Neil, you really do shine in this thread! Take a bow! I've taken mine for saying "overdramatic"!
Who would have thought we could have such fun out another's misery? Shame on us!
Thank you, Nadir. I was having fun. I guess it shows.
I have another story. Hold on.
A friend of mine told me that he went to Bob's Big Boy hamburger joint one day about 40 years ago (not that he carries a grudge or anything!) and he ordered a cheeseburger. Well, usually he just chomps into it like a maniac, but this time, for some reason he can't recall (it's been what, 4 decades? - so cut him some slack!), he opened it by lifting the top bun, and he couldn't believe his eyes. The square cheese slice was melted into the burger patty as one might expect, but here, in the center of the cheese, was A SQUARE HOLE.
They had cut the cheese (no pun intended) diagonally like an X, then cut it again like a +, making 8 triangles, and had put 4 of them on HIS burger (half a slice of cheese!) and had used the other 4 on SOMEONE ELSE'S BURGER. On the outside, it
looked like the 4 corners of a slice of cheese, but INSIDE, there was
a big square missing, because that was cheese they had arranged on another burger to look like a full square slice of cheese (even though it was only half a slice, in 4 points).
He was SO ANGRY, that he POUNDED his fist on the bar and demanded to see the manager. He shouted his complaint, and the whole restaurant stopped and looked at him. They called security in. He was so upset about this square hole in his burger cheese that he wanted the whole world to know about it. He said the service bar waiter had NOTHING to say to him. And the manager was not very helpful either. Two security guards came in and they were about to haul him out of there, when he settled down. They gave him a whole additional slice of cheese. He ate his burger. But he never went back again.
I told him he should have gone in there every day for a week, going from table to table, quietly telling them to check their cheeseburgers for incomplete cheese slices.
I asked him if he perhaps had overreacted. He said, "Maybe I did, but
in those days, Americans expected to get what they
paid for."
.