Fine Dining???

I watched the woman as she looked around with disdain. All the tables were dirty. The last occupants' litter had been neglected and no staff member had been around to put it in the trash or wipe the table.

She retrieved a serviette, wiped the table vigorously with the serviette held tightly between two fingers. She was clearly more concerned with not touching the table than the apparently not self-evident fact that the table could be more thorough cleaned if a greater percentage of digits where involved in the process. Her left hand held her sleeve pulled part of the up her arm away from whatever mysterious substance might be lurking on the table.

She declared it to be clean enough. Her mother and daughter got settled while she flung the offending serviette in the nearby trash can.

Moments later I felt the urge to burst out in song as the lyrics of a certain Alanis Morissette song pop into my head.

How ironic. When the woman finally sat down at the table, she hung her coat on the back of her chair. Now, the very same sleeve that was so carefully held away from the table top is dragging completely ignored on the floor underneath her chair.

It's not like you really expect fine dining at the McDonald's at Douglas and View, is it?

"The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart,
gets up above them so we can see
the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates."

David Foster Wallace