I wanted to put the poor nervous boy at ease with a joke. Now I threatened him

Julien AlthuisiusSeptember 25, 202214:34

A colleague and I had arranged to have lunch in the cafe with bad acoustics. We had been seated for a while, but had not yet been noticed by the wait staff. My colleague asked a boy who appeared to be on his way to another table if we could order some. He walked over to us hesitantly, as if he didn’t really work here at all. That turned out to be partly correct after we ordered from him. “Today is my first day,” said the boy. He had the face of an angel. “So if something goes wrong, then…”

‘Then that’s no point’, ‘then we know that’, or ‘then we won’t whine’. All things I could have said. But of course I had to play the joke again. “Then we’ll beat you up,” I said. It slipped out; the mechanism to filter out this kind of blunt, inappropriate utterance just didn’t work.

I wanted to put the poor nervous boy at ease with a joke. Now I had threatened him. So this is what happens when good intentions come into contact with sheer tactlessness. I don’t know if he had heard, because of the acoustics. But when he was gone, my colleague looked at me the way you look at someone who has just drowned a puppy.

Like I shouldn’t have known. As if I hadn’t been obligingly buffalo in cafes, restaurants and beach bars for years. As if I didn’t learn there how nice it is when people are just a little nice to you. And as if I haven’t stood like him often enough on a first day. Unfamiliar with the table numbers, with the cash register system, with your new colleagues. Afraid to screw it up, hope the day will be over soon. Alone.

I wanted to get up, hug the boy and whisper to him that everything would be okay. But that would be inappropriate and would only make matters worse (“First he said he was going to beat me up, then he forced himself on me”). I decided to be extra nice if he came back to our table.

That only happened again when we asked for the bill. My colleague gave him a generous tip. Smiling gratefully, the boy took the mobile pin from the table. It was over. We had accomplished it. The equilibrium was restored. ‘Thank you,’ I said as warmly as possible, ‘have a nice day and good luck.’ He nodded and smiled again. “Thank you too,” he said. And then: ‘Have a nice evening.’

Immediately he realized his mistake. “Oh no,” he corrected himself. ‘Nice day. I meant: have a nice day.’ But it was already too late. Now he still had to believe it.

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