How was my trip up to New England, you ask? Well, let's time travel back to Friday evening, just after we touched down in Boston.
The trip was for work; all four of us from the Austin office had come up for the company bbq. For Friday night, we had nothing to do so we decided to get adventurous and somewhere in the vast megapolis that is the Boston area.
After numerous wrong turns and run red rights, we finally found ourselves at this little pizza place. I'll be charitable and say that this place had five tables. All of these tables were taken. Most were inside of the restaurant, but a couple were out on the patio of the restaurant. A quartet of older ladies sat at those tables, and it was clear that they were finishing up their meal.
We're no dummies; we spotted the telltale signs of a nearly-finished dinner date and we started loitering around the tables. We'd all been traveling for a while now, so we were just standing around, talking and zoning out. In the midst of all of this, one of the older ladies gets up from the table and heads back into the restaurant. Her hands are full with some napkins and whatnot, and like I said, we were all zoning out after the travel, so she had to do a bit of shuffling to open the door.
As soon as she did that, one of the other ladies at her table looks over with absolute venom and shouts, "You don't help a woman open the door? You're clueless, Jack!" Had murder been legal, she would've massacred all of us right there with plastic flatware.
The best part of this whole thing is that there was other dude milling about, and all of us Austin folk just assumed she knew him, that the dude was named Jack, and that she was giving him a hard time. We didn't say anything or even shrug, we just continued to watch for that open table. Eventually, "Jack" walked away without any further interaction from the screaming meanie.
In the act of waiting, someone brought up the idea that hey, maybe that lady had been bitching us out? Great debate ensued. Do people really just scream at perfect strangers like that in a civilized society? Is this a New England welcome ritual, right up there with pelted with rotting lobsters? After a while, I found myself back in the restaurant with "Jack" and he leaned over and said, "Wow, she really tore you guys a new one, huh?"
The trip went up from there, fortunately. Still, there's nothing like that Yankee hospitality.
Posted by Cody at June 30, 2008 8:55 PM