Why Do The Heathen Rage?

I enjoy breakfast although I don't eat it often and rarely at home. Generally on a weekend it's more likely that I'd head for the local All Day Breakfast place in town.

This place I usually go has the old tyme booths with the mini jukeboxes and the bad Top 40 just a-begging for your quarters. The minis typically go hungry.

Although I've been called fussy in regard to food, I think my requirements are within acceptable limits at breakfast:

3 Eggs over hard (no runny jubbly bits for me thanks),
Regular bacon
Brown toast (sort of how I see myself, one big complex carb)
Coffee
=============
$5.50

See? Not too demanding or odd.

The waitress comes and takes my order and John's. Within 10 minutes, the food is ready and in front of us.

It's obvious very quickly that the bacon on my plate has been cooked beyond the limits of what even the pig would consider acceptable. I like crispy but draw the line at brittle. I pick up a piece and it crumbles, I touch another piece and it fairly turns to dust. For the record, John's bacon is not as well done.

I ask the waitress if it's possible to get some bacon that's a little 'less dead'. She smiles and says sure realizing on sight what the problem is. She goes to the little order window, calls in for a side order of medium done bacon and then comes over, leans in conspiratorially, puts down a side plate and says using my terminology, just put the 'dead bacon' on this plate, I'll eat it, give you the new bacon, won't charge you for it and nobody will know. Um, okay, sure.

I raise an eyebrow. John's confused, so am I. But not for long. While she's off serving someone else, big swarthy and cyclopsy cook lumbers into view carrying a saucer of limp barely cooked bacon in one of his mitts and grunts to the waitress. She points to me and he stands over me and fairly bellows: something wrong with that bacon? (the bacon that lies sadly fractured), I say well, yes, it's too crisp. He says nobody else would stand over that hot grille to make nice bacon like that for you! Nobody! No matter where you go!

I'm just looking quizzically back at him at this point and shrug my shoulders. He puts the new bacon which is indeed vastly underdone down, takes away the insulted bacon and makes his way back to the kitchen cave. There's a bacon Nazi? Nobody told me.

The waitress comes back a few minutes later with the bill, shows me that she's written in an extra side order of bacon at $3.00 and with something approaching a sloppy sleight of hand, puts $3.00 in coins down in front of me. She leans in yet again, she says he's very cranky and I'll tell him that you insisted on paying the $3.00. She takes the bill away with her.

Have I just entered the fucking breakfast Twilight Zone?

She comes back again -- hey all I want to do now is just eat and leave before I'm asked to dance any more of these steps I don't know. She says he'll probably come back over now and apologize. Yeah, I'd like that. I simply say it's okay, I'm over it. Get me outta here.

We wolfed down the rest of our brekkie, calculated what it was all worth, left a tip and scrambled out of there.

I can fry an egg and be surly. Maybe I'll start trying to fend for myself.