast-food place. I turn away from the counter with my food, and I almost walk into a young man--maybe 10, 11 years old. He's holding a small cardboard box liberally studded with air-holes, and one slightly larger hole. Immediately I intuit: This person is holding a rat. "Is that a rat?" I ask, about a second before the stunningly adorable head of a rat pops up out of the box and sniffs around.
"Yep. Just got him."
"I've got a dozen at home. They're great pets. I hope he treats you well." And then off to my table, to eat a fried chicken sandwich and read frightening things, warm in the sense that you never know where kindred will turn up.
This time, I had a passenger; one of the other regular attendees was without automobile, because his fiancee had to spend the night in New Jersey
Jordan and I talked about all sorts of things while we rode to Hempstead and then to Seaford (the former for Bojangles chicken, which is my favorite fast food in the world and which is very hard to find in New York; the latter for the gaming). One of the odd things I do is Mystery Shopping, which means that a company sends me to stores (fast food, gas stations electronics shops, used piano warehouses, and all sorts of other places) to pretend that I'm a typical customer and evaluate the service and the goods. I started doing this in high school, which means I've been doing it for over twenty years now. I like the work for a variety of reasons: I've always liked acting, though never enough to actually do anything about it; I like reviewing; it gives me a good feeling to tell bosses that their employees are doing a good job (which, surprisingly, they usually are), and it gives me a sense of divine justice when I rat out bad employees. (Face it, haven't you always wanted to be able to officially Write Someone Up for being snotty and incompetent?)
Most of all, though, I just like getting out of the house and going to neighborhoods I wouldn't otherwise think to go, even if all I'm doing there is parking, eating a hamburger, and going home. I did that today--I ended up on Martin Luther King Blvd. in the Bronx, a mixed black/hispanic neighborhood where, judging by the faces I saw, white people almost never go.
But that's not what this post is about. It's purely a set-up for this bit:
So I was in the fast-food place. I turn away from the counter with my food, and I almost walk into a young man--maybe 10, 11 years old. He's holding a small cardboard box liberally studded with air-holes, and one slightly larger hole. Immediately I intuit: This person is holding a rat. "Is that a rat?" I ask, about a second before the stunningly adorable head of a rat pops up out of the box and sniffs around.
"Yep. Just got him."
"I've got a dozen at home. They're great pets. I hope he treats you well." And then off to my table, to eat a fried chicken sandwich and read frightening things, warm in the sense that you never know where kindred will turn up.
