Cold Cereal Would’ve Been Faster.

We were approaching hour six of the drive home yesterday- right around dinnertime. The girls had been good. SO good. They’d napped, read, played, and watched individual media like champions.

I had also been good. (SO good.) I’d written and filed and emailed and kept my passenger seat comments to a minimum. (Hush up, P.J., I did. Ponder THAT.)

So when we hit the city limits, Peej suggested we stop and pick up dinner to make that aspect of mealtime (and clean up) that much cinchier. I called in an order, pausing to ask P.J. which street the restaurant was located on.

“Clybourn. Right by the store, so I’ll go grab some milk, too.”

I phoned in dinner (in more ways than one), and quietly prided myself on having a night that was shaping up to be extremely easy. We pulled up to the restaurant and I ran in to grab it.

“Name?”

“Keely.”

“Spelled?” (I spelled it.)

“Did you call it in?” (I had.)

“…Was it phoned into this location?”

I took to a sec to breathe, not roll my eyes at this moron, and even pulled out my phone to confirm that I had called them- these flighty people at the Clybourn restaura-

“Wait a sec. We’re on Elston, aren’t we?” (He nodded patiently.)

We were on Elston, of course we were. This was the one we always went to, not their other place on Clybourn, nearly two miles south of here. I smiled jovially. (I think they were glad to see me go.) I got back into the car, giving the same bright smile to my quizzical husband.

“Hey!” I beamed. “We called in order to CLYBOURN!”

He gave me a weird look. “Of course we did. And it’s right- GAH.”

So we drove to Clybourn, berating ourselves for acting like tourists (and not the braindead parents who had resided here for over a decade). My monologue was silent. P.J.’s was not. And as we drove, we gave the evil eye to the people clogging the roads at 6pm on a Sunday, all of these other folks who were out and about wanting dinner. (Jerks.)

We got to Clybourn and I ran inside. Gave my name. And got a strange look.

“I just gave you your food.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“To your husband?”

“Ah, definitely no.”

She went to the back room. Came out with a manager. Who conferred with a third party, the order-taker.

“Yeah, Keely,” he said.

“Yep!”

“The guy who just came in.”

“Nope!”

The manager listed my order- exactly- and stared at me. I confirmed. After a painfully long time of re-listing, re-confirming, re-questioning, and trying to figure out if I was some sort of prankster, they checked their phone. Turns out, there were two identical orders placed, one right after the other; same salads, pasta, soup, all of it. Hilarity.

So they made me a fresh order. Took a nice discount from the price. And I got back to the car roughly ten minutes later, greeting my confused family and waving a gigantic bag of food. P.J. was miffed. Really miffed.

“They gave away our food? They had to make us new food?”

I showed him the receipt with the sizeable discount.

He smiled.

And he agreed that everything had worked out for the best, after all.

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