26th
Chipotle is judging you.
I was once told by a friend of mine that, while attempting to purchase a burritto from Chipotle, he was forced to wait in line for ten minutes while the customer in front of him forced the people working the burritto assembly line to stop, get a manager, and wait while he complained that the burritomatons behind the counter weren’t being “courteous enough”.
I see this sort of thing with alarming regularity, and while I understand the frusteration that people have to deal with in terms of rude, unhelpful, frequently unsanitary customer service personell in all realms of the feild, I think when things like this begin to happen, that we’re forgetting that there is a time and place for everything. Unless someone in the burritto machine is pulling things directly out of their pants to serve on your burritto, I feel your complaints should be saved until you’ve reached the end of the line and can speak to a manager privately.
I have to go to the post office daily, to get my offices mail. Once there, I have to stand in front of a large, blue, two part door and press a little buzzer until the employees of that particular cave decide to grace me with their presence. It feels a little like the entrance to The Emerald City, except instead of a rude little man with a funny moustache, it’s one of six or seven people who have never quite fully mastered the English language and who, regardless of how many times I show up, day after day, to do exactly the same thing, have to ask me what I want. Then they vanish again.
The time I spend waiting varies, but on average I would say it’s roughly between ten and fifteen minutes, though it has been, on some occassions, as long as twenty to thirty.
One time, Werner Herzog was there to get his mail. He got angry at the amount of time we were being forced to wait, and demanded to see the manager, which made us all have to wait longer and made the employees even more unpleasent than usual. At first, I wanted to rush up to the people that were sass talking this director who I admired and scream, “Don’t you know who this is? This man spent years in the jungle making a movie! THIS MAN IS AN ARTIST YOU CHARLATANS!!!!!” and shake them about until I was forced to leave. Then I realized that I come here every day and deal with this same shit, and despite many times when I’ve been perfectly capable, in my head, of murdering another human being in a frenzy of blood, fingernails, and postage, I’ve never lost my cool with these people.
Then I imagined Werner Herzog, holding up the line at a Chipotle. And I though, “Fuck you, Werner. Wait for your mail like everybody else. There’s air conditioning in here, which automatically makes it better than the jungle.”
I felt better after that.
