Wednesday, April 30, 2014

All to No Avail ©2014 by Joe Sixtop all rights reserved

     I've been keeping notes, usually on order pads here lately. I've been scribbling little ideas for episodes of These American Servers™. And I was just about ready to try and put all that together into a coherent blog post. But then I lucked into a story I like better, so I'm appropriating it for my humble internet column. Enjoy!

     We close at 10:00 (11:00 on weekends), but our shifts are too long. So I usually bring a snack I can enjoy at some point during the evening, to keep the hunger pangs at bay. The snack is almost always an apple. If a co-worker named Jasmine is there, I usually offer her a slice of my Granny Smith product. Tonight we slid back to the dry storage room to get our munch on. My work-friend Josh C was back there already, getting some napkins or whatever. He overheard our convo and told us that it reminded him of something that  happened to him back in high school. Josh C is only in his very early 20's, so his incident isn't but a few years old.
     Josh had a crush on a cute fellow student named Stacy. From what I've heard, she's extremely attractive. Josh wanted her in ways that went beyond friendship, but friendship was as far as Stacy was willing to go with Josh C so that's what he settled for, hoping to bide his time and look for the chance to maybe take things to another level.
     Josh C and Stacy hung out pretty regularly. They'd go out to eat a lot. Josh always paid. One time they were at the food court at the mall. Stacy got up to use the bathroom. She left her phone at the table with Josh C. For lack of anything better to do, Josh picked up her phone and started looking at it. He decided to look himself up in her phonebook. His name wasn't there. He kept checking, nicknames, his last name, abbreviations, anything he could think of, all to no avail. When he and Stacy talked on the phone, it was usually him calling her, but she called him occasionally. She had to have his number in there. So he took his own phone and called Stacy's phone. He looked to see what popped up on her caller ID. It said "Free Food."

     Ouch! Poor Josh C. I hate that happened to him and I'm glad he's able to laugh about it now. I told him that even though it hella sucks to go through something like that, it's a really great story. I even said that since the story was so good, I wanted to steal it. He told me to go ahead. I said I couldn't claim the story since no one had cell phones when I was in high school. But I can tell the story on These American Servers, and so I have. I asked Josh if he and Stacy had lots of mutual acquaintances and he said they did. I told him he should have gotten ahold of the phones of every one of those people and changed Stacy's name in them from "Stacy" to something like "Disease-Infested Whore."