Shitty day at work. My stories this week are boring, which is my fault, and no one calls back the newspaper on Columbus Day, which isn't exactly my fault. On days like this writing goes especially slow, and I was there for about eleven hours before the office finally closed down completely and I was forced to leave.
On the way home it occurred to me there wasn't much food at the apartment, and I was starved. Rather than acting reasonably (say, buying food at the grocery store), some combination of inertia and self loathing propelled my car into the drive thru line at Wendy's. It was on the way, sort of. I ordered a Crispy Chicken Sandwich, a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger and fries. None of that sounded especially good by the time the voice asked me for my order, but there were cars in front of me and it seemed a little too late to escape. At the second window I handed a fat guy a $5 bill and he handed me change.
A fairly gloomy thirty seconds passed while I sat in my car waiting for the food. The workday had sucked, prospects for going anywhere at night seemed bleak, and I was watching the sun go down from the front of the Wendy's drive thru line. Jeez. The fat guy, who had curly dark hair and looked about 25 years old, must have been bored and he asked me how I was doing.
"All right, what about you?"
"Good."
Ok, nice to know. Fat guy at Wendy's says he's doing good. Put a check next to that one — finally an accomplishment I felt satisfied with.
But he wasn't done.
"Hey bro, you want a Coke?"
"Um, no. Not really. Thanks."
I didn't order a Coke, mostly because I didn't really want one and it seemed like a waste of money. It seemed odd that he would ask.
"You sure? The lady in front of you ordered a Coke and then changed her mind and said she wanted a Diet Coke. I've got the Coke right here and you can have it."
"Oh...ok. I mean, yeah, I'll drink it, I guess."
"All right, it's on the house."
He handed me a huge plastic cup filled with probably 40 ounces of soda. Somehow I managed to think "Wow, it's nice of this guy to give this huge drink to me" instead of "What kind of stupid bitch orders an XXL Coke and then changes her order so that this nice fat guy has to pour her a new XXL Diet Coke." It was a truly beautiful moment, I think. Somehow, if for only a second, I forgot about tedious news stories and dead imperialist Europeans and about how this guy was really just handing me another menu item that I only sort of wanted. Even though all he did was hand me a drink he was otherwise going to throw away, it seemed like I was witnessing the performance of a genuinely good deed.
Then the fat guy maneuvered his tubby torso back through the window and walked away. I'll probably never see him again. A minute later some high school girl with a lip ring handed me my food and I drove off.
I was thinking about the big soda and the fat guy and work tomorrow and how humanity's not all bad when I accidentally pulled a little too far past a stop sign next to the restaurant. My car was sticking a few feet out at the three-way stop and there were two other cars waiting to go. A woman in one car scowled at me and raised her shoulders — a guy in the other car revved his engine and flipped me off. It kind of irritated me, and while carefully watching the other oncoming traffic, I made a left turn in front of both of them. Yeah, I'm sure they were both REALLY upset.
An hour later, I'm at home drinking a watery soda. And in all seriousness — it's not too hard to tell the difference — I'm almost sure it's a fucking Diet Coke.
