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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